Is Roger Federer really the GOAT? Martina Hingis proves the latest greatness isn't always the best

Tennis obsessives love to debate who the sport's "greatest of all time" is. Rod Laver still has his partisans, but at this point such fans are widely considered sentimentalists. Conventional wisdom now has it that whoever is the dominant player of the moment is the "GOAT." Players from each new generation, goes the thinking, are always bigger, faster and ever-more dedicated to excellence than the last. Tennis aficionado RICHARD WIENER, however, argues that such thinking is all wrong. The greats, he says, would be great in any generation. His example in a guest column here: Martina Hingis. Back at the turn of the century, the injury-prone "Swiss Miss" was believed to be too small to continue in the upper echelons of the game. Hingis ultimately proved such thinking wrong, with successful comebacks in both singles and doubles. Read Wiener's column below. - Douglas Perry


One of the most enduring articles of faith among sports fans is that pro athletes just keep getting better and better. Pete Sampras, the great tennis champion of the 1990s, recently articulated this view for his sport, saying: "Each generation of athletes gets stronger and faster, and the players are adding to their knowledge of the game, and as a result you see the level of tennis going up and up. Everyone keeps on improving - today's players are tremendous athletes and hit the ball incredibly hard." This is a belief that's only reinforced by YouTube videos of tennis matches over the past 50 years - the speed of today's game looks faster than ever, because ... it is!


But despite the ever increasing pace of play, the curious case of Martina Hingis demonstrates it's just a myth that each generation is better than the previous.

Hingis, the current number one ranked women's doubles player, announced her retirement a few weeks ago, saying, "You want to stop on top and not when you're already going backward."

At age 15 Hingis became the youngest woman to win a doubles title at Wimbledon, and at age 37 one of the oldest to win doubles at the U.S. Open. In between these remarkable bookends, she won more than 100 titles in singles and doubles. In the course of a spectacular career, Hingis managed five major singles titles, 13 major doubles titles, and seven Grand Slam mixed doubles titles. She won a calendar year Grand Slam in doubles, and in 1998 simultaneously held the number one ranking in both singles and doubles. Hingis even matched up well against the mighty Serena Williams, with a head-to-head singles record of six wins and seven losses.


Even though Hingis turned pro 23 years ago, she only played on tour for 14 years, making the number of titles she won all the more impressive. As a teenager she rose to the top of women's tennis, and then retired at the age of 22 due to injuries. Four years later Hingis briefly came out of retirement, climbed back to number six in singles, and then retired abruptly a second time after testing positive for cocaine. 

After five additional years off tour, long enough to be elected to the Hall of Fame, Hingis unretired again, but this time as a doubles-only player. Remarkably, in her mid-thirties and after an extended leave from pro tennis, she nonetheless quickly rose to number one and dominated women's doubles. Hingis and her partner Sania Mirza went on a 41-match winning streak, which included titles at Wimbledon and the U.S. and Australian Opens. After splitting with Mirza, Hingis dropped from number one but remained in the top 10. Then she teamed with Latisha Chan and went on another tear, winning nine tournaments in 2017, including the U.S. Open, once again regaining the number-one ranking in doubles, only to retire for a third time.

If athletes are stronger and faster and just keep improving, as Sampras says, how did Hingis manage to "time travel" from the 1990s into the present decade and still remain well above a whole new crop of younger, more powerful, and supposedly better players than the ones she faced two decades ago?

Martina's latest accomplishments are even more striking considering that, unlike on the men's side of the game, the top women's singles players routinely play doubles too. Hingis and Mirza defeated Garbine Muguruza (a two-time singles champion at Grand Slam events) and Carla Suarez Navarro (ranked in the top 10 in singles at her highest) to win the title at the 2015 year-end WTA Finals. Plus, tactics in women's doubles have changed since the 1990s. 

Back then, doubles players served and volleyed. In the current era of power tennis, the return of serve is too strong to follow serve to net. So the one-up, one-back formation, common in recreational tennis, is now the primary formation in the women's pro game. But regardless of style of play, Hingis has proven herself the best doubles player in the world. She can more than hold her own from the baseline against huge hitters like Muguruza and still play a magical finesse game at the net with superb use of angle, spin and placement.

Here's an alternative hypothesis. The game isn't faster because players are better. It's faster because equipment is improving, which allows players to hit harder and look like they've taken the game to a whole new level. Put the latest in racquet and string technology in the hands of a great player from the past, something that usually can't happen, and he or she is still a great player. Hingis is that rare case of a champion from 20 years ago coming out of extended retirement to show what she can still do. 

Lo and behold the radar gun now clocks some of Martina's serves over 100 mph, a speed she almost never attained in the 1990s. Her service motion is unchanged, which suggests it's the racquet not the player responsible for extra pop on the ball. And how does Hingis deal with rockets off the racquets of big hitters? Back at them, no problem. A few dozen more trophies on the shelf and it's time to end the experiment on intergenerational play with Martina still on top!

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