Archive for April, 2006

Are you looking for Professional Tennis’ very own player blogs? Well look no further. Wicked Backhand found a good stock of professional tennis players telling it like it is on their very own blogs at the Men’s ATP Blog site.

They have players like James Blake, Ivan Ljubicic, Marcos Baghdatis, and Jarkko Nieminen. The players give updates on their latest tennis tournaments as well as some personal behind the scenes looks into their training, travel, and life on the tour.

Marcos Baghdatis has some interesting posts from about a month ago when he played the NASDAQ-100 Open in Miami. He talks about the new challenge rule, getting rackets restrung and swimming with dolphins. He is quite a character on court and as it turns out, can joke around off the court. Check him out over at his ATP blog.

Tennis magazine’s latest issue has a great my point article by L. Jon Wertheim titled “The Slamless Wonders.” In it he exclaims the top 4 male and the top 4 female tennis players to never win a grand slam title.

In order to determine the best in each sex to not win at least one of the tennis slams he employed Jonathon Brown of the University of Washington. Brown recently determined that if a pro would win just 53 percent of his/her points he/she will win 75 percent of matches. This I guess made him a pretty good source to “crunch the numbers” and come up with an accurate way to measure “best” player to never win a major title.

The results are in and here they are.

The Top Males are:

Alex Corretja
Todd Martin
Miloslav Mecir
Marcelo Rios

Top Females are:

Mary Joe Fernandez
Andrea Jaeger
Helena Sukova
Wendy Turnbull

Some of these names might surprise you and some of them you may have already realized, but a great list none-the-less. Some of them were number ones and some weren’t but all were great and never won a major title, ever. Check out the magazine for a more in depth look at the numbers (comparing records, tournaments won, vs. slam winners etc).

Thanks for the great article LJ.

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