[quote author=LeTallecWiz link=topic=41879.msg1174580#msg1174580 date=1284537027]
Ask any of the greats (and indeed the likes of Nadal and Murray) and they'll tell you that Federer is the greatest.
How about the stats that King posted? Look at the #s ... Nadal, if he continues at this level, will surprass Federer comfortably and he'll probably STILL say that Federer was 'better'.
The arrival of Federer pretty much spelled the end for the likes of Sampras and Agassi
Well, the arrival of the 'can play on all surfaces' Nadal will do the same for Federer.
It's very easy to explain Federer's dominance in terms of the lack of quality of his opponents, because he made it look so easy
Make a list of the top 30 players of the 80s-90s. Now make a list of the top players that have played in Federer's generation, not including those in the first list. Is there any real comparison between the two?
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Firstly, you're right. If Nadal continues at his current rate, he'll surpass Federer. And will deservedly be known as the greatest player ever to have played the game. It's still an 'if' at this stage though, so you can't talk of it as though it's happened already. As for king's stats, they mean relatively little in the grand scheme of things. Nadal still has a way to go yet. Soon enough, he'll have to deal with a new wave of players who have adapted their game to compete with him, in the same way that Sampras did, and in the same way that Federer has had to.
As for your second point - that also remains to be seen. Either way, it doesn't detract from my point in any way.
And your final point, well, it misses the point. As I alluded to before - if Federer hadn't been around, then you would have had some of the 'great' rivalries that we saw during the 80s and 90s. The game would have progressed, albeit much more slowly, and we would all have been blissfully unaware of how inferior the players are to what we've become accustomed to now.
As for the derth of big names in the 80s and 90s, well, they were much more evenly-matched back then. What's more, their games were tailored for specific surfaces to a much greater degree than they are now. They didn't have the kind of all-court game that Federer and Nadal have, so you were likely to see different players dominating on different surfaces. Hence, Grand Slams were much more evenly distributed. It used to be that serve-and-volleyers dominated Wimbledon - now they're all but extinct. Hewitt somewhat turned the tide in that respect. We no longer have the classic rivalries of top serve-and-volleyer meets top baseliner, or Sampras v Agassi, for example. What we're with left is a new breed of tennis player, most with a pretty similar idea of how the game should be played - something of a baseliner hybrid, if you will (to the detriment of the game IMO, but that's an aside).
The fact is, Federer has shown the rest of the world the most effective way of playing the game. It took them a long time to get to grips with it, but now that they have, we can appreciate some of those rivalries again. To cite the lack of other good players in his era is to ignore the level that Federer was playing at. He was quite literally untouchable, and I don't blame any of his competitors for not being good enough. The game has moved on to such an extent that you could pluck many of the greats from former eras and place them in the present and they wouldn't have a hope of competing. (I would still back Sampras in his prime to do well at Wimbledon, but that's about it.) It's called progression.
Anyway, I'm sure we've been over this a few times before now, so I don't expect you to agree with me!
