Doctor MJ wrote:
Yeah, clearly the thing that most annoys me is not that Emerson gets a mention, but that there are people who know Emerson's name but don't know Gonzales, or even Rosewall. It's one thing to not know Tilden, but quite another thing to know the wrong guy from an era.
I agree that there's really no excuse for that. It's not even a situation like the ABA and NBA going head-to-head. The better players were in the professional ranks when Emerson was racking up his 12 slams.
It's also just a shame that when Sampras was dominating we weren't seeing Gonzales comparisons, simply because their games should make comparisons obvious, and it would have been a fantastic time to have experts chime in on the two.
I agree with you here, too.
Although to be fair, I feel like tennis has some of the most extreme ego-driven old-timers around (possibly because they'd been so ignored). To here Gonzales and Budge talk, tennis has been getting worse in talent in every possible way as the talent pool as grown far more deep. Hard to take that too seriously.
Yeah, Connors used to be almost as bad, but he's either mellowed a little bit or simply realized that his comments were making him look like a bitter, bitter man. It's interesting that supposedly Connors' mother patterned a lot of Jimmy's game off of Budge's.
The one thing Budge said that always cracked me up was when he got tired of people downgrading his Grand Slam because it came against amateurs. "If i was so easy to do, how come more guys didn't do it?"
He's pretty much been a better version of Tim Henman so far in his career.