A year of dominant No.1s in tennis, but also of fluidity and drama on women’s tour
NEW YORK: The big gaps at the top of the rankings speak for themselves at the official end of the tennis season, which is not quite the real end of the tennis season, with the International Premier Tennis League relaunching in Japan on Wednesday.
Novak Djokovic has a record 16,585 points, putting him more than 7,000 ahead of No.2-ranked Andy Murray.
Serena Williams has 9,945 points, nearly 4,000 more than No.2-ranked Simona Halep, even though Williams skipped the final two months of the season.
It was a year of rare double dominance, with Djokovic and Williams each winning three of the four major singles titles and Williams coming within two matches of the first true Grand Slam since 1988.
Despite Williams’ sparkling record in the biggest events, the women’s tour was on balance a much less stable workplace than the men’s tour.
“I just thought it was a really good year for women’s tennis,” said Pam Shriver, the former star who is now an ESPN analyst. “A lot of it had to do with Serena, but I thought the women matched the men’s storylines or even bettered them for the first time in many years.”
The hierarchy after Williams was certainly more fluid. On the ATP Tour, only one player — Kevin Anderson — made his debut in the top 10. On the WTA Tour, six women punched through that barrier for the first time: Ekaterina Makarova, Carla Suárez Navarro, Lucie Safarova, Garbiñe Muguruza, Karolina Pliskova and Timea Bacsinszky.
Canada’s Eugenie Bouchard, who soared to No.7 in 2014, plummeted to No. 49 by season’s end.
Six men, including the rising young players Jack Sock and Dominic Thiem, won their first tour-level singles titles compared with 11 women, including teenagers Belinda Bencic and Ana Konjuh. There was also Flavia Pennetta, the effervescent Italian who won her first Grand Slam singles title at the US Open at age 33 and then retired at the end of the season.
Charming outsiders had no such luck on the ATP Tour, where the main men remained the main men and the new generation that had made inroads in 2014 — led by Kei Nishikori and Milos Raonic — surprisingly lost ground in 2015, as did Marin Cilic and Grigor Dimitrov, the flashy Bulgarian who slumped from No.8 in 2014 to No.28.
“These guys have been so stingy at the top, it’s amazing,” said Paul Annacone, the former coach of Roger Federer. “How long have we been talking about Milos and Grigor and this next group?”
Several years is the answer, but the reality in 2015 was that the band formerly known as the Big Four — Djokovic, Federer, Murray and Rafael Nadal — combined for 277 victories, their highest total in any season. Their combined winning percentage of 84.45 was higher than in 2014.
Djokovic’s phenomenally consistent high level of play — 11 titles and a 31-5 record against the top 10 — was deservedly the main theme. But Federer was often brilliant, too, hitting high notes at Wimbledon and during the American summer hardcourt swing.
Federer’s three victories over Djokovic in eight attempts all came in best-of-three-set matches on hardcourts. But he lost when it mattered most: in the Wimbledon final, the US Open final and the final of the yearend championships.
That evened their career series at 22-22, and it is difficult at this stage not to see Djokovic finishing with headto-head advantages in all of his Big Four rivalries when the final numbers and forehands have been crunched. He and Nadal are even at 23-23, and he leads Murray, 21-9.
What was striking in 2015 was the way he crushed the suspense out of close matches with lopsided decisive sets: 6-0 in the third set over Murray in the Miami final and 6-1 in the fifth over Murray in the French Open semifinals were typical.
Djokovic had staying power. He had focus. He had, despite all the millions (he earned a record US$21,592,125 in official prize money in 2015), hunger.
Can he remain ravenous? Quite likely, with his longtime rivals still in the game and prestigious records there to be broken. His decision to pull out of the Asian-based International Premier Tennis League and not play in the upcoming exhibition event in Abu Dhabi is an indicator that he will keep making the smart scheduling decisions necessary to stay fresh in the head and the legs.