Va-Va-Voom wrote:Zenith wrote:Tennis is an expensive sport to practice; historically it's almost exclusively limited to children from an upper to upper middle class background.
More than 95% of the planet doesn't even have the financial means to even play competitive tennis, making the competitive pool much smaller than is the case with athletics, boxing, basketball, swimming, football, etc.
For this reason no tennis player should ever get even close to being considered the greatest athlete of all time.
Whilst tennis does require a wider skill set than your average sport, it's insulting to athletes who face, or have faced, 1000 times more competition than every tennis player throughout history ever has.
So what about Tiger Woods, should he not be considered one of the greatest athletes ever because golf is one of the most elite sports in terms of socioeconomic status?
I'm not going to consider a tennis player's achievements lesser than other athletes and hold it against them just because of the sociological aspects.
Also just how far do you go with that viewpoint?
For example do you hold a good boxer, football or basketball player in higher regard than all time great tennis players just because they have bigger talent pools?
It doesn't hold water to talk about individual dominance whilst simultaneously disregarding the most pertinent aspect of all that is competition. Fierceness of competition is strongly influenced by the size of the pool of active competitors; it'd be a mistake to ignore its relevance.
To answer your other question, I would never even entertain the idea of comparing the achievements of an individual competitor to that of a team competitor.
Individual input where the total input is largely down to one person
≠ individual input influenced by outer factors
(teammates, other living creatures, funding/budget, technology, etc.)Given the heavily differing sets of variables it's impossible to make a fair, objective and remotely rational comparison.