Rod Laver
Margaret Court
Stat by stat
Bars are scaled to the leader in this list.
The verdict
Dead even across the measured categories. Our all-time ranking places Rod Laver at #6 and Margaret Court at #8.
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The case for Rod Laver
Laver's 11 majors are the most misleading number in tennis. He won the calendar Grand Slam as an amateur in 1962, turned professional, and was then banned from every major for five full years — 1963 through 1967 — during what should have been his absolute prime, while dominating the pro circuit against Rosewall and Gonzales and collecting 8 Pro Slam titles. When open tennis arrived in 1968 he immediately won Wimbledon, and in 1969 he won the calendar Grand Slam again — the only player ever to complete it twice, and still the last man to do it at all. Reasonable projections of his banned years put his major count in the high teens or twenties. Across amateur, professional and open competition he won roughly 200 tournaments, the most by any man, and he remains the benchmark for left-handed shotmaking — the whipped topspin backhand decades ahead of its time. Ranking him requires imagination; the two Grand Slams seven years apart, either side of exile, tell you what the missing years contained.
The case for Margaret Court
Court's 24 Grand Slam singles titles stood alone as the all-time record for half a century until Djokovic equalled it in 2023, and her 64 total majors across singles, doubles and mixed will never be approached. She won the calendar Grand Slam in 1970 — a season crowned by a 14-12, 11-9 Wimbledon final over Billie Jean King, still the longest women's final by games — and she completed the 'boxed set' of every major in every discipline, a feat unique in tennis history. The era caveat is real and must be stated: 11 of her singles majors came at the Australian Championships in years when most top internationals did not make the trip, and her totals straddle the amateur-open divide. But she also won 13 majors after the Open Era began, against fully professional fields, and her serve-and-volley athleticism — she was among the first women to train with weights — was a generation ahead of her peers. Wherever one ranks her, the record book starts with her name.