Serena Williams
Rafael Nadal
Stat by stat
Bars are scaled to the leader in this list.
The verdict
Serena Williams leads 2 of 2 categories. Our all-time ranking places Serena Williams at #2 and Rafael Nadal at #4.
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The case for Serena Williams
Serena Williams won her first major at the 1999 US Open at age 17 and her 23rd — the Open Era record for any player, man or woman — at the 2017 Australian Open while roughly eight weeks pregnant. Between those bookends lies the most sustained excellence in women's sports history: 23 Slam finals won from 33 contested, 319 weeks at No.1 including a 186-week consecutive run that tied Steffi Graf's record, four Olympic gold medals, and two separate 'Serena Slams' (holding all four majors at once) completed eleven years apart, in 2002-03 and 2014-15. She won majors as a teenager and in her mid-thirties, beat No.1-ranked opponents across three different decades, and returned from a 2011 pulmonary embolism to compile arguably her best stretch, going 3.5 seasons from 2012 with a match record above 90 percent. Her serve is widely considered the greatest shot in the history of women's tennis. On dominance relative to field, she has a case for the top spot on any list.
The case for Rafael Nadal
Nadal owns the most extreme dominance of a single arena in the history of sport: 14 Roland Garros titles and a 112-4 match record in Paris, including an 81-match clay-court winning streak from 2005 to 2007 that remains the longest single-surface run ever. But the clay label undersells him — he won 22 majors overall, at least two at every Slam, took Olympic singles gold in 2008 and doubles gold in 2016, won the Davis Cup five times with Spain, and beat Federer in the 2008 Wimbledon final in what is widely called the greatest match ever played. His 209 weeks at No.1 and 92 titles came despite a career fought against chronic injury — a congenital foot condition diagnosed at 19, plus knee, wrist, abdominal and hip problems that cost him roughly a dozen majors' worth of appearances. He holds a career winning head-to-head over Federer (24-16) and pushed Djokovic to 29-31 across 60 meetings, the most-played rivalry in men's history. Peak-for-peak on his surface, no one in any era was better at anything.