Comparing Contrasts

Winning so much makes you wanna dance | Getty

Novak Djokovic has just capped the greatest year of his career, and one of the best single seasons ever, by winning the ATP World Tour Finals for a fourth(!!!) consecutive year and fifth time overall. Official stats are just a little ridiculous and speak very loudly for themselves. 82 match wins against 6 losses, 11 total titles, three majors, six Masters, a finalist in every event he entered bar the very first of his year (and least significant on his schedule) in Doha. The ageless Djokovic, unaffected by the effects of passing time, has evened up the head-to-head with his two weathered yet legendary contemporaries in the geriatric Roger Federer and the rapidly graying Rafael Nadal.* Novak himself called his 2015 all but perfect.

I'd rather not waste time getting into the growing-more-moot-by-the-minute argument whether it was the best season in men's tennis history, but I would like to debunk an idea that fans and pundits have (or maybe it's 'had' at this point, either way) about Serena Williams putting together a more accomplished season than Novak. Serena had history on the line until the eleventh hour by winning the first three majors of the year and coming agonizingly close to completing the calendar-year Grand Slam. She's the one who will get the public support for SI Sportsman of the Year, deservedly so. Hers is the season we will remember more out of the two, not Novak's. All very fair, it's inarguable, really. 

However, what's not fair to Novak is letting all quantifiable evidence fall by the wayside. No argument is needed here: compare Djokovic's stats above to Serena's 2015 results and there is no doubt that Novak had a more successful run from January through November, playing a full schedule, winning damn near everything, and contending in the final for everything else. At a very quick glance, Serena's results can be classified as quizzical. Only eight tournaments of which she played through in it's entirety, a far cry from her 82-match, 15-tournament 2013 (which is, for my money, the best season Serena has ever had).

While I say all of that, I can't help but wonder what it would've been like if Novak won the French Open. Would he have been able to deal with that kind of pressure? Would his run at the CYGS make Serena breathe easier coming down the stretch in Flushing Meadows? If Serena lost at Roland Garros or Wimbledon, it's almost absurd to assume she doesn't win the U.S. Open, her most successful Slam, right? And she would obviously remain motivated to go to Beijing and Singapore and reassert her dominance there, too...right? We really don't know, so it's best to not compare these two extremely different seasons against each other at all. We haven't seen a season like this in a long time, one which one man and one woman rule their respective tours simultaneously. Yet the seasons Novak and Serena each had were so far apart from the other's, both incomparable in their own ways.


*shade