Everyone in tennis wonders: where are the next superstars.  They aren’t looking for those who find success at an older age.  So as nice a story as David Ferrer and Mardy Fish are, players that have reached number 1 found success early on, some very early on.

Let’s list the top 17 players by weeks at number 1.  At 18, we go under 10 weeks at number 1 (and Safin is at 18, so he was pretty young when he first broke through).

  1. Roger Federer
  2. Pete Sampras
  3. Ivan Lendl
  4. Jimmy Connors
  5. John McEnroe
  6. Bjorn Borg
  7. Rafael Nadal
  8. Andre Agassi
  9. Lleyton Hewitt
  10. Stefan Edberg
  11. Jim Courier
  12. Novak Djokovic
  13. Gustavo Kuerten
  14. Ilie Nastase
  15. Mats Wilander
  16. Andy Roddick
  17. Boris Becker

 

The players that were somewhat old when they got going are basically Roger Federer, who won his first Slam at 23, and Ilie Nastase, who didn’t play Open tennis until his mid 20s (his early career was prior to the Open era).  No one else on the list matured particularly late.  It may have taken Lendl some time to win and become number 1, but people were paying attention to him in 1981 when he reached a Slam final against Borg.

If we went further down the list, then we’d reach 21, Thomas Muster, who had his best year when he was in his mid 20s, and up to then, had been a solid player, ranked, say, 15, and even then, he was number 1 for a scant 6 weeks.

Certainly, there are players that reach the top ten later in life, and certainly, a player can be number 1 very late in life, but they don’t come out of nowhere.  So Roger Federer may currently be number 1, be he was number 1 back in 2004 as well, some 8 years ago.

Maybe this will change, but this would require players like, say, Milos Raonic, to improve by leaps and bounds, and it’s not clear he can do this.  Jo-Wilfried Tsonga would be a relatively late bloomer though he did reach his first Slam final around 23 or so.  One could say the same for Berdych.  But for now, short of a power vacuum at the top, it seems hard to envision them getting to number 1.

This is why people look to the young, but in the young, they often have to see spectacular talent which upsets higher ranked players.  Thus, Nadal upsetting Federer in his first encounter, Becker winning Wimbledon for his second title, Wilander and Kuerten winning the French as their first title.