I wouldn't use Wikipedia as proof of anything but this made me smile...

First line of the 'History' section:

"The early 2000s were seen as a time of transition in tennis, with older players retiring and a lower quality of player at the very top of the game."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Four_(tennis)

The article it sources isn't a bad read either:
http://www.essentialtennis.com/atpnews/commentary/2000-2009-the-decade-in-tennis/699/

Very Baised article, I think Socal wrote it

Why from 2008? coz Djoko won his first GS that year? then how come Murray is on the list before 2012?

"Important tournament domination matrix" they considered only from 2008, while all these players played even before it why those years weren't considered only GOD knows, either they should have considered those or should have considered from 2013 .

Wikipedia

Well the fact remains that a majority of the controversial positions I have had over the years have come to pass. Murdoch some call it transitional, some call it an under-utilization of talent LOL!!!, (only three exclamations this time). Anyone who can't look at the early 2000s and objectively analyze the competition at this point has on rose-tinted spectacles. Interesting many of these posters who question the weakness of the early 2000s have been screaming that this era is weak for many years.

I did not write said intellectually sound piece of information, but I would not be surprised if my years of hammering the issue on various sites has not impacted the beliefs of a few open-minded tennis experts. I called the golden age in early 2008, and in the last couple of years everyone paid media journalist has sans royalties been using my terminology.

Murdoch this is why you are a crack investigator on the Special Select Committee for the Chairgate Investigation. Another excellent find.

socal1976 wrote:Murdoch this is why you are a crack investigator on the Special Select Committee for the Chairgate Investigation. Another excellent find.

Ha! By uncanny coincidence, I read through that thread again earlier today! I wanted to relive the glory of your liquored-up 50s executive comment again...

It was a great thread I must say where we delved into the definition of goosing and the beauty of the metaphorical voluptuous backsides of federer fans.

Wiki us written by people like us.
Just depended on whether the guy who wrote was weak or strong era proponent...

lydian wrote:Wiki us written by people like us.
Just depended on whether the guy who wrote was weak or strong era proponent...

A school friend of one of my sons managed to get himself listed on Wikipedia (for a brief period of time) as a founder of the school they attend. He was 14 at the time. This has earnt him great respect amongst his peers...

@HM...

Of course, there is an arbitrariness to picking years that end in nice round numbers like 0. Not everything fits nicely in a decade.

In 2001, Pete Sampras would again make the finals, but instead of playing the rangy, powerful Russian, Sampras played Lleyton Hewitt, who played like Agassi, but had the intensity of Connors.

it was Andre Agassi that became the iconic Bollettieri player: big forehand, so-so serve, not much of a volleyer.

However, as the 1990s were moving along, the clay court specialists became even stronger, reinforcing the idea that clay court tennis is its own separate game. These specialists were generally Spaniards or Argentines.

Coria was the number 3 seed, but could almost be considered a 1-hit wonder, a player that peaked for a year, and had maybe 2 other good years, but was otherwise irrelevant.

Perhaps their success highlight the folly of breaking achievements into decades.

For posters who choose not to read the referenced article, here are some tidbits.

It is good to smile, but smirking is a different matter altogether...

Laverfan, I think you've read too much into my posting that link. It wasn't an endorsement. Just a wry smile that opinions I know drive certain posters crazy have made their way onto Wiki!

@HM... A professor at the UNI, that I associate with, went and put up some obscure research topic with factual errors on WiKi a couple of weeks prior to asking his students to research the topic, and a significant percentage quoted the WiKi links as authoritative, and he stood up in front of his class and confessed to spreading 'misinformation', hence I myself am always skeptical of what I see there and do agree with the 'wry' part.

I did quite a bit of research and updated Tennis-related information (matches and statistics only, not opinions) on WiKi, so your evaluation is very nice.

Wiki is peer-reviewed openly...but what counts as a "peer" openly isn't quite the same as expert peers you normally get when publishing literature in scientific journals, etc.

Lets not pick on wiki, I think overrall they do a great job and are more relibable than many newspapers and journals that I have read. There is dispute on many issues and factual inaccuracies that come up all the time in any publication. Aholes from the bogus Chicago School of Economics, which has people as supposedly smart as Dr. Greenspan backing it have Phds and are printed in real academic journals. Those fools are a hundred times more wrong than anything in wikipedia and they have PHDs and teach at major universities. I think as a source wiki is pretty good for most things.

The facts are this 1. The majority of commentators who know say that the current era has been to this point very strong 2. That this strength is apparent when comparing them to the relatively weaker period of the early 2000s and that 3. Socal is right!

The weight of journalistic research on the subject is in favor of the positions I have been touting for years.

laverfan wrote:I did quite a bit of research and updated Tennis-related information (matches and statistics only, not opinions) on WiKi, so your evaluation is very nice.

To give Wiki credit where it is due (and, if I've understood correctly, you), I do think the tennis stats are very well presented. The presentation of a player's slam results in particular is excellent.

socal1976 wrote:
The facts are this 1. The majority of commentators who know say that the current era has been to this point very strong 2. That this strength is apparent when comparing them to the relatively weaker period of the early 2000s and that 3. Socal is right!

4. Socal is delusional.

Jeremy_Kyle wrote:

socal1976 wrote:
The facts are this 1. The majority of commentators who know say that the current era has been to this point very strong 2. That this strength is apparent when comparing them to the relatively weaker period of the early 2000s and that 3. Socal is right!

4. Socal is delusional.

Good one JK, quality post.

socal1976 wrote:Lets not pick on wiki, I think overrall they do a great job and are more relibable than many newspapers and journals that I have read. There is dispute on many issues and factual inaccuracies that come up all the time in any publication. Aholes from the bogus Chicago School of Economics, which has people as supposedly smart as Dr. Greenspan backing it have Phds and are printed in real academic journals. Those fools are a hundred times more wrong than anything in wikipedia and they have PHDs and teach at major universities. I think as a source wiki is pretty good for most things.

The facts are this 1. The majority of commentators who know say that the current era has been to this point very strong 2. That this strength is apparent when comparing them to the relatively weaker period of the early 2000s and that 3. Socal is right!

The weight of journalistic research on the subject is in favor of the positions I have been touting for years.

The challenge with some of the journalists currently reporting, is their

a. own bias, (Bodo, Harman, Overend and Wertheim come to mind...)
b. the length of their tennis watching years, (some of these have never seen Laver/Pancho play. And this is not a plug for age.)
c. ability to analyse nuances that a TV screen/Facebook/Twitter/... may hide

You should take a look at Bud Collins and Lance Tingay to gain a more balanced perspective, perhaps.

laverfan wrote:

socal1976 wrote:Lets not pick on wiki, I think overrall they do a great job and are more relibable than many newspapers and journals that I have read. There is dispute on many issues and factual inaccuracies that come up all the time in any publication. Aholes from the bogus Chicago School of Economics, which has people as supposedly smart as Dr. Greenspan backing it have Phds and are printed in real academic journals. Those fools are a hundred times more wrong than anything in wikipedia and they have PHDs and teach at major universities. I think as a source wiki is pretty good for most things.

The facts are this 1. The majority of commentators who know say that the current era has been to this point very strong 2. That this strength is apparent when comparing them to the relatively weaker period of the early 2000s and that 3. Socal is right!

The weight of journalistic research on the subject is in favor of the positions I have been touting for years.

The challenge with some of the journalists currently reporting, is their

a. own bias, (Bodo, Harman, Overend and Wertheim come to mind...)
b. the length of their tennis watching years, (some of these have never seen Laver/Pancho play. And this is not a plug for age.)
c. ability to analyse nuances that a TV screen/Facebook/Twitter/... may hide

You should take a look at Bud Collins and Lance Tingay to gain a more balanced perspective, perhaps.

Laverfan I have read both those guys although Collins is a bit of weirdo. He is a bit flowery in his rhetoric. No one questions the quality of the older guys it is just very difficult to compare as the conditions and times change. The longer the time period between stars the harder it is to compare the current crop to them. The technology and conditions have changed so much. That is not an issue however if comparing a group of players to their immediate successors and predecessors. Often two groups who had lengthy overlaps in their careers.

laverfan wrote:

The challenge with some of the journalists currently reporting, is their

a. own bias, (Bodo, Harman, Overend and Wertheim come to mind...)
b. the length of their tennis watching years, (some of these have never seen Laver/Pancho play. And this is not a plug for age.)
c. ability to analyse nuances that a TV screen/Facebook/Twitter/... may hide

You should take a look at Bud Collins and Lance Tingay to gain a more balanced perspective, perhaps.

Current journalists of course have their own bias but they also have to follow the sport from a viewpoint determined by editors. Neil Harman is a case in point. He was a chief football correspondent for the Daily Mail prior to taking up his present post with The Times. I still sense that football and not tennis is his real passion. But working with The Times he gets to travel to more tournaments than most British tennis journalists. He therefore does have access to a lot of inside information and appears to know many of the top players personally. So he can be interesting to read. It's a shame that his "mission" is clearly to follow and report on Murray rather than tennis as a whole. He knows were his bread is buttered though and some of his articles have IMHO laughable bias.

My favorite recent "reporting" by him about tennis or rather Murray was prior to the AO. Because of Armstrong there was a lot of speculation about drug use in tennis and Murray had put on all those extra pounds of lean muscle over Christmas. Harman was invited to spend some time with Murray in Miami to see how hard he works. The "proof" of this hard work was that Harman himself (not Murray) ran along a beach and got out of breath and sweaty. Harman is a 50's ish journalist not an athlete so this wasn't really surprising. But this allowed Harman to throw mud at Djokovic regarding drug use just before the AO final (He hadn't run on a beach with Djokovic watching) whilst "his boy" was presented as mud free because of his "evidence" (cough) of Murray's hard work.

Just to be clear I'm not throwing mud at either player as I don't have the evidence. But I find this sort of bias reporting infuriating. Harman has also resorted to unfair mud slinging at Federer and Nadal in order to make Murray look better too. I find that more infuriating than when he hypes Murray up (Of course I know he has to). Sometimes I find that quite amusing...

The good thing about following tennis now is that it's much easier to get information. For anyone with an interest it's possible to look at a range of different sources. It's a shame I'm not able to follow the tour around in person and get some quotes directly though. Sigh...

socal1976 wrote: No one questions the quality of the older guys it is just very difficult to compare as the conditions and times change.

But conversely, I do question the quality of what is currently written and being written.

socal1976 wrote: The longer the time period between stars the harder it is to compare the current crop to them. The technology and conditions have changed so much. That is not an issue however if comparing a group of players to their immediate successors and predecessors. Often two groups who had lengthy overlaps in their careers.

By that argument, Sampras/Federer comparison should be easy, as compared to Federer/Nadal or Federer/Djokovic, because Federer uses equipment and technology which is much closer to Sampras, than say, Murray/Nadal/Djokovic. Or how about McEnroe to Lendl.

Subtle changes (like strings for example, or grips, etc.) or large changes (like oxygen tents, eggs, BMRs, etc.) are also another factor.

Excellent point HE, I found Harman's article demanding that we should know if Djokovic is clean or not on sheer speculation was a pretty nasty piece of work. Of course journalists like anyone else have their biases and frankly I think very few of these tennis journalists are even active club players because some of what you read doesn't make much sense. However there is good quality work out there and Harman does provide a good read every now and again just like collins or others.

My argument is based more on the weight opinion when looking at the journalists as a whole. This concept of the strong period we have been in has been near universally accepted by tennis journalists as a whole. Now at times the weight of popular and journalistic opinion can be wrong like the US media in the run up to the Iraq war or Roger Federer's laughable 8 edberg awards. However most of the time they are right, and in this case I believe them to be right as the facts and figures and our own eyes support the thesis.

laverfan wrote:

socal1976 wrote: No one questions the quality of the older guys it is just very difficult to compare as the conditions and times change.

But conversely, I do question the quality of what is currently written and being written.

socal1976 wrote: The longer the time period between stars the harder it is to compare the current crop to them. The technology and conditions have changed so much. That is not an issue however if comparing a group of players to their immediate successors and predecessors. Often two groups who had lengthy overlaps in their careers.

By that argument, Sampras/Federer comparison should be easy, as compared to Federer/Nadal or Federer/Djokovic, because Federer uses equipment and technology which is much closer to Sampras, than say, Murray/Nadal/Djokovic. Or how about McEnroe to Lendl.

Subtle changes (like strings for example, or grips, etc.) or large changes (like oxygen tents, eggs, BMRs, etc.) are also another factor.

I think Federer is much closer to Nadal and Djokovic in time than to Sampras. Sampras and fed played once and Sampras is almost a decade older than federer, fed is 5 and 6 years older than Nadal and Djoko. Plus Sampras played in the fast court era, fed has played almost his entire career in the slow court era. Just like Nadal and Djoko. Fed is more comparable to Nadal and Djoko by a great margin. He has played those two about 65 times he played Sampras once. Laverfan, as well researched as you are you can not argue with these simple facts are indisputtable.

@HE... Very much share your sentiments, in general (and I ignored all anti-Murray stuff ) .

Rene Stauffer, Federer's biographer, seems dry and unemotional, by contrast, or perhaps the terse German side emerges, not sure which.

socal1976 wrote:I think Federer is much closer to Nadal and Djokovic in time than to Sampras. Sampras and fed played once and Sampras is almost a decade older than federer, fed is 5 and 6 years older than Nadal and Djoko.

Nadal, yes, but Djokovic/Murray are relatively a bit farther. Federer has played Raonic (4-0 so far), but it would be stretch.

socal1976 wrote: Plus Sampras played in the fast court era, fed has played almost his entire career in the slow court era.

Not sure I want to get into this fast/slow court discussion. There has been plenty already.

socal1976 wrote:Just like Nadal and Djoko. Fed is more comparable to Nadal and Djoko by a great margin. He has played those two about 65 times he played Sampras once. Laverfan, as well researched as you are you can not argue with these simple facts are indisputtable.

The years in which they turned pro - Federer (1998), Nadal (2001), Djokovic (2003) and Murray (2005), shows the gap.