Rafael Nadal

Rafael Nadal has won nine Roland Garros titles in 10 tries.

(The Associated Press)

Rafael Nadal is the greatest clay-court player in the history of tennis. This goes without saying.

Or does it?

Earlier this year Gaurav Sood, writing for a website called Perfect Tennis, offered this tongue-in-cheek provocation: "how could he be the greatest clay court player ever, when his opposition for 10 years has included just one grand slam winner on clay?"

His point isn't actually about Nadal. It's to poke a gaping hole in the argument that Roger Federer's generation was lacking in depth and quality. Proponents of the so-called "weak era" theory knock Lleyton Hewitt, Marat Safin, Andy Roddick, David Nalbandian, Nikolay Davydenko, Tommy Haas and the rest of that generation for their dearth of major titles.

As I've said myself, the argument is ridiculous. Federer's generation was far from weak; the other members of it won so few major titles because the 33-year-old Swiss was that good.

Which brings us back to Nadal, who technically belongs to the generation after Federer's. The 28-year-old Spaniard has crushed his opponents on clay like no one since Bjorn Borg in the 1970s and early '80s. Winning the French Open is how we judge a player's clay-court greatness (we denigrate Pete Sampras' dirt-ball credentials even though he did win the Italian Open, the second most prestigious clay-court tournament in the world), and the only player other than Nadal to win the French Open in Nadal's era is Roger Federer, in 2009. And so Sood, with a wink, calls it a weak clay-court era.

OK, here's the big question: Was it harder for Borg 30 years ago or Nadal today to dominate on clay?

Borg had to deal with a large contingent of clay-court specialists, players who spent more than six months of the season on the dirt and made only token efforts on faster surfaces. This should have made the Viking God's path to the Roland Garros final 30 years ago harder than what Nadal faces today, right? That certainly is one way to look at it. Guillermo Vilas, Manuel Orantes, Adriano Panatta (the only man to beat Borg at the French Open), Harold Solomon, Jose Higueras, Eddie Dibbs, even Corrado Barazzutti: these guys were all experts on the dirt. And yet against Borg, with his supreme movement and revolutionary use of topspin, it didn't matter. Barazzutti was once asked about his chances of beating Borg at Roland Garros. It was possible, he said, if he could "bring a gun and shoot him."

Roger Federer at the Italian Open, one of the few significant titles he hasn't won.

The thing is, even a gun probably wouldn't be enough to best Nadal on clay. And it's not because there aren't clay-court specialists anymore. Think about it: with surface standardization taking hold early in the new century, the serve-and-volleyer has disappeared and now everybody is a clay-court player. Everyone is a power baseliner. The one man who's beaten Nadal at Roland Garros? Big, flat-hitting Robin Soderling. He would have been a serve-and-volley man in Borg's era. (It's the same deal among the women, of course. Big, flat-hitting Maria Sharapova, who's about as agile as C3PO, has won two of the past three French Opens. Is there any chance she could have stayed with Chris Evert on clay back in the wooden-racket days?)

Every year Borg could expect to face one or two grass-court specialists at Roland Garros to ease his way to the second week. Not Nadal: every round he's going to face a player who loves to hit and run from behind the baseline. For years, we have held up Federer's results on clay as proof of his versatility. He is unbelievably versatile, but his play on clay doesn't really prove it. Novak Djokovic, a winner at Wimbledon and the two hard-court majors, has beaten Nadal three times in clay-court finals. Andy Murray has never won a clay title but has reached the French Open semifinals twice. David Ferrer counts hard courts as his best surface, but his best major result came at the French Open, where he reached the final last year. Stan Wawrinka's best surface is clay, but his best result came at the Australian Open, which he won in January. Juan Martin del Potro, like Soderling a big, not especially swift guy with flat-ish strokes, has made it as far at the French Open as he has at Wimbledon. (He's reached the semifinals of both.) Borg had to deal with a fair number of first-rate clay-court specialists, sure, but he never faced anything like the kind of depth of competence on clay that exists right now.

So case closed: Nadal, operating in the heart of an exceptionally strong dirtball era, is by far the best clay-court player of all time. Borg took home six Roland Garros trophies in eight appearances. He won 46 straight clay-court matches at his height, from 1977-79. Nadal, of course, set the record with an astonishing 81 straight clay-court match wins, from 2005-2007. He's won nine French Open titles in 10 appearances. Borg was 246-39 on clay in his career, an .863 winning percentage. Nadal? 318-24, for a .930 winning percentage. He's won 45 clay-court titles, 15 more than Borg.

The flip side of this argument, of course, is that Borg's accomplishments on faster surfaces are more impressive than Nadal's. Yes, Nadal has made adjustments for grass and hard court, by moving up in the court and improving his serve. But they are, indeed, adjustments, tinkering. He still offers up the same style of play at Wimbledon as he does at Roland Garros. Borg, in contrast, transformed himself at Wimbledon, which he won five straight times. He mostly played serve-and-volley tennis on Centre Court. He was far and away the best groundstroker of his era, but he knew he couldn't win the tournament from the baseline, as Nadal has done twice. That's how much the game has changed over the past 30 years.

We already mentioned Borg's .863 winning percentage on clay. This is phenomenal, but it's only slightly better than his winning percentages on grass (.847) and indoors (.808). Nadal, on the other hand, has that mind-boggling .930 winning stat sheet on clay in an era where everyone plays well on the dirt. But those percentages significantly fall on grass (.779) and indoors (.670).

To be sure, the faster-court comparison is a little off point, a sop to any Borg fans reading this. The actual point is that there hasn't been a "weak" generation in tennis since the mid-1960s, when the major tournaments refused entry to the game's half-dozen-or-so best players because they had turned professional. There can be no chipping away at Federer's or Nadal's gaudy accomplishments. They are what they are, and all of us who watch these two great players should count ourselves fortunate to witness them rewriting the tennis history books.

-- Douglas Perry