Next week, Sports Illustrated will announce its 2015 Sportsman of the Year. The magazine’s editors cannot have had an easy time choosing a winner. When was there last a year like this? There was Steph Curry, leading the Golden State Warriors to the N.B.A. championship with his dizzying crossovers and quick-release threes, and carrying himself with that Bay-vibe relaxed exuberance of his: the most winning of winners. How about the emergence of Jordan Spieth? At twenty-two, he ended the year as the world’s No. 1 golfer, having won two majors, including the Masters (where he finished a record-tying 18-under), and, along the way, treated us to numerous, intimately coaxing conversations with his just-struck golf balls. Lydia Ko did some incredible golfing this year, too: she became the world’s youngest women’s world No. 1 in February, at seventeen. Ronda Rousey, meanwhile, was named Best Female Athlete Ever in an ESPN poll in May, and was undefeated until, last month, she was kicked in the head and knocked unconscious, a perfectly legal thing to do in her sport of choice, ultimate fighting. And the editors at SI must have given due consideration to American Pharoah, though the acceptance speech would present challenges.

But no athlete had the year Novak Djokovic had. No athlete was as consistently superb, January through November. No athlete was as complete in all the aspects of his or her game and, as Christopher Clarey of the Times suggested recently, the best on all surfaces: indoors and out, hardcourt, clay, and grass. No athlete, week in and week out, faced the level of competition he did: men’s professional tennis, as gets said at the start of every big televised match—because it’s true—is in a golden age, and winning, for Djokovic, meant little bottom-feeding after the first or second rounds of a tournament, and involved many semis and finals against players who number (or will) among the best to ever play the game. No athlete had the historic year Djokovic did: one of the very best in the Open era of men’s tennis—and, when put in context, the best, or so I’d argue.

Djokovic won eighty-two matches in 2015 and lost only six. His winning percentage was ninety-three per cent. He became only the third man in the Open era, which began in 1968, to reach the final of each Grand Slam. He won twelve tournaments in all, including a record six Masters 1000 titles—these are the tournaments just below the Slams in terms of prestige—and reached the final of each of the Masters tourneys he played. In fact, he reached the final in every event he played save the one he entered to begin the year, a tune-up in Doha for the Australian Open. He finished the year No. 1 in the rankings of the Association of Tennis Professionals, which oversees the men’s circuit—his third year in a row at the top—and his total of 16,585 A.T.P. ranking points is the most ever accumulated, and more than the No. 2 and No. 3 players (Andy Murray and Roger Federer, respectively) combined. For what it’s worth—quite a bit—he also won more than twenty-one million dollars in prize money, the largest annual haul in history.

Was it the greatest year ever in men’s tennis? Let’s repair to the parlor and play the game. John McEnroe had an incredible year in 1984, losing only three times and winning ninety-six per cent of his matches. But he avoided clay, his weakest surface, playing only two matches on the dirt and losing the French Open, devastatingly, after going up two sets against his arch-rival, Ivan Lendl. Jimmy Connors went 99-4 in 1974, but was barred from playing the French Open because of his involvement with World Team Tennis. Roger Federer reached all four Grand Slam finals in 2006, won twelve titles overall, and lost only five matches. Four of those losses were on clay to Rafael Nadal (the other was in Cincinnati to eighteen-year-old Andy Murray). A remarkable season, and most observers consider it the second-greatest in the modern history of the men’s game—second only to Rod Laver’s accomplishing the Grand Slam in 1969, something that no other Open-era men’s player has done.

But neither Federer nine years ago nor Laver at the beginning of the Open era faced the competition or had to play the kind of grueling tennis Djokovic did to accomplish what he did this year. Of the Top Ten players in 2006 that Federer faced, only two had Grand Slam wins: Nadal, who dominated him, and Andy Roddick, who had won one Slam. Others who finished in the Top Ten that year included Ivan Ljubičić, Fernando González, and Mario Ančić (remember him?). The Golden Age had yet to arrive. And while Federer had some year, he accumulated only about half the A.T.P. point total Djokovic just amassed. To say that Laver also had an easier time of it in 1969 is, of course, to get more speculative. True, Laver played doubles as well as singles back then, and, because the tiebreak to settle a set tied at 6–6 was not yet part of most tournaments, he occasionally found himself grinding out sets 12–10 or 22–20. But men’s tennis then was serve and volley, with points usually over in three or four shots, if that. The game was not as physical and fast—as athletic—as today’s game. And the draws were not talent-deep: tennis was dominated by the Australians and the Americans and was not yet a truly global sport. This year, against much tougher competition, Djokovic—the son of a Serbian pizza-parlor owner—went 30–5 against Top Ten players, including 6–1 against the world No. 2 (Murray), and ended the season in London at the A.T.P. World Finals by beating Nadal in the semis and Federer in the finals, each in straight sets—something no player had ever done.

Only three tennis players have ever won SI’s year-end award: Billie Jean King, in 1972, Chris Evert, in 1976, and Arthur Ashe, in 1992. All of these awards had less to do with what the player had done that year, and more with a sense of what each had accomplished in his or her career—in Ashe’s case, with his work, in retirement, promoting AIDS awareness. So maybe this isn’t Djokovic’s year, but Serena Williams’s chance for a lifetime-achievement award. It would be hard to argue against: she is the best women’s tennis player of all time. And with three Grand Slam victories and a No. 1 ranking, she had an extraordinary year. Or three-quarters of a year, rather—she played no tennis after her stunning loss in the semifinals at the U.S. Open and skipped the W.T.A. finals in Singapore. (Her coach, Patrick Mouratoglou, mused that Serena might have lacked “motivation” after failing to achieve the Grand Slam.) But by almost any measure, the best year in tennis was had by Novak Djokovic. The best year in sports, too.