Roger Federer, pictured here after the Australian Open final, is clearly not, but Rafael Nadal, talking with the last man to complete a Grand Slam, Rod Laver, is poised to win all four majors this year.  Nadal has already won in Melbourne, is a heavy favorite to win the French, proved last year that he can win Wimbledon, and showed by winning the Australian Open and Indian Wells this year that he can win on hardcourts, the New York surface where the Grand Slam season ends in September.

Only one man other than Laver has won the true Grand Slam, meaning the four majors in order, and that was American Don Budge in 1938. (Three other players hold “career slams,” meaning they have won all four but not in order — Fred Perry, Roy Emerson, and Andre Agassi.)  The term Grand Slam originated, according to Bud Collins’ indispensable and encyclopedic History of Tennis, in 1933 when Australian Jack Crawford won the first three legs and sought the U.S. championship.  Collins wrote: “The prospect of his winning that one, too, intrigued a New York Times columnist, John Kieran. If he did, wrote Kieran, it would be something like a ’grand slam’ in bridge.” Crawford lost in a grueling five-setter in the final to Perry, including a second set by the pre-tiebreaker days score of 11-13, but the Grand Slam was born.

 Laver in his 1973 memoir The Education of a Tennis Player (the prose of which bears the hyperbolic stamp of Collins, his collaborator) wrote: “I like to think the tennis Slam is the hardest of all because you have to get your game up to the top level four times over an eight-month stretch, and of course your’e playing other tournaments in between, too. Much travel and changing conditions are involved. In 1969, I started in the tropical summer heat of Brisbane and wound up in the autumn rain of New York.”

And those varying conditions are even more varied now.  When Laver won his Grand Slams — as an amateur in 1962 and in the Open professional era of 1969 — only the French was not played on grass. Today, there are two on hard courts, the fast courts of Flushing Meadows and the slower blue hard courts of Melbourne, as well as the red clay of Paris and the grass of Wimbledon.  The modern Grand Slam is as difficult as it has ever been. 

Nadal has a long way to go, with the two most difficult for him coming last, but if he pulls it off, he’ll have to rank atop the list in the perpetual argument of who is tennis GOAT — the greatest of all time.

Sorry, Roger.

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