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In tennis there are four tournaments that are worth much more than all the others: the so-called Grand Slam tournaments, also simply called “Slam” or “Major”. They are the greatest ambition of every tennis player and the four events around which the entire tennis season revolves, for historical, economic and sporting reasons. They are also those occasionally followed by non-enthusiasts, or in any case those whose name might be familiar even to those who are not interested in tennis: Australian Open, Roland Garros, Wimbledon and US Open.
The results in the Slams are the measure of the skill of a tennis player: they are almost always the first data cited to give the dimension of the level of a player. “You made a quarterfinal at Wimbledon,” for example, is a way of saying that a tennis player has had a good career. Among men, Novak Djokovic, Rafael Nadal and Roger Federer are considered the strongest tennis players of all time because they have won more than anyone else (24, 22 and 20 respectively), just as the American Serena Williams is considered the strongest tennis player of all time for having set the record of 23 victories in Slams (in the so-called “Open Era”, we will return later).
It happens that tennis players are asked whether they prefer to become number 1 in the world ranking or win a Slam, and the answer is always very similar to the one recently given by the Norwegian Casper Ruud (who lost three Slam finals and came very close to number one): «If I became number one without having won a Slam I would feel a bit strange».
The most promising tennis players are always under a lot of pressure compared to when they will win their first Slam, which for public opinion corresponds to their consecration, the moment in which they can truly be considered strong. Until recently, many wondered why Jannik Sinner – the Italian champion of the 2024 Australian Open – had not yet won a Slam, if he really was so promising. The fact that the Spaniard Carlos Alcaraz, considered together with him the strongest young man on the circuit, had also won his first Slam at 19 years old also contributed to putting further pressure on him.
Roger Federer, for example, won his first Slam at the age of 22 (like Sinner), in 2003, but before he got there his talent was much debated because every time he came close he ended up losing, to the point that they started calling him “the best tennis player in the world to have never won a Slam.” In the seven years between 2003 and 2009 he won 15, a record never equaled.
It is perhaps also because of all this pressure that the most frequent reaction of tennis players who win the last point of a Slam final is to let themselves fall to the ground, relieved and exhausted, even before being happy. The Austrian Dominic Thiem, US Open champion in 2020, after that victory was unable to repeat himself at high levels the following year, he dropped out of the top hundred in the world in the rankings (today he is 92nd) and for 14 months he didn’t win a single match . He himself said that the pressure he experienced to win a Slam had consumed him psychologically: “When you spend your whole life pursuing a goal that affects everything, once you’ve achieved it your perspective changes.”
Thiem after winning the US Open in 2020 (EPA/JASON SZENES)
– Read also: Does tennis make you unhappy?
In a tennis season there are around sixty tournaments in addition to the Slams, some of which are played simultaneously in different parts of the world. When the Slams are played, however, the rest of the circuit stops: all the best men and women players in the world are called to participate, the others can try to enter through a long qualifying tournament, itself an event of some importance, at least for enthusiasts. Still others are invited from the tournament with the so-called wild carda sort of special invitation granted to male and female tennis players who do not have the ranking requirements to participate, for example because they are too young or have just returned from an injury.
In the end there are 128 places on the draw, both for men and women. The top 32 of their respective world rankings are arranged in the draw so that they cannot meet before the third round, so as to guarantee matches between the strongest and most anticipated tennis players as late as possible in the tournament. It is a mechanism that tends to favor the strongest and already established, excluding the others, and this makes it almost prohibitive to undermine the hierarchies. The tournament is won by the only man and woman who manages to win 7 consecutive games in fourteen days: a lot.
For men, the Slams are also distinguished from all other tournaments in terms of scoring: they are the only ones in which the best of 5 sets are played (i.e. the first to reach three wins), instead of the best of 3 sets. It is a rule that generates very long and exhausting, but also epic and spectacular matches, which then end up becoming the most remembered by the public. For tennis players, however, it makes it even more tiring to win the tournament, because you need to combine exceptional athletic and mental skills: a 5-set match can last several hours, and to win, in addition to physical resistance, you also need great psychological solidity.
Until a few years ago, both the men’s and women’s matches in the Slams did not include the decisive set tie-breakthe special game played at 6-6 to decide who wins a set (i game are the fractions into which a set is divided). Previously, in the decisive sets at 6-6 we went to the bitter end, and this could produce even longer matches. This rule was completely abolished in 2022, but the Slams still maintained their particularity, as often happens: in the tie-break of the decisive sets we reach 10, instead of the usual 7.
The Slams are the tournaments that guarantee by far the greatest number of ranking points for those who win, two thousand (the most important tournaments after the Slams, the Masters 1000, give half of them), and naturally also those with the highest prize money high. By winning the Australian Open final, for example, Sinner obtained almost 2 million euros. Even just having access to the scoreboard gives players a cash prize: at the 2024 Australian Open it was the equivalent of around 19 thousand euros, which became 72 thousand for whoever won the first match.
All these are the most practical reasons why tennis players’ seasons are organized around the four Grand Slam tournaments: even just winning a match in one of these competitions can ensure a valuable gain for the whole season, both in terms of ranking points (climbing positions means among other things being able to participate in the most important tournaments), both in economic terms.
Each tennis player must pay a large staff to follow him around the world, and if we exclude the strongest, there are many tennis players who are highly dependent on their results from an economic point of view. In this sense, the Slams are also the most democratic tournaments, in some ways: more tennis players can participate and a single victory can relaunch a career at a high level. It is also for this reason that stories that the public is passionate about come out more often in Slams than in other tournaments: unknown or low-ranked tennis players who beat much stronger ones, debutants who come surprisingly ahead, etc.
Tennis players therefore plan the season in order to arrive in the best possible shape for the Slams, and those who can try to have at least a week of rest before they begin. In the period of the year around a Slam, all the attention is so focused on that event that the previous tournaments are often defined as “preparation tournaments” for the Slam.
In the end, however, the winners are a very small circle of male and female tennis players (with the exception of a few exceptional surprises): in men’s tennis it has been particularly so in the last twenty years, with Djokovic, Nadal and Federer who between them have won 66 of the 83 Slams played between 2003 and 2023.
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The Grand Slam tournaments are the most prestigious because they were born as “international championships” organized by the four federations of the first four countries that won the Davis Cup, the main team tennis competition for national teams, between the 1920s and 1930s. Australia, France, the United Kingdom and the United States remained the only countries to have won the Davis Cup until 1974. They are also among the oldest tournaments in tennis, and Wimbledon in particular is the oldest ever (and therefore also the most prestigious ): it was played for the first time in 1877.
Until the Seventies, three out of four Slams were played on grass, only Roland Garros on clay (this is still the case today). In 1974 the US Open moved to hard courts, also to differentiate itself from the others, and the Australian Open did the same in 1987. In their current organization, the first Slam of the year is always the Australian Open, the last two weeks of January, then there is Roland Garros between May and June, Wimbledon between June and July and finally the US Open between August and September.
Over the years their prestige has consolidated, and the national federations that organize them have associated themselves and worked to increase and maintain it, applying a conservative line in a sport in which traditions and solemnities have always been an integral part. The Slams are the only tournaments on the professional circuit not organized by the ATP and WTA, the world men’s and women’s tennis associations. They therefore have their own organisation, internal rules of conduct and make joint decisions, sometimes even in conflict with the ATP and WTA. “Grand Slam”, in English, is a registered trademark.
“Grand Slam” is also the name of the greatest sporting feat that a tennis player can achieve, i.e. the consecutive victory of all 4 Slams in a single year: Djokovic came close in 2021, winning the first three of the season only to then lose in the final against Russian Daniil Medvedev at the US Open. It was a match played with unprecedented tension, in the midst of which Djokovic even started crying under a towel during a break.
After winning a Wimbledon final, Djokovic has the habit of pulling blades of grass from the center court and “tasting” them while looking at the audience with a satisfied look (Julian Finney/Getty Images)
Only three players have managed to achieve a Grand Slam in the so-called “Open Era”, the one that began in 1968, when amateur and professional tennis were unified. The first was the Australian Rod Laver in 1969, the second another Australian in 1970, Margaret Court. But in those years it was very difficult for tennis players from other countries to reach Australia, and many thus gave up on the Australian Open. The third was the German Steffi Graf in 1988. In that year Graf also won the Olympic gold in tennis in Seoul, becoming the only tennis player in history to achieve the so-called “Golden Slam”, or in Italian “Grand Slam of ‘gold”.
Serena Williams, on the other hand, won four consecutive Slams twice in her career, but not in the same year. In 2002 she won Roland Garros, Wimbledon, the US Open and then the subsequent Australian Open in 2003, while in 2014 she won the US Open and then the first three Slams the following year. This winning streak spread over two years, however exceptional, was called Serena Slamand between 2015 and 2016 Djokovic also succeeded (in the past Martina Navratilova and Steffi Graf had also done it once each).
2024-01-29 09:16:15
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