Active Singles Players & Their Titles

[Sjengster]

One important player to knock off the active list here, Hackie....

[TennisHack]

You know I update that part of the list at the end of the year. Though he will free up some more room...

[TennisHack]

Updated through Beijing/Bucharest 06

[TennisHack]

Farewell Alex Corretja

Alex Corretja was always polite. He would never want to interfere with someone else's glory. So he didn't retire at, say, the U. S. Open; he waited a couple of weeks, then announced it was over this past weekend as Spain won its Davis Cup match. It was fitting, given his importance to Spain in Davis Cup -- he won 12 of his 15 singles ties, and went 8-8 in doubles (which, given what most Spanish players are like in doubles, is pretty impressive).

Not that he had much choice about retiring. He's had vision problems for several years. He had hoped there would be a cure. There wasn't.

It's too bad. His poor results in his final years, plus the long delay between his last match and his official retirement, rather dimmed his legacy. He's not a Hall of Famer, certainly -- but he's a lot more than the guy who couldn't beat Pete Sampras even with Sampras vomiting on the court, which is what most people probably remember thanks to a few zillion reruns.

Corretja in fact was about as good as a player could get without winning a Slam. It was just his luck to spend years and years as the second-best clay player, even as different #1 clay players came and went. He started playing as a pro in 1991, at age 17, and made his ATP debut just a year later. It was a very solid season for an 18-year-old: He won 11 matches and broke into the Top 100.

Two years later, he really announced his arrival. In 1994, he won his first title (Buenos Aires), and broke into the Top 25; his record that year was 44-22, and he ended the year at #22. He went into a bit of a slump in 1995, but came back well in 1996, reaching his first Masters final at Hamburg and his first Slam quarterfinal at the U. S. Open.

1997 brought another breakthrough. He won three titles, including his first really big one, at Rome; the others were at Estoril and Stuttgart. He ended the year at #12.

1998 was the year for which he will really be remembered. He finally broke away from clay, winning titles on every surface but grass (where he never really did become comfortable; he had only a couple of Wimbledon wins in his career, and skipped the event more often than not). He reached his first Slam final (at Roland Garros, naturally). He won Dubai on hardcourts, Gstaad on clay, Indianapolis on hardcourts, and Lyon on carpet (the only carpet title of his career). That was enough to earn him his first appearance at the year-end championships at Hannover (on indoor hardcourt) -- and he won that, too. He ended the year at #3, and hit #2 in early 1999; it was his career high.

1999 proved a severe letdown; he won no titles, lost in the quarterfinal at Roland Garros, and had only one significant Masters result, a semifinal at Rome. But if anyone thought 1998 was a fluke, he disproved it in 2000, winning Indian Wells for his second Masters title, plus Gstaad and Kitzbuhel on clay, Washington on hardcourt, and Toulouse on indoor hard. He again qualified for the year-end event, and though he was eliminated in the Round Robin, he still ended the year at #8. He also was a key member of the team that won the Davis Cup.

This time, it really was the beginning of the end. In 2001, he again made the Roland Garros final, but won only one title (Amsterdam), reached the quarterfinal of only one Masters, and ended the year at #16. He won his last titles (Gstaad and Kitzbuhel) in 2002, and made to Roland Garros semifinal, but he never made it past the Round of Sixteen at any Masters, and ended up at #19. From then on, it was a downward struggle with injuries and the vision problem; in 2003, he didn't win a Slam match and ended the year #100. He picked up a few more Slam wins in 2004, but had only 12 ATP wins overall and ended the year at #113. And that was pretty much the end.

In all, he won 17 singles titles, plus three small doubles titles. He had only the two years in the Top Ten, but a lot of that was injury; he spent five years in the Top Twenty, and was Top Fifty for nine straight years (1994-2002).

And he really was well-liked; he was given the Stefan Edberg Sportsmanship Award in 1996 and 1998.

It was an almost invisible farewell. It followed a very visible career.

[TennisHack]

Updated through Bangkok/Mumbai/Palermo 06

[TennisHack]

Updated through Tokyo/Metz 06

[TennisHack]

Updated through Vienna/Moscow/Stockholm 06

[TennisHack]

Updated through TMS Madrid 06

[TennisHack]

Updated through Basel/St. Petersburg/Lyon 06

[TennisHack]

Updated through TMS Paris 06