Jon Wertheim, who wrote the SI cover story on Serena Williams as the greatest of all time, is being too generous to his colleague Bruce Jenkins and his unconvincing arguments to the contrary. Jenkins expresses undue confidence in the serve and volley game and the power of diverse strokes to defeat completeness from the baseline. His contention that Sampras at his peak would definitely beat Federer at his peak on grass is somewhat baseless (especially given the perfection of Federer's return game), and that carries over into his points about Serena. With Serena's win at Wimbledon last week, there remain only two challengers, Graf and Navratilova. Although both of them won more majors and spent more weeks at number one than Serena, the level of competition is significantly better now than it was in the '70s and '80s. Martina pioneered the very notion of weight training for female athletes, which put her way ahead of her peers. When Graf came up against a younger player of comparable skill, Seles, she lost. A lot. None of these women had to face a top five comprised of Henin, Clijsters, Sharapova, and her own sister. As Wertheim rightfully points out, the psychological challenge of the latter is a unique circumstance that probably prevented Serena from more career slams, although she seems to have conquered it. Although facing a wider variety of opposing styles would make match wins harder for Serena, I find it difficult, as does Wertheim, to imagine any given one-on-one match in which I wouldn't give her an edge. She's smart, she's incredibly strong, her technical skill is underrated (she's a top doubles player; she can play the net), and she's as mentally tough as anyone who's ever played the game. If matching the stats of players from less dominant eras is what counts, we should have to wait for her to measure up to Margaret Court's 24 slams, which Jenkins doesn't suggest. That seems to me a sign that most of his objections are disingenuous.

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