Wednesday, February 13, 2008

Greatest Season of All-Time

Back again making my countdown to my favorite greatest season of all-time before the turn of the century. This is hard enough and before I started doing this I put my 20 before hand and I find myself overthinking the next one each time I post one. Today I am going back to the sport of tennis, yeah I know, just hear me out can't deny his accomplishments this season. Here it is...



So if I told you that a mens tennis player had a record of 99-4 with 14 titles you would probably think that I was talking about Roger Federer, but the year was 1974 and the name was Jimmy Connors. The very energetic Connors put together in my opinion the best season by a mens player. He won 3 Grand Slam titles that year(Australian Open, Wimbledon, and U.S. Open) and the way he was playing that year could have won a forth but was denied the opprotunity. At that time Connors had signed a contract with the World Team Tennis organization and the French Open board banned all players that were signed with the WTT because they thought that he would be conflicted with the French Open being involved with the WTT for whatever reason which sounds ridiculous to me. Connors took over the world overall #1 ranking in July that year and held the title for a record 160 straight weeks, a record that was broken last February by Federer. Connors also was a part of a mixed doubles team that year with Chris Evert and they finished runner-up in the U.S. Open. Connors was such a very colorful player when he was on the court, I remember him later in his career at the U.S. Open in the early 1990s and watching this older man compete with the young bucks and he always got my respect. I know that this is tennis but in my opinion if I was to put a tennis player in my top 20 it had to be this kind of season with this kind of player.

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