Stefanie Maria "Steffi" Graf (born 14 June 1969, in Mannheim, Baden-Württemberg, West Germany) is a former World No. 1 German tennis player.
In total, Graf won 22 Grand Slam singles titles, second among male and female players only to Margaret Court's 24. In 1988, she became the first and only tennis player (male or female) to achieve the Calendar Year Golden Slam by winning all four Grand Slam singles titles and the Olympic gold medal in the same calendar year.
Graf was ranked World No. 1 by the Women's Tennis Association (WTA) for a record 377 total weeks—the longest period for which any player, male or female, has held the number-one ranking since the WTA and the Association of Tennis Professionals began issuing rankings. She also holds the open era record for finishing as the year-end World No. 1 the most times, having done so on eight occasions. She won 107 singles titles, which ranks her third on the WTA's all-time list after Martina Navratilova (167 titles) and Chris Evert (154 titles).
Martina Navratilova (Czech: Martina Navrátilová; born Martina Šubertová; October 18, 1956) is a retired Czech American tennis player and a former World No. 1. Billie Jean King said about Navratilova in 2006, "She's the greatest singles, doubles and mixed doubles player who's ever lived."
Navratilova won 18 Grand Slam singles titles, 31 major women's doubles titles (an all-time record), and 10 major mixed doubles titles. She reached the Wimbledon singles final 12 times, including nine consecutive years from 1982 through 1990, and won the women's singles title at Wimbledon a record nine times. She and King each won 20 Wimbledon titles, an all-time record. Navratilova is one of just three women to have accomplished a career Grand Slam in singles, women's doubles, and mixed doubles (called the Grand Slam "boxed set") a record she shares with Margaret Court and Doris Hart. She holds the open era record for most singles titles (167) and doubles titles (177). She recorded the longest winning streak in the open era (74 consecutive matches) and three of the six longest winning streaks in the women's open era. Navratilova, Margaret Court and Maureen Connolly share the record for the most consecutive major singles titles (six). Navratilova reached 11 consecutive major singles finals, second all-time to Steffi Graf's 13. In women's doubles, Navratilova and Pam Shriver won 109 consecutive matches and won all four major titles in 1984, i.e. the Grand Slam. Also the pair set an all time record of 79 titles together and tied Louise Brough Clapp's and Margaret Osborne duPont's record of 20 major women's doubles titles as a team. In addition she won the season ending WTA Tour Championships a record 8 times and made the finals a record 14 times and won the doubles title a record 11 times. Navratilova is the only person of either sex to have won eight different tournaments at least seven times.
Andre Kirk Agassi ( /ˈɑːndreɪ ˈæɡəsi/; born April 29, 1970) is a retired American professional tennis player and former world no. 1. Generally considered by critics and fellow players to be one of the greatest tennis players of all time, Agassi has been called the best service returner in the history of the game. Described by the BBC upon his retirement as "perhaps the biggest worldwide star in the sport's history", Agassi's performances, along with his unorthodox apparel and attitude, have seen him cited as one of the most charismatic players in the history of the game, and credited for helping revive the popularity of tennis during the 1990s.
In singles tennis, Agassi is an eight-time Grand Slam champion who competed in 15 Grand Slam finals, and an Olympic gold medalist. A multi-surface specialist, he is the first of two male players to have achieved a singles Career Golden Slam, and one of four to have achieved a singles Career Grand Slam in the Open Era (one of seven in history). He was the first male player to win all four Grand Slams on three different surfaces (hard, clay and grass), and is the last American male to win the French Open (1999) and the Australian Open (2003). Agassi also won 17 ATP Masters Series titles, the 1990 ATP Tour World Championships, and was part of a winning Davis Cup team in 1990 and 1992. He is the only male singles player in history to have won all four Grand Slam tournaments, the Olympic gold medal and the ATP Tour World Championships: a distinction dubbed as a "Career Super Slam" by Sports Illustrated.
Martina Hingis (born 30 September 1980) is a retired Swiss professional tennis player who spent a total of 209 weeks as World No. 1. She won five Grand Slam singles titles (three Australian Opens, one Wimbledon, and one US Open). She also won nine Grand Slam women's doubles titles, winning a calendar year doubles Grand Slam in 1998, and one Grand Slam mixed doubles title.
Hingis set a series of "youngest-ever" records before ligament injuries in both ankles forced her to withdraw temporarily from professional tennis in 2002 at the age of 22. After several surgeries and long recuperations, Hingis returned to the WTA tour in 2006. She then climbed to world number 6 and won three singles titles. On 1 November 2007, Hingis announced her retirement from tennis after testing positive for cocaine during Wimbledon in 2007. She denied using the drug, but decided not to appeal the imminent ban.
In June 2011, she was named one of the "30 Legends of Women's Tennis: Past, Present and Future" by Time.
Hingis was born in Košice, (then part of Czechoslovakia, now in modern Slovakia), to accomplished tennis players Melanie Molitorová and Karol Hingis. Molitorová was a professional tennis player, who was once ranked tenth among women in Czechoslovakia, and was determined to develop Hingis into a top player as early as pregnancy. Her father was ranked as high as nineteenth in the Czechoslovakian tennis rankings. Hingis's parents divorced when she was six, and she and her mother relocated around a year later to Trübbach in Switzerland. Her father, who continued to live in Košice as a tennis coach, said in 1997 that he had seen little of his daughter after the split.
Monica Seles (Serbian: Моника Селеш, Monika Seleš, Hungarian: Szeles Mónika, pronounced [sɛlɛʃ], born December 2, 1973) is a former world no. 1 professional tennis player and a member of the International Tennis Hall of Fame. She was born and raised in Novi Sad, SR Serbia, SFR Yugoslavia, to Hungarian parents. She became a naturalized United States citizen in 1994 and also received Hungarian citizenship in June 2007. She won nine Grand Slam singles titles, winning eight of them while a citizen of Yugoslavia and one while a citizen of the United States.
She became the youngest-ever champion at the 1990 French Open at the age of 16. She was the world no. 1 player in the women's game during 1991 and 1992, but in 1993 she was forced out of the sport for more than two years following an on-court attack in which a man stabbed her in the back with a 9-inch-long knife. She enjoyed some success after returning to the tour in 1995, including a Grand Slam singles title at the 1996 Australian Open, but was unable consistently to reproduce her best form. She played her last professional match at the 2003 French Open, but her official retirement announcement was not issued until February 2008.
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