Tennis Story: when the Masters decided on No. 1

The best season finale possible. The ATP Finals, the Masters that crowns the eight main protagonists of the year, will also define who will be the best of all, the number one in the world at the end of the season.

Two competitors: Novak Djokovic, who aims to equal the Sampras record and close the ranking for the sixth time, and Rafa Nadal who could reach Djokovic with five seasons closed by number 1.

However, the Serb must reach the final and win at least two games in the group because he has the chance to climb over Nadal, even if in the next few hours the Spaniard should decide not to play in London.

The tournament, which was played in January of the following year from 1977 to 1985, experienced the most thrilling epilogue on two occasions: in 2000 and 2016, in fact, the end of season number 1 remained uncertain until the last game of the year, the Masters final.

The 75 points of "Guga"

The year 2000 is a year of changes, it is the beginning of a new era for the ATP Finals that return traveling after the decade at Madison Square Garden (site of the tournament in the Eighties) and the Nineties in Germany. It is played in Lisbon in the brand new Pavilhao Atlantico opened two years earlier. At the beginning it was called Pavilhao Utopia: a name, a why.

The Russian Marat Safin remains in the running for the world number 1 title, which dominated Pete Sampras that year in the final at the US Open and climbed to the top of the ranking two weeks earlier, and the Brazilian Guga Kuerten. Safin wins the first two group matches, against Alex Corretja and Lleyton Hewitt. Kuerten, on a field not very fast, is unplayable in the first set against Andre Agassi. But it's not enough to win. Defeated in comeback on the third set, Kuerten must reach the final and hope that Safin will not win a game to become world number 1 at the end of the season.

Safin loses the last match of the group and the semifinal against Andre Agassi who takes away the service twice. Kuerten passes the round beating Magnus Norman and Yevgeny Kafelnikov, celebrates the help of the wonderful audience and flies.

In the semifinals he rejoins Pete Sampras in the last meeting of the American at the Masters. Become the second player after Michael Chang ten years earlier to beat Sampras and Agassi in the same tournament. The final has the road marked immediately. Kuerten closes 6-4 6-4 6-4, for 75 points it is the number 1 in the world at the end of the year.

The year of Andy Murray

The only case of 2016 is when Andy Murray and Novak Djokovic, the two rivals for the number 1 year-end post, meet in the Masters final: a single match for two goals.

After the final of the Masters 1000 in Madrid, Murray had to recover a 9,025 points gap to Djokovic, but from that moment the Briton won 58 games out of 62, winning the title at Wimbledon (on Raonic) and three Masters 1000 (Roma on Djokovic, Shanghai on Bautista Agut and Paris-Bercy on Isner). It's his best season: he wins nine tournaments, including Olympic gold, out of 13 finals played.

The 6-3 6-4 on Djokovic at the Finals makes him the seventeenth player to close the year from number 1 in the era of computerized ranking, which began in 1973. Since 2004, only the Fab Four have finished the season in the lead: Roger Federer (2004-07, 2009), Rafael Nadal (2008, 2010, 2013, 2017), Djokovic (2011-12, 2014-15, 2018) and Murray (2016).

It's a double party at Murray's house, with his brother Jamie number 1 double: it's the first pair of siblings simultaneously at the top of the two rankings at the end of the season.

These however are not the only cases in which the place of best player of the year is still up for grabs at the beginning of the Masters. In 1990, the first season of the ATP circuit as we know it today (it absorbed the WCT tournaments, the calendar was reformed with the introduction of what we now call Masters 1000), Stefan Edberg secures the place of number 1 at the end year only thanks to the qualification for the Masters final, then lost to Andre Agassi.

In 1992 Jim Courier is sure to finish the year at the top thanks to the qualification for the Masters semifinal at the Frankfurt Festhalle. It is the first US end of season number 1 after John McEnroe in 1984.

It is helped by Boris Becker who eliminates his only rival, Stefan Edberg with whom he alternated at the top of the rankings throughout the year. Courier beats Sampras in the semifinals, and avenges the defeat in the final of the previous year, but loses the challenge for the title against Becker. The German triumphs at home while the audience sings "Happy birthday" on his 25th birthday.

The record of Pete Sampras

Courier will become three years after Sampras' ally who celebrates the certainty of the number 1 after the two victories in the first two matches of the group. His only rival, Thomas Muster, has indeed lost against Courier and, for the first time in his career, also against Michael Chang who will stop in the final against Becker.

In 1998 Sampras presented himself to the Masters with 33 points ahead in the standings against the Chilean Marcelo Rios, who must win at least two games and certainly more than Sampras to finish the year at the top. The beginning seems encouraging: Rios in fact at the debut surpasses the British Tim Henman. But he must withdraw from the tournament due to a back problem.

Sampras is eating a plate of pasta at the hotel when he learns of the Rios package. It is the first in history capable of remaining the number 1 in the world at the end of the year for six seasons in a row "I try to be down to earth, but it is an incredible record that perhaps will never be beaten". Celebrate with a cake in the shape of number 6 with a tennis ball in the circle, then champagne for everyone.

Hewitt: the youngest number 1

In 2001 the Masters moved to the SuperDome in Sydney, an 18,000-seat cathedral in the Olympic park that hosted the Games a year earlier. Three of them are in the running for the scepter of best player of the season: Kuerten has 771 points, Hewitt 723, Agassi 684. There are twenty points to be won for every victory in the group, forty for the semifinal, fifty for the final.

Agassi and Hewitt are in the same group, named after John Newcombe. Agassi beats Rafter on his debut, but loses to Hewitt and Grosjean. In the other group Guga Kuerten closes with three defeats against Juan Carlos Ferrero, the first participation, Kafelnikov and Goran Ivanisevic who won Wimbledon.

In the last group match, Hewitt challenges Rafter in front of the largest audience ever seen in Sydney for a tennis match since the Davis Cup final in 1954. There is no story: 6-3 6-4 Hewitt who at 20 and 8 months becomes the youngest number 1 in the world in the Open era.

The following year he will hold the ranking at the top of the ranking for all 52 weeks of the season, even if the mathematical certainty of being at the end of the year will come only to the Masters after the defeat of rival Albert Costa against Carlos Moya, today coach of Rafa Nadal.

From Roddick to Djokovic

Andy Roddick is having dinner before the second Masters 2003 game in Houston when he receives the official title of being the youngest American to finish the season by number 1 in the year of his only Slam success, at the US Open.

Despite the forfeit at the Masters, Rafa Nadal completes the first year from number 1 in 2008 also because Federer does not pass the group for the first time.

The same happens to Rafa Nadal the following year: Federer, on the other hand, overtakes Fernando Verdasco and Andy Murray in the first round robin matches and ends the season as number 1.

"Being the best at the end of the year is the toughest challenge in our sport," Novak Djokovic will say in 2014 who had already completed the season in the lead in 2011 and 2012. Before him, only Federer, Nadal and Ivan Lendl had succeeded in take back the scepter of number 1.

Five years later, the Serbian could win this challenge for the sixth time. Will 2019 be the year of Rafa or Nole? The appointment with history is at the O2 Arena, the tensile structure on the Greenwich meridian line. Measurement of time, where history becomes emotion.