Steffi Graf’s footwork

For those of you too young to remember, Steffi Graf is arguably the best female tennis player of all time. In total she won 22 grand slam titles and 109 tournaments overall. She’s the only person, male or female, to win all four major tournaments (Australian Open, French Open, Wimbledon, U.S. Open) more than four times and in 1988, was the last person to win the grand slam, and the only tennis player in history to win the “golden grand slam” which refers to winning all four major titles in one calendar year in addition to the Olympic gold medal. She was ranked the #1 player in the world a record 377 weeks, 156 of those consecutively, also a record. She introduced the power-game to women’s tennis and unlike the players of today, never grunted. She was gracious in defeat and always let the tennis racquet do the talking. In 1999, at the age of 30, and after years of injuries, she retired ranked #3 in the world, the highest of any player. I patterned a lot of my own tennis game off of Steffi’s all-encompassing court coverage, and in this video above you can see how at 42-years-old, her footwork is still second to none.