MEGAN MCARDLE: Serena Williams Is Not the Best Tennis Player. “This is not to take anything away from Williams, whose athleticism stuns me into a near-faint. But even McEnroe’s detractors have had to grudgingly acknowledge that if Williams were playing with the men, at best, her superb athleticism and mental strength might occasionally earn her a win. That’s a pretty strange definition of ‘best tennis player in the world.’ . . . Tennis, after all, is a court, a moderate amount of equipment, and some highly detailed rules for determining who wins. The best tennis player is the person who can most regularly defeat the other players under those rules. Unless some sort of terrible plague wipes out hundreds of top men’s tennis players, that person will never be Serena Williams.”