Djokovic recently (a few weeks ago at this point) won the US Open and his rise to number 1 has been incredible.  The data for that graph in the article was collected from the ATP website using the R package XML (which I learned about from The Log Cabin).  In that graph, I was only looking at the top 8 players and their points since 2009.  (In 2009 the ATP changed the scoring system, so it’s difficult to compare players directly from before and after 2009).  Anyway, I had all this data and I figured I should mess around with it some more.  This led to my tennis masterpiece graph.

This graph contains the career trajectories for all of the 19 players who have been ranked number 1 in the tennis world since 1990.  Rather than display the total points of players, I am displayed the percentage of points a player had relative the the number one player in the world at any given time.  (Bearing in mind that the points system changed in 2009.)

The bottom part of the graph contains the time series plot for each player containing the percentage of points they had relative to the number one player in the world at the time.  Dashed and solid lines indicate whether a player is inactive or active, respectively and the width of the line is relative to the number of Grand Slam tournaments that a player has won.  The top part of the graph indicates the time period that a player was ranked number 1 as well as the number of gran slam tournaments a player has won.

All told this graph contains (1) the number of graph slam titles for each player (2) the time period each player was number one (3) a time series of their ATP points relative to the number one player in the world at any given time and (4) whether the player is currently active or inactive.  It’s no Napolean’s March on Russia, but what is?

Cheers!