Both male and female professional tennis players have their careers measured by the number of Grand Slam tennis tournaments they win.
Those tournaments are the Australian Open, French Open, Wimbledon, and the U.S. Open.
What’s different about these tournaments is that they are grueling two weeks in length, have larger playing fields, and in the case of the men, the matches are won with the victor prevailing in the best of five sets.
Here are the five best current singles players (a mixture of both men and women) who have not yet won a grand slam tournament.
Coco Gauff, USA
Coco Gauff is now 18 years old but burst onto the women’s tour as a 15-year-old phenom.
Gauff has had tremendous success as both a singles and doubles player.
In 2022, she competed in her first career Grand Slam final, losing in the French Open to Iga Swiatek.
Gauff is currently ranked sixth in the world and many wonder when, and not if, she will become a Grand Slam champion.
Madison Keys, USA
Madison Keys is 27 years old and has been a fixture on the women’s tennis scene since turning pro in 2009.
She has ranked among the top 25 women’s players in the world for the majority of her career with a career-high ranking of seventh in 2016.
Keys is currently ranked 24th and has only played in one Grand Slam final, the 2017 U.S. Open when she lost in straight sets to fellow American Sloane Stephens.
Karolina Pliskova, Czech Republic
30-year-old Karolina Pliskova was previously ranked the best player in the world in 2017.
She has competed in two Grand Slam finals, the 2016 U.S. Open and 2021 Wimbledon only to be defeated by Angelique Kerber and Ashleigh Barty respectively.
Pliskova has endured the ups and downs of a long tennis career, and her window of opportunity may be closing given the younger players joining the circuit.
Stefanos Tsitsipas, Greece
The third-ranked player on the men’s circuit, Stefanos Tsitsipas, has already had two Grand Slam final appearances.
Unfortunately in both cases, his opponent was Novak Djokovic who defeated him in two heartbreaking ways.
The first was the 2021 French Open when Tsitsipas built a two-set lead only to drop the final three sets.
The second was a recent 2023 Australian Open final in which Djokovic never fell behind and defeated him soundly in straight sets.
Alexander Zverev, Germany
25-year-old Alexander Zverev was the world’s number two men’s player in 2022 on his quest to a first French Open final when he suffered a devastating ankle injury in his semifinal match against Rafael Nadal.
He rolled his ankle and needed to be taken off the court in a wheelchair.
Zverev is on his way back after missing the rest of 2022 recovering from the injury but lost in the second round of the 2023 Australian Open.
He lost in his only Grand Slam final appearance to date in the 2020 U.S. Open to Dominic Thiem in a thrilling five set match that was decided by a tiebreaker in the final set.
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