Before you read another word, I have a challenge for you. The ATP rankings were first unveiled in 1973. In the intervening years, 29 players have reached the #1 ranking. How many of them can you name? (Go ahead and take a shot at it. When you are done, the full list can be found on the ATP site.
For the sake of transparency, I got most of them, but not all. You’ll also inevitably forget one or two and immediately wonder how they slipped your mind. There will likely be a few others that you recognize but had completely forgotten ever reached the top ranking. As it turns out, even many members of this remarkably exclusive club struggle with the same exercise.
That simple challenge serves as the opening hook for ACES: The ATP No. 1 Club, a new tennis documentary series currently streaming on Amazon Prime Video. It chronicles every man who has reached the pinnacle of the ATP rankings across four episodes. There have been thousands of professional tennis players during the Open Era. Only twenty-nine have occupied the No. 1 ranking.
At first glance, the documentary promises to be a history of those twenty-nine champions. In reality, it is something much more interesting. ACES is a study of what separates extraordinary from merely exceptional.
The gap between the player ranked No. 1 in the world and the player ranked No. 100 is astonishingly small. Both possess extraordinary athletic ability and have dedicated their lives to the sport. Yet only a tiny handful ever manage to climb to the very top. Throughout the series, former champions, coaches, and journalists continually return to the question of what defines those razor-thin margins.
One phrase, repeated in different forms by multiple contributors, particularly resonated with me: “Hard work is a talent.” It is such a deceptively simple statement that it deserves to be remembered long after the credits roll. Talent may open the door, but the willingness to sustain extraordinary effort year after year is a common thread connecting nearly every member of this club.
One of the documentary’s greatest strengths is its storytelling. The interviews with former World No. 1 players are naturally compelling, but the producers wisely avoid allowing the series to become a collection of isolated reminiscences. Instead, they surround those firsthand accounts with exceptional narrators who provide historical context and connective tissue between generations.
Mary Carillo and Jon Wertheim will be the most recognizable voices for many viewers, but tennis fans will also appreciate contributions from longtime journalists and authors including Joel Drucker, Richard Evans, and Giri Nathan. Darren Cahill also proves to be an inspired choice. As a former ATP professional, the one-time coach of Andre Agassi, and the current coach of Jannik Sinner, he occupies a unique position that allows him to bridge multiple eras of the sport with an unusual breadth of experience and credibility. Together, this group transforms the series from a collection of interviews into a remarkably coherent history of men’s professional tennis.
Perhaps the aspect I enjoyed most was watching tennis grow up. The documentary begins with the formation of the ATP rankings and follows the sport through more than five decades of evolution. Throughout the years, one theme remains remarkably consistent. Nearly every World No. 1 speaks about the champions who came before them. Each generation inherits something from the previous one before leaving its own mark for those who follow. Rather than presenting twenty-nine independent success stories, ACES tells the story of excellence being passed from one player to another, and one generation to the next.
The final episode understandably devotes significant attention to the era dominated by Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal, and Novak Djokovic before transitioning to Andy Murray’s long-awaited breakthrough and the emergence of Jannik Sinner and Carlos Alcaraz. Given the constraints of a four-part series spanning more than fifty years, I thought the balance was appropriate. While fans of the modern era could certainly argue that those years deserved even more screen time, their influence has been woven throughout the entire documentary, making the final episode feel like the culmination of a story that had been building from the very beginning.
Daniil Medvedev, who spent 16 weeks at #1, is also a welcome presence throughout the contemporary episode. Long one of my favorite players to listen to in interviews, he brings the same sardonic and thoughtful perspective here that has made him one of the sport’s most entertaining personalities away from the court.
The series also prompted me to revisit one of my own long-held questions about tennis history: whether the dominance of Federer, Nadal, and Djokovic says more about their greatness, the era in which they competed, or some combination of both. The emergence of Alcaraz and Sinner has only made that question more interesting. The documentary avoids taking a position, and nothing I saw here materially changed my own thinking. If anything, it simply reminded me that the question remains one of the more fascinating albeit controversial debates in modern tennis.
I have one critical observation, but it is not really directed at the documentary itself. Watching ACES only reinforced my belief that the WTA deserves this same attention. The history of the women’s game is every bit as compelling and, in many respects, even richer. The women who reached World No. 1 did more than reshape professional tennis. Many of them helped reshape society. A companion series chronicling the evolution of the WTA through its own World No. 1 players would be every bit as fascinating as this one.
ACES: The ATP No. 1 Club succeeds not only as a documentary about twenty-nine remarkable champions, but also as a story about the evolution of excellence itself. By the end, I no longer felt like I had simply watched the history of the ATP rankings. Rather, it was like watching professional tennis grow up throughout the Open Era.
I recommend this documentary without reservation to every serious tennis fan. My only hope is that this is not the end of the story and that the WTA comes next.
ACES: The ATP No. 1 Club (<- Sponsored Link)
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