WITH no live tennis on currently due to the COVID-19 global pandemic, Draft Central will take a look back at some of the best players of past and present and rank them based on a specific set of guidelines. In our next Top 10 countdown, we look at the Top 10 WTA Players to never have won a Grand Slam title, and inside the top five are players who have made multiple Grand Slam finals, and won them in other formats.

#5 Mary Joe Fernandez (640 matches – 68.3% winning record, 7 career titles, #4 career-high ranking)

We are into the top five of our countdown and now it gets to the really unlucky players. Not only have the top five players been amongst the bet players of their generation, but time and time again they have reached Grand Slam finals without success. Fernandez is one of those players with a remarkable achievement of having won a lowly seven WTA Tour titles which might not seem like much, but she reached three Grand Slam finals and played in six semis as well. In just 640 matches, Fernandez reached as high as fourth in the world over a 15-year span, but could not quite claim the ultimate glory.

Fernandez did win a couple of Grand Slam Doubles titles – at the Australian Open and French Open – and even won golds at Barcelona (1992) and Atlanta (1996) in the format. She claimed a bronze at Barcelona in the singles, and it was smack bang in between a golden run of Grand Slams where she got ever so close to winning one. But rewinding back to the start of her career, a 14-year-old – and only eight days in at that – Fernandez won her first main draw US Open match in 1985, becoming the youngest player to do so. The following year she officially turned professional and while there were high hopes, she did not reach a WTA Tour final until 1989 where she reached the Filderstadt final in October, and ranked 13th in the world took down top 10 players, Monica Seles and Zina Garrison before running into Argentinian world number three, Gabriela Sabatini in the final.

Earlier that year she made her first Grand Slam semi-final at Roland Garros, had beaten Sabatini and made it to the final four before being blown away by world number 10, Arantxa Sanchez-Vicario. It would prove to be the first of many for the young star who would make her first Grand Slam final at Melbourne Park in the new decade. Steffi Graf would ultimately take the crown, but Fernandez had beaten world number four Garrison on her way to the final. The run pushed her inside the top 10 for the first time and she made a quarter final at Roland Garros and a semi-final at Flushing Meadows where once against she went down to Sabatini. She did go one better at Filderstadt and then winning at Tokyo to claim her first two official WTA Tour titles.

It would be three years before she claimed the first of two Indian Wells titles – the clear biggest wins of her career – while making six more finals in that time, including one at Melbourne Park and one at Roland Garros in 1992 and 1993 respectively. Losing to Sabatini in Sydney the week prior, Fernandez returned serve in the Australian Open semi-final, only to run into a red-hot Seles and bow out at the final stage again. In the first five tournaments of the year she lost to Sabatini twice, Graf twice and Seles once such was the top-end talent on tour. In an eerily similar result to Melbourne Park, Fernandez knocked out Sabatini before losing in straight sets again to Seles in the semis.

Graf would be the one to end her run on multiple occasions in 1993, with the Roland Garros slipping away in three sets. It would be the last Grand Slam final she would make, and in fact, her golden four year run on four semis and three finals would be over bar a 1997 semi-finals appearance at the Australian Open. There it would be a teenage Martina Hingis who would wipe her off the court, as the Swiss star had done a week earlier in Sydney – the new era of tennis had begun. She would win just the one more title at Berlin that year, and then end her career without a Grand Slam title, but instead 19 doubles titles and two of those being Grand Slams. She might have had a lot less career titles than some others on this list, but she was very close to being a multiple Grand Slam winner.

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Top 10 WTA Players without a Grand Slam title:

#10 Manuela Maleeva (Bulgaria/Switzerland)
#9 Zina Garrison (USA)
#8 Jelena Jankovic (Serbia)
#7 Elena Dementieva (Russia)
#6 Agnieszka Radwanska (Poland)
#5 Mary Joe Fernandez (United States)