Is Serena Williams greatest female tennis player ever?

What do Sir Don Bradman, Pele, Michael Schumacher and Roger Federer have in common?
They are arguably some of the greatest sportspersons in their respective sport. But the difference between ‘one of the greatest’ and ‘the greatest ever’ is huge, for every Bradman there is Tendulkar, for every Pele there is Maradona and so on. It’s is highly unlikely that a player will ever be called ‘greatest ever’ unequivocally.
Serena Williams is undoubtedly one of the best women tennis players to ever swing a racquet but is she the greatest women tennis player of all time? This is one tough question. One has to look back to the days of Steffi Graf and Martina Navratilova to see someone as dominant as Serena Williams in women tennis. There is no iota of doubt that she is the greatest contemporary tennis player. But how does she compare with the players of likes of Navratilova, Graf and Margaret Court. If there were a time machine we could easily pit them against each other, grab some popcorn and watch them battle it out and voila we are done. But the failure of science has made our job a lot harder. If we look at number of Grand Slams won Serena Williams is way behind the pack with 5 players winning more Grand Slams than her but this gives only half the picture. Serena’s career has been marred by injuries but whenever she isn’t sidelined by injury she makes it to the top no matter who the numero uno is, such is her domination. One measure of greatness is the longevity of impact. Most recently she won US Open in 2013 full 14 years after she won her first Grand Slam in 1999 but if you look at Graf and Navratilova they won Grand Slams 12 years apart and faded in rankings in later stages of their career. Serena is currently number one in rankings and more importantly has more than 2300 points lead over nearest rival Li Na. As far as one could think Serena has never had a serious challenger, there were Justine Henin, Kim Cljsters and more recently Maria Sharapova but combined they have won 16 Grand Slams, compare it with Serena who has 17 Grand Slams alone, this speaks volume about her hegemony. The status quo is unlikely to change in the near future because excluding her other players in top 10 have won only 10 Grand Slams combined together.
If one goes by sheer numbers it would be hard to overlook Graf, Navratilova and Court but the game is much more than just numbers. Serena has shown no apparent decline and she has time on her hands to rack up the numbers of her predecessors. But one thing that goes against Serena is that she has hardly been challenged and she needs more epic matches that would cement her place as the greatest women tennis player. All said and done the ultimate greatest is a subjective thing but one thing we can all agree upon is that Serena is undoubtedly one of the greatest tennis players to embrace the court.