Ash Barty is on the Hall of Fame ballot: The case for the champion who left at No. 1

Ash Barty is on the ballot for the International Tennis Hall of Fame's Class of 2027, and her case rests on a question that few players pose: what counts more, the length of a career or how much happened in it? Barty won three Grand Slam singles titles on three different surfaces, spent 121 weeks as world No. 1 and retired in March 2022 at 25, two months after winning the Australian Open.

She is one of three players on the 2027 player ballot, with Svetlana Kuznetsova and Juan Martín del Potro, who were both on the ballot in 2026 and were not elected. Roger Federer was the only player elected that year. Fans can vote until October 25, and candidates need at least 75% of the combined total, which includes bonus points for the three players with the most fan votes. The full class will be announced later this fall.

By 2014, Barty was 18 and already a familiar name. She had won the Wimbledon girls' title at 15, and in 2013 she had reached three Grand Slam doubles finals with Casey Dellacqua, losing all three. But in singles she was ranked outside the top 200, and after the 2014 US Open she announced she was taking a break from professional tennis. She said later that she wanted to experience some normal teenage life, and that the sport had come too much, too fast, since she had been traveling from a young age.

What she did next is one of the strangest detours in modern tennis. After meeting members of the Australian women's cricket team, she asked Queensland Cricket how to get involved, despite having no competitive experience. In her second game for a local club she scored 63 off 60 balls, and in December 2015 she made her debut for the Brisbane Heat in the inaugural Women's Big Bash League, hitting 39 off 27 balls with a six against the Melbourne Stars. She was also the top scorer in her club's grand final win.

In February 2016, nearly 17 months after leaving the tour, she announced her return. She began with doubles at ITF level, winning three of her first five events, then came back in singles in late May and reached the Nottingham quarterfinals. A stress injury in her arm limited the rest of her year. But the player who returned had a different relationship with the game, and the climb that followed was quick.

The 2017 season was the first sign. Barty received a wildcard into the Austrlaina Open and reached third round. Two months later, she entered the Malaysian Open as a qualifier and won both the singles and doubles titles, which took her into the top 100 for the first time. In Wuhan she reached her first Premier 5 final by beating three top-10 players, Johanna Konta, Karolína Pliskova and Jeļena Ostapenko, and lost to Caroline Garcia after serving for the match twice.

Doubles carried her through 2018. With CoCo Vandeweghe she won the US Open, coming back after losing the first set and saving a third championship point in the final tiebreak, in what became the first Grand Slam women's doubles final ever decided by a third-set tiebreak. At the end of the year she won the Elite Trophy, then the biggest singles title of her career.

Then came 2019. She won Miami, beating Kvitova and Pliskova on the way, and entered the top 10. At Roland Garros she dropped four games in the final against Marketa Vondrousova, and a week later she won Birmingham to become world No. 1, the second Australian woman to do so, after Evonne Goolagong Cawley in 1976.

Barty's three singles majors came on three different surfaces, and she won all three finals. The Wimbledon win in 2021 made her the first Australian woman to win the title since Goolagong in 1980, and the first top seed to do so since Serena Williams in 2016. The Australian Open in 2022 was her third and last, and the first for an Australian woman at home since Chris O'Neil in 1978. She was the eighth woman to win majors on three different surfaces.

Between those majors she also won the 2019 WTA Finals, beating Elina Svitolina 6-4, 6-3 for a $4.42 million prize, the largest paid at a single tournament in tennis history at the time. She won five titles in 2021 and was 10-0 against top-10 opponents between the 2019 Finals and Stuttgart in 2021. From 2019 to early 2022 she won 21 matches against top-10 players, more than any other woman.

Her time at the top is the most concrete part of her case. She first reached No. 1 on June 24, 2019, lost it to Naomi Osaka for a few weeks that August, then regained it on September 9, 2019 and held it for 114 consecutive weeks, the fourth-longest streak in WTA history behind Steffi Graf and Serena Williams (186 each) and Martina Navratilova (156).

She finished 2019, 2020 and 2021 as the year-end No. 1, becoming the fifth woman to do it three years in a row, after Chris Evert, Navratilova, Graf and Serena.

The count, though, comes with an asterisk. The WTA froze the rankings from March 23 to August 9, 2020 because of the pandemic, and those 20 weeks did not add to Barty's total.

She was No. 1 during that period but did not play after February 2020 until the Yarra Valley Classic a year later, an 11-month hiatus, skipping the US Open and the French Open that year. Counting those 20 weeks would give her 141 in total, enough for seventh place all time, ahead of Iga Swiatek's 125. As it stands, she is eighth.

Barty's final act was perhaps her most dominant. She began 2022 by winning Adelaide, beating Coco Gauff, Sofia Kenin, defending champion Swiatek and Elena Rybakina, and she also won the doubles title with Storm Sanders. At the Australian Open she did not drop a set across seven matches and lost only one service game, beating Danielle Collins in the final. She was 11-0 for the year, had won 22 straight sets, and had won 25 of her last 26 matches.

On March 23, in an interview with Dellacqua, she said she no longer had the physical drive or emotional want to compete at the top, and summed it up in two words: "I am spent." She later explained that after winning Wimbledon, the one dream she had in tennis, she began to lose her motivation. With Justine Henin, she is one of only two women to retire as the reigning No. 1, and both were 25.

The ballot sets two very different kinds of résumés side by side. Del Potro won 22 titles, the 2009 US Open, a Davis Cup in 2016 and an Olympic silver medal. Kuznetsova won 18 singles titles, two singles majors and two doubles majors, and reached No. 2. Both had longer careers and more trophies. Barty has more singles majors than either, a year-end No. 1 and a spell at the top that neither of them ever had.

The case against her is as simple as the case for her. Fifteen singles titles is a modest total, and her prime lasted about four seasons. She also never went past the fourth round at the US Open, and she missed parts of 2020 and 2021 through the pandemic. But the Hall of Fame has never been just about length, and Barty won majors on three surfaces, finished three straight years at No. 1 and left on her own terms, while still the best player in the world.

The result will come down to which of those two arguments the voters find more persuasive and whether that persuasion can reach 75%. Fan voting closes on October 25, and the full class will be announced later this fall.