The Stat Sheet: Federer joins 100-titles club

Roger Federer became a member of a rather exclusive club with his eighth title in Dubai as he joined Jimmy Connors, Martina Navratilova, Chris Evert and Steffi Graf as the only players in the Open Era to win 100 singles titles.

And like those legends of the sport, it didn’t take the Swiss superstar long to go from double to triple digits in his championship ledger.

Federer pulled off the feat in his fourth tournament, only one off Connors’ pace among men set back in 1983. Last fall, Federer claimed No. 99 at a venue that could’ve been the perfect storybook setting—if it would have been 100—in Basel at the Swiss Indoors, where he once served as a ball boy.

Federer missed his opportunity to hit that magic number in his last two tournaments of 2018. And at the Australian Open this year, where he was the two-time defending champion, the Swiss fell to Stefanos Tsitsipas in the fourth round.

Playing in his first final since hitting 99, Federer was able to exact his revenge against Greece’s best-ever player in the Dubai championship match. Graf, Navratilova, Connors and Evert also took advantage of their next final-round appearances.

Navratilova and Evert, the all-time singles title leaders, both went a few months before reaching the century mark, as did Connors, who capped off his big moment at the place that defined him throughout his career, the US Open, which he won for the fifth time in 1983. Evert also had a Grand Slam milestone of her own as she won her 99th at the 1980 US Open.

While a few months is comparatively short in the span of all that could happen on the tennis tours, that period of time pales in comparison to Graf’s feat: The German great pulled off a back-to-back major double as she won the French Open in 1996 for her 99th triumph and followed that up with the centennial at Wimbledon only a few weeks later.

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