Sixty-six

Last March 10, two of the greatest tennis players of all time - Roger Federer and Pete Sampras - squared off in a best-of-three exhibition in Madison Square Garden. There have been lots of discussion as to who the greatest tennis player of all time is, and having both Roger and Pete battle it out on a tennis court drew massive interest from people, whether rabid tennis fans or not.

The exhibition went the distance and the winner had to be determined by a third set tie-break that went 8-6 in favor of the current #1. Obviously, there would be no answer to the best-of-all-time question because Pete was 10 years older than Roger, and frankly there are other players who are worthy of being called the greatest (such as the legendary Rod Laver). But the exhibition was a huge success, and with 26 Grand Slam titles between the two of them (Pete has 14, Roger currently has 12 but you can expect him to win more), you won't find any other tennis exhibition that could boast of as many Grand Slam titles.

That is, unless you go over to women's tennis and stage a Dream Match between Steffi Graf and Martina Navratilova. Which is exactly what happened in Tokyo on March 15, just 5 days later. Steffi and Martina teamed up with ex-Japanese #1 Kimiko Date to play their own "Dream Match" tennis exhibition on the other side of the world.

This exhibition was a lot more low-profile than Federer-Sampras, and I'm still surprised that there wasn't a lot of information shared about in the media, at least until the event was actually completed. Kimiko actually found her groove and beat both Steffi and Martina in their respective matches, but what most of the world must've been waiting for was the Steffi-Martina match.

These two ladies are arguably the best female tennis players ever (right up there with Chris Evert and Margaret Court, among others), and in fact are dead-even in their career head-to-head matches at 9-all. So it made perfect sense that their exhibition would follow in the footsteps of the Pete-Roger one. They played only one set, a Championship set which means that the first player to win 8 games wins. If they got to 7-all, they would play a tie-break that would be first to ten points. And amazingly enough, it did go to a tie-break, with Graf beating Navratilova by winning the final point with her trademark bazooka forehand that she hit for a winner.

Between these two ladies, you have 40 Grand Slam singles titles (Steffi has 22, Martina has 18). That's not even counting doubles titles (Martina, the most successful doubles player in history, has 31 doubles titles and 10 mixed doubles titles). So in that span of 5 days, four of the best tennis players - with sixty six Grand Slam singles titles combined - entertained the world with world-class tennis. If only the tennis gods can put all four of them together in a single event where they can all play tennis together...