Thursday, June 24, 2010
70-68.
That’s not tennis. That’s an arena football score.
But on Court 18 of the All England Club at Wimbledon, such comparisons — a six-overtime Stanley Cup playoff here, a 12-day cricket test match there — have been the only currency with which one could trade opinions and observations, because what transpired there this week between the American John Isner and the Frenchman Nicolas Mahut stopped feeling like tennis as we know it sometime Wednesday, even before the scoreboard shat the bed at 47-47 in the fifth set and people started tracking statistics on dry-erase boards and writing on their forearms.
The scoreboard quit. Isner and Mahut did not. Their fifth set alone stretched on past the eight-hour mark; the previous record for an entire tennis match was 6 hours, 33 minutes at Roland Garros in 2004.
Somewhere around, say, Game 110 of that fifth set, ESPN studio analyst Brad Gilbert compared the spectacle to a baseball game in its 34th inning with both starting pitchers still on the mound. Baseball, though — like the aforementioned hockey and cricket — is a team sport, a game played by nine, and one with a lot of standing and waiting, a lot of down time and mincing around between pitches and innings.
It wasn’t until Thursday that analyst Patrick McEnroe arrived at the more apt comparison: a no-limit bare-knuckle prize fight.
Our friend the Internet informs me that the longest boxing match of the Queensberry Rules era was contested in New Orleans in April 1893: Andy Bowen and Jack Burke fought for the vacant lightweight title in a bout that lasted 110 rounds, or 7 hours, 19 minutes, counting the one-minute breaks between rounds — still shorter than Isner and Mahut’s fifth set, though certainly more punishing. That fight was ruled “no contest” when the bell rang for the 111th round and neither man had enough strength, will or wits to come out of his corner.
That’s more like it.
Erase from your mind the simplification that tennis is a sport in which men in white shorts trade volleys over a net on a grass court. Picture instead Mahut seated during breaks with towels draped over both his lap and his shoulders, hunched like a fighter taking instructions from an unseen corner man.
If we must think outside tennis to draw a more apt comparison, then we must also throw out our timeworn adjectives — classic, legendary, historic; even epic has become trite and tired in modern sports parlance — and go scouting about for new ones to describe the dynamic battle of wills between Isner and Mahut. At one point Wednesday, ESPN’s McEnroe declared the effort to be “herculean.” I would add to that assessment Sisyphean and Homeric.
When after the second stoppage due to darkness Wednesday evening, deadlocked at 59-59, Isner remarked, “Nothing like this will ever happen again. Ever,” he wasn’t just slapping History in the face. He was bashing it upside its head with its own hourglass and throwing it down a flight of stairs. If anybody deserves the right to say never with impunity, it’s these two guys.
Just last year at Wimbledon, American Andy Roddick became a sentimental crowd favorite and eventually a sympathetic hero when he challenged Roger Federer, then ranked No. 2 in the world and argued by many to be the greatest ever, in a classic 77-game final whose fifth set was fought tooth-and-nail to a now quaint-by-comparison 16-14 conclusion and a sixth Wimbledon title for Federer.
With all due respect, Roddick has nothing on the solemn grace of Nicolas Mahut.
When the end finally arrived, with a backhand up the line out of the Frenchman’s range, the victorious Isner afforded himself only a moment’s elation before trotting to the net to embrace Mahut. After they strode off the court, Mahut afforded himself only a moment’s rest and reflection before quietly gathering up his gear and attempting to exit an arena and a spotlight that finally, under the ordinary circumstances of mere mortals, would have belonged to Isner.
But Mahut was collared before he even stepped off the grass and brought back for a seemingly hastily assembled midcourt ceremony at which the hackneyed phrase “They are both winners today” was dragged out of mothballs once more. It was then announced that the All England Club had “decided” to honor the two men and the chair umpire with “a special memento” marking the occasion.
A special memento, you say?
Let’s recap:
Isner defeated Mahut on the fifth match point out of 980 points contested — 6-4, 3-6, 6-7, 7-6, 70-68.
The match spanned 183 games (roughly equivalent to four regular matches), lasting 11 hours, 5 minutes, over three days of competition. It was postponed twice on account of darkness.
The men combined for a record 215 service aces, with each shattering the previously held single-match record of 78. Isner won the edge (112-103) and stands atop the record book, though, with Mahut playing Sosa to his McGwire.
I came late to this party. It was already 52-51 in the fifth set before I arrived, and before midday Wednesday, I had never heard of either of these guys. Isner and Mahut could just as easily have been two random names I pointed to in a phone book while blindfolded.
But now, after watching only 35 games of that fifth set and waking at 4 a.m. Thursday (without cause, it turned out) to ensure that I didn’t miss the match’s conclusion, I’m personally invested in these men, and I have a list of demands to present on their behalf:
- Any box of Wheaties on which John Isner and Nicolas Mahut appear together is a box of Wheaties I will purchase and eat. That’s a no-brainer.
- If Sports Illustrated doesn’t unanimously declare Isner and Mahut its Sportsmen of the Year at the end of 2010, I may not pick up an issue of that sorry rag ever again. You simply cannot persuade me that anybody this year has accomplished or will in the next six months accomplish anything of this magnitude in the entire world of sports, nor do so in a truer spirit of sportsmanship than these two men have done.
In an era in sports that has grown cynical, corrupt, fueled by self-aggrandizing egos, and driven by bottom-line greed, Isner and Mahut have demonstrated that it is still possible to find rare moments of grace, dignity and the purity of competition. If SI won’t acknowledge that, then I will no longer acknowledge SI. - Its “special mementos” notwithstanding, the All England Club at Wimbledon needs to step up most of all.
First, the club should formally rename Court 18 after Isner and Mahut. Henceforth, then, there’d be Centre Court, courts 1 through 17, the Isner-Mahut Court, then Court 19. Listen: If Arthur Ashe can have center court in Flushing, Queens, named in honor of his life and achievements, then surely this pair deserves to have their names forever appended to some dinky outlying stadium on which they only waged the most ridiculously tenacious battle in tennis history.
Second, and most important, there should be a permanent monument along the center-line wall opposite the umpire’s chair. And I’m not talking some dainty little 12-by-16-inch bronze commemorative plaque affixed to the wall. The club needs to take its inspiration from Cooperstown or from Monument Valley at Yankee Stadium — a product of hammer and chisel and fiery forge, faces raised in bas relief like figures from antiquity.
The monument should be a feature of the landscape, a fixed point in the peripheral vision of every low-ranked qualifier who competes there, a constant reminder to them that once upon a time, two other relative unknowns walked onto the grass of Court 18, rendered it a groundskeeper’s nightmare, and strode off it three days later as giants among men.
