The Match That Took Three Days

On 22 June 2010, two tennis players walked onto Court 18 at Wimbledon for a first-round match. One was the American John Isner, ranked 19th. The other was Nicolas Mahut of France, who had come through qualifying.

They finished on 24 June.

The first four sets produced a fifth set, and the fifth set at Wimbledon in 2010 was still played to a two-game margin — no tiebreak. Both men were serving at a level that made the margin nearly unreachable. Games went by without a single break point converted. Then sets' worth of games went by.

They played for seven hours in one day, until light failed at 59–59 in the fifth. They came back the next evening and played another hour before darkness again, at 68–68. On the third day they returned and finished it: 70–68, Isner winning, on a break of serve that ended the longest match in the history of the sport.

11 hours and 5 minutes. 183 games. 216 aces between them — Isner 113, Mahut 103, both records. Mahut hit 103 aces and lost.

The final set alone lasted 8 hours and 11 minutes — longer than any previous complete match.

The unglamorous detail is what it cost. Isner won, and effectively wrecked his tournament: he lost his next match in straight sets, visibly exhausted, and his career-long vulnerability to long matches and injuries dates partly from that week. He has said he'd rather have not played it. Mahut, who lost, became the more celebrated of the two for years afterwards.

The scoreboard on Court 18 broke. It could not display a fifth set at 70 games and was taken away and replaced.

It's worth noticing what the match actually was: not a display of variety, but two enormous servers in a statistical trap, neither able to find a break, both too deep in it to stop. Greatness and futility were, for three days, the same thing.