Something remarkable has been happening for over an entire day now in the world of tennis. That's right, tennis. The sport doesn't get much face time on this blog. Maybe it would if there were any good American players. Or if it was discovered that an American player had slept with hundreds of women includes porn stars, prostitutes and men (allegedly). However, when a tennis match in Wimbledon is tied at 59-59 in the 5th set and has been suspended TWICE for darkness, now that is something to write about.
American John Isner and Frenchman Nicolas Mahut are in fact tied at 59-59 in the 5th set of their first round Wimbledon match. The match has lasted over 10 hours. Isner has a new record 98 aces and Mahut has 96 aces. The match will continue tomorrow and who knows how much longer.
To try to put that into perspective, let's compare it to a baseball game, since baseball is one of the only sports that can go on as long as necessary. There are 9 innings in baseball. In a typical tennis match there is about 45 games (typical is 4 sets ~11 total games per set). So far there has been 163 games in the match. That's 3.6 times the length of a typical tennis match. Which would be equivalent to a 32 inning baseball game! If you're wondering, the longest baseball game ever played was 26 innings in 1920 between the Brooklyn Dodgers and Boston Braves which ironically was called a tie due to darkness since they didn't have lights then.
The match will resume at 10:30am EST tomorrow.
Greg "dudes must be in shape" R.
No comments:
Post a Comment