They played 11 hours 5 minutes and the scoreboard gave up

Court 18 at Wimbledon hosted, on 22 June 2010, the longest match in the history of tennis: eleven hours and five minutes spread over three days, with an electronic scoreboard that jammed halfway through the fifth set. On it were John Isner, an American of 2.08 metres seeded twenty-third, and Nicolas Mahut, a Frenchman who had needed three qualifying rounds just to get into the draw. It was the first round. On paper, a two-hour formality.

That evening play was suspended for bad light at two sets all: 6-4, 3-6, 6-7 and 7-6. The fifth had not even started. Wimbledon had no tie-break in the deciding set back then: you won the fifth by two clear games, with no ceiling. If it took forty games, it took forty.

On the 23rd they came back to Court 18 in the early afternoon and played the fifth set in one sitting: seven hours and six minutes without either man dropping serve. The light went again with the score at 59-59.

Halfway through that second day something happened that no rulebook had foreseen. At 47-47 the electronic scoreboard IBM had installed on the court stopped advancing and stuck on that number. The program keeping the score stored the number of games in each set in a space designed for ordinary matches, and once the count overflowed it simply stopped displaying anything. The system had to be restarted and the score typed back in by hand so the crowd could see where the match stood. The chair umpire kept calling the score out loud; it took a few minutes for the board to agree with him again.

On 24 June, the third day, it lasted barely an hour. Mahut served at 68-69 down, Isner sent a backhand hugging the line that the Frenchman never reached, and at 4.47 in the afternoon it was over: 70-68.

The numbers do not resemble any other match. One hundred and eighty-three games, when a long five-setter runs to about fifty. The fifth set alone lasted eight hours and eleven minutes, longer than any complete match played before or since. Isner served 113 aces and Mahut 103: more than two hundred between them, when the previous record for a match stood at 78. Mahut won 502 points and Isner 478, which means the loser won twenty-four more points than the winner.

The next day Isner had to play the second round against the Dutchman Thiemo de Bakker. He lost 0-6, 3-6, 2-6 in seventy-four minutes, roughly what it had taken him to win the last four games of the day before.

The All England Club, which runs Wimbledon, put a plaque beside Court 18 with the score and both names, and the organisers of the four majors began saying the same thing: you cannot plan a draw if a first-round match can eat three days of court time. Wimbledon introduced a deciding-set tie-break in 2019, played at 12-12. Since 2022 all four majors play a ten-point tie-break as soon as the final set reaches 6-6.

Under today's rule, that fifth set would have ended in the thirteenth game. They played one hundred and thirty-eight.