(dramatic music)
- [Narrator] It's June 24th, 2010.
On Court 18 at the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club,
Nicolas Mahut is serving to John Isner,
who can win the match with this point
and complete an absolute tennis ultra-marathon.
This is not the championship.
It's not even a quarterfinal match.
This is the first round of the tournament
and the score is 6-4, 3-6, 6-7, 7-6, 69-68.
To understand how one set of tennis can take 137 games,
we need to rewind.
Like, a lot.
So let's start with the obvious.
69 games to 68 is an unfathomable score for a tennis set.
That's more games than Roger Federer played
in the first four rounds of last year's Wimbledon.
But what those games really mean is a boatload of time.
This set alone has already taken over eight hours
and the match has exceeded 11.
The first two sets, which took place two days before this,
were positively brisk.
Both featured something we haven't seen since:
a game won by the returner and not the server.
This is what's known as breaking your opponent's serve
and it's a key turning point
in most high-level tennis matches.
The basic strategy boils down to this:
To win, you need to break your opponent's serve
more often than they break yours.
But the margins to accomplish that can be very, very narrow.
Most of the best pros have nearly unbeatable service games.
They also lose more return games than they win,
and it's not particularly close.
Isner and Mahut both fit squarely into that pattern.
When they're serving,
they're almost certain to win the game.
When they're returning,
they're just about as certain to lose it.
Despite that statistical similarity,
these two players have come to this moment
from very different paths.
Nicolas Mahut has been a pro for a while,
but he's kind of the tennis version of a working actor.
He's barely ranked in the top 150,
he's never won an ATP singles tournament,
and he needed to survive a qualifier
just to get a spot in this Wimbledon draw.
That said, he's had some success here before.
In 2000, he won the Boys' Singles tournament and in 2006,
he made it to the third round
where he put up a pretty good fight
against eventual champ Roger Federer.
Or at least as good of a fight as most players could manage
against Fed at the peak of his powers.
While he's kind of on the fringes as a singles player,
Mahut's shown lots of promise as a doubles partner
where his serve and volley game
has led to several deep Grand Slam runs.
John Isner, on the other hand,
is a newer face enjoying a career ascent.
Earlier this year, he won his first ATP title in New Zealand
and in the three slams before this tournament,
Isner advanced to the third round or deeper,
including wins over highly-ranked opponents
Gael Monfils and Andy Roddick.
Sure, Isner is not one of the favorites
to win Wimbledon or anything,
but he's an interesting threat thanks to his serve.
In 2009, he ranked second in aces per match,
including 38 in that win over Roddick.
Isner's height, a staggering six-foot-10
helps him dominate on serve.
It also limits his agility as a returner.
So we've got two tall guys -
Mahut is no slouch at six-three -
who thrive on serves and serves alone.
Isner broke Mahut in the first set.
Mahut returned the favor in the second.
Question: What if they just stop
breaking each other's serve?
That was the case in sets three and four.
See those fun parenthetical scores?
Those indicate that the set was decided by a tiebreaker,
a tennis overtime mini game of sorts
when a set is tied 6-6.
One player starts the tiebreaker serving one point,
and then both players alternate serving
two points at a time until somebody,
A) has at least seven points,
and B) is ahead by at least two points.
Thus, Mahut won the first tiebreaker nine points to seven,
and Isner won the second seven points to three.
This is where we should stop and acknowledge
that tennis scoring is unique.
In men's majors, you need to win three sets to win a match.
To win a set, you need to win six games.
But you have to win a set by two games.
6-5 won't do it.
And, to win a game, you have to get four points.
The same rule applies where you can't win by one point.
Tennis is obsessed with winning by two.
The tiebreaker doesn't abandon the win-by-two mentality
but it does lower the difficulty level.
Instead of winning a set by two games,
you now just need to win it by two points.
But the tiebreaker has not always been a part of tennis,
which means we gotta rewind to a first-round match
at Wimbledon that took place more than a decade
before Mahut or Isner were even born.
In 1969, Pancho Gonzales beat Charlie Pasarell
in a first-round match with a score
that sounds like a local lottery drawing:
22-24, 1-6, 16-14, 6-3, 11-9.
At more than five hours of play across two days,
this set a record at the time for the longest match
ever played at Wimbledon.
Long sets were not terribly rare before the tiebreaker.
Beyond this match, the first round of this Wimbledon alone
had a few 11-9s, a couple 14-12s, a 16-14, and a 22-20.
That didn't always make for an enjoyable
fan experience though,
especially as tennis started to explore its TV options.
Enter Jimmy Van Alen, a Rhode Island blue blood
from the Astor and Vanderbilt family trees.
In 1958, he introduced a total revamp of tennis scoring
called the Van Alen Simplified Scoring System.
Most of it never made it into mainstream tennis,
but one important aspect did, eventually: the tiebreak.
A little over a year after the Gonzalez-Pasarell epic,
the U.S. Open became the first major
to adopt this significant change.
The difference was immediately noticeable.
A men's singles match in the first round
of the 1969 U.S. Open without the tiebreak
took an average of 36 games.
In 1970, that number dropped to 25 games per match.
Over the next few years, the other Slams,
including Wimbledon, all followed suit.
Had that Gonzalez-Pasarell match taken place
five years later, the score would've been something like
6-7, 1-6, 7-6, 6-3, 11-9.
Wait. What's that 11-9 still doing there?
Well, the U.S. Open went all in on the tiebreaker,
letting them decide any set that got to 6-6.
The other Grand Slams weren't as willing
to abandon tradition that fully, however,
so they took a middle road.
Tiebreakers were fine for most of a match,
but not in a set that could decide the outcome.
Things moved faster, though occasionally,
you'd still get a 10-8 set at the end of a match.
No big deal, right?
Just a few extra games--
Oh, whoops.
Even with tiebreakers, this match stretched.
The first four sets took three hours on day one
with officials suspending play after the fourth set
due to darkness.
But thanks to Wimbledon's allergy to the tiebreak
in this final set, Isner and Mahut
played an entire second day of tennis
and are back out here for a third.
Things became a spectacle.
At 47-47, the scoreboard just stopped working.
- [Announcer] I mean, even the scoreboard's given up now.
(laughing)
It says 47-all, but it's actually 48-all at the moment.
- [Narrator] Andy Roddick took it upon himself
to serve as Isner's personal nutritionist.
Several other players were asked about the ongoing saga
during their press availability, including Roger Federer,
who said he didn't know whether to cry or laugh.
Federer and Roddick had some idea
what Mahut and Isner were experiencing, too,
after facing off in the 2009 Men's final.
Like this match, service breaks were hard to come by.
Like this match, tiebreaks settled two of the sets.
And like this match, it came down to
a no-tiebreak fifth set.
Unlike this match, Federer-Roddick ended
on the same day it started,
with Fed claiming the decisive set 16-14.
At the time, that seemed like a lot of tennis.
Federer only clinched the championship
when he finally broke Roddick's serve, his signature weapon,
for the first time in the last game of the match.
The problem for Isner and Mahut?
Neither can break the other,
though Isner's had - and squandered - some chances to end this.
Way back at 9-10 in the fifth,
Mahut double-faulted twice in a row
to give Isner a 30-40 match point.
One easy way to break a dominant server
is to wait for him to just start missing.
But one screaming Mahut ace up the middle later,
that opportunity was gone.
Up 33-32, Isner got to double match point
needing to just win one of the next two points.
Mahut won the first by forcing Isner
into an off-balance shot that set up an easy volley
for the doubles specialist.
And on the second, Mahut bombed another serve
that Isner couldn't return cleanly.
Right before the end of day two,
Mahut double faulted his way
into Isner's fourth match point.
And determined to keep this endless tennis loop intact,
Mahut aced his way back to safety.
Maybe Mahut just loves marathons.
Nine days before this, he won a qualifying match
that took 46 games in the final set.
Time and time again, he's dodged defeat to keep this going,
well beyond what anyone thought
a long tennis match looked like.
And each time, Wimbledon tradition
offered him the same reward: more tennis.
This only ends when either Mahut or Isner
does something they haven't done in 168 straight games:
break the other's serve.
Otherwise, they'll just do this forever,
locked in an endless dance with one another.
They've already played 11 hours of tennis.
Isner can end it now or Mahut can keep the music going.
Welcome to a moment in history.
(ball thwacking)
(grunting)
(crowd cheering)
- [Announcer] Isner, three sets to two.
6-4, 3-6.
7-6, 6-7.
70-68.
(TV clicking)
(instrumental fanfare)
(dramatic music)
- [Narrator] In the first round of Wimbledon
the following year, Isner and Mahut got matched up
against one another again,
but Isner won in three sets because remakes
are almost always inferior to the original.
Check out one of our other tennis videos,
and thanks again for watching.