Look. I’m not going to pretend that I watch tennis or anything, but of course I ended up streaming the ridiculousness of today’s portion of the Isner-Mahut match online. And of course now I’m reading about how there are no words and that we’ve never seen anything like this before and never will again…
No shit. It’s completely unbelievable. It’s awesome in the most literal sense. It’s the kind of thing I used to read about in the single most important book from my childhood: The Giant Book of Strange But True Sports Stories.
A fifth set that goes 118 games before the match gets called on account of darkness for the second time is exactly the kind of stuff I devoured as a kid, along with stories of baseballs being caught after being dropped from the top of skyscraper, a soccer player (I think) being traded for a bag of balls, and a guy throwing his bat in the air after what he thought was a bad called third strike, only to have the umpire threaten him that if the bat hit the ground he’d be ejected and fined. I mostly remember the drawing for that last one – the goofy looking hitter goes running after the bat like a Keystone Kop trying to catch a baby thrown from a burning building – and it makes me wish I could see what the folks at Strange But True would do with a 6’9″ frat-boy in a backwards hat who has 98 aces going into Day Three.
Seriously, the only way I can wrap my ahead around this match is to pretend that it’s something I read about while I was taking a dump as a kid. If you had told me some match went on for three days, I would have assumed that Big Bill Tilden was involved and that both athletes had been wearing v-neck sweaters. Because that’s when weird shit like this happened: way back in the day.
Here, Bill demonstrates the proper way to surrender your masculinity.
And now here we are in the thick of it for real, and all I can think about is how much I wish I still had my copy of that book.
