TO: Tennis Magazine • SUBJECT: Isner-Mahut record • FROM: Craig Karseno, Carrollton, TX
Q: Do you think the record for the longest match set last Wimbledon by John Isner and Nicolas Mahut has a chance of ever being broken?
Pete Sampras: There’s no way we’ll ever see a score like that again. I know from my own experience (and from being across the net at Wimbledon from one of the most deadly servers of all time, lefty Goran Ivanisevic) that you can hold serve for what might seem like an eternity. You can go 10, 12, 18 service games without being broken, but eventually—long, long before that now-mythic 70th game—something gives.
Inevitably, you blink. You lose concentration for a moment. Your toss on a second serve goes a little off and you hit a double fault. Then the other guy spears a lucky return—maybe it comes off his frame but, whatever the case, there you are, down 0-30 and at that point it’s pretty easy to get broken. To serve your way out of those kinds of situations the way both Isner and Mahut repeatedly did at Wimbledon strains the imagination. But it happened. We all saw it.
There’s not much point in seeking technical reasons or strategic reasons for how something like 70-68 could happen. Isner may not be one of the best returners on the tour (if he were, he might have found a way to break) and Mahut may have consistency issues (they might have enabled Isner to break). But none of that really mattered. This was one of those days when, by some quirk of fate, the two men got to the point where they fell into something like a trance. There was an eerie rhythm to it, and the longer it went, the more unlikely it seemed that either man could break.
I’ve been in that trance-like state myself at Wimbledon, but it never lasted anything like that long. And I can’t believe it ever will, for anyone, ever again.
This article was published in the July/August 2011 issue of TENNIS.