That tennis match was longer than my...

...road to maturity?

I know I've been slacking, so here's my effort to catch up on another thing I missed. In case you missed it, possibly because you live under a rock or because you were in a basement somewhere playing World of Warcraft, John Isner of the United States and Nicolas Mahut of France played the world's longest professional tennis match on record this past Wimbeldon. The final score was 6-4/3-6/6-7/7-6/70-68 for the American.

For those of you wondering, that is not a typo. They played a 5th set with a total of 138 games. The match lasted over 11 hours and had to be played over three days due to poor visibility at night and scheduling issues.

Let's assume the final set ended 8-6, as a normal set might have ended (mind you even that would have been a long game). This means that the match would have lasted 59 games total. In reality it lasted 183 games. I am now going to put the length of that game into perspective for you by comparing it to other things.

Baseball - a game that goes on for roughly 28 innings: ok, games have gone that long in basebal fare more frequently that in tennis, but that's because in tennis every point has a winner. In baseball, an inning can go 0-0 and then the teams just play another inning. I'd like to point out that at least in New York, they stop selling beer at the seventh inning. All of a sudden, baseball just got VERY boring.

NASCAR - 1500 laps at the Daytona 500, or roughly 9 hours of going around in a circle (oval) plus the additional pit stops it would take. I can hardly think of anything more boring than NASCAR to watch, and frankly, the only benefit of such a long race is that since they cut out the race itself and show only the crashes in the highlights, there would be more crashes to watch!

Soccer - 4 hours and 30 minutes of soccer, with only three substitutions allowed: Many players get tired before the full 90 minutes... In a match that long I'm pretty sure the French would demand overtime pay or stop playing.

Ironman triathlon - 421 miles combined of swimming, cycling, and running: this is roughly 10% more than the distance from New York to Boston and back. Imagine how much your balls and nipples would hurt after that???

Boxing - 36 rounds of Boxing! In the 1980s the max number of rounds in professional boxing was reduced from 15 to 12 because someone actually died in the ring. Could you imagine a fight that went on for almost two hours? Finally, pay per view is worth it.

Mo out.