In Praise of the Journeyman

This afternoon in Flushing Meadows, Queens, 25 year-old American Michael Mmoh beat countryman John Isner in a five-set battle to advance to the third round of the 2023 U.S. Open. Mmoh won the match by taking a final-set tiebreaker, 10-7.

That breaker must've felt like a millisecond and an eternity all at once for Isner. 

An eternity, because the 38 year-old announced before the tournament that this Open would be his last professional tournament. One can imagine that Isner spent the 17 points in the tiebreak against Mmoh replaying his entire career on a reel that passed before his eyes. If one's a romantic. And this one is.

A millisecond, because Isner won the longest match in the history of professional tennis way back in 2010, and those 17 points represent a mere 1.7% of the 980 points in that epic. The 6'10" Greensboro native and Georgia Bulldog was the 23rd seed at Wimbledon that year, and took on French qualified Nicolas Mahut in the first round in London. The match started at 6:13 pm local time on a Tuesday.

The pair split the first two sets, each breaking the other once. Those breaks would be the last until the final game of the match. Mahut won the third set in a tiebreaker (9-7), then Isner returned serve by winning the fourth set, 7-3 in a tiebreak. The match was halted due to darkness.

At the time, Wimbledon did not play tiebreakers in the fifth set, meaning that the players competed until one led by two games. I vividly remember the 1980 Wimbledon final between John McEnroe and Bjorn Borg, where Johnny Mac took the fourth set with an 18-16 tiebreaker win before the Swede won the fifth and deciding set, 8-6. I thought that was a grueling match.

Isner and Mahut whaled away on each other for a good portion of that next day, with the American holding his serve each time and forcing the Frenchman to do the same to stay alive. Isner had four match points (at 10-9, 33-32 (twice), and 59-58), and Mahut fought them all off. The match official suspended play for the evening with the match square at 59.

The players returned to the court on Thursday, June 24, two days after the match started. They each won nine more games before Isner finally, finally broke Mahut and won the deciding set, 70-68. The match took a total of 11 hours and five minutes, nearly five hours longer than the second-longest tournament match in history (which also featured Isner, who lost in five sets over six hours and 36 minutes to South African Kevin Anderson in the 2018 Wimbledon semis - this one only went 26-24 in the final set). For the record, there were two Davis Cup matches that lasted longer than the Isner/Anderson match, but that's nitpicking.

In the years since Isner's win over Mahut, all four majors changed their rules, with all now deciding the fifth set (third for women) in a first-to-ten-point tiebreaker. We'll never see another match like Isner/Mahut.

And after today, we'll never see John Isner in a professional tennis match. At first a curiosity because of his height, he fashioned an outstanding career far below the radar of the casual sports fan. Isner won 16 professional singles tournaments over his career adding another eight doubles titles. He reached the 2018 semifinals at Wimbledon (reaching a career-best ranking of #8 in the world after that event) and a pair of U.S. Open quarterfinals. I called him a journeyman in the headling of this post before I started researching his career more deeply, but the dude won more than $22 million in prize money, ranking him 21st all time in that category.

John Isner was far more than a journeyman. May the wind be at his back, and the ice be upon his heavily-taxed right shoulder.