When Isner beat Mahut 70-68 in the fifth: Wimbledon's 11-hour epic defies belief, a decade on

John Isner and Nicolas Mahut

Zsa Zsa Gabor's eighth marriage was a shorter-lived affair than John Isner and Nicolas Mahut's licentious congress at Wimbledon.

The queen of all socialites wed a Mexican count, Felipe de Alba, on April 13 1983, with their union annulled a day later when it emerged marriage number seven had not yet been quite annulled.

Yet Isner and Mahut spent three days in cahoots at the All England Club, their head-spinning 2010 match breaking record after record, and it all began on June 22, 2010.

Ten years on, and although the longest tennis match in history eventually did end, it stands to be an eternal marker of ultra-endurance.

'IT'S A BASKETBALL SCORE'

Like Max von Sydow's knight facing down Death over a chess board, Mahut eventually bowed, Isner unrelenting in his pursuit of the kill.

They spent 11 hours and five minutes in action, ace after ace, mental and physical torment, but the match spanned a full 46 hours and 34 minutes of the human race's existence.

It started inconspicuously at 6.13pm on the first Tuesday of the Wimbledon fortnight and ended as a globally recognised phenomenon at 4.47pm on the Thursday.

Isner sent exceptional forehand and backhand winners fizzing past Mahut in successive points to take the win, sensational trolling from the American given both men were physically beat on their feet.

The match is quaintly recorded in Wimbledon's official compendium thus: J.R. Isner (USA) bt. N.P.A. Mahut (FRA) 6-4 3-6 6-7 (7-9) 7-6 (7-3) 70-68

That final-set score will forever have the air of a misprint, and Isner admitted to feeling "delirious" when play was suspended due to fading light on the Wednesday evening, the contest poised at 59-59 in the decider.

"It's a basketball score," Isner later told ESPN. "It always reminds me of that. I'll never forget these two numbers for as long as I live."

CALL THE COPS

You could watch The NeverEnding Story seven times in 11 hours and five minutes.

In the playing time that it took Isner to break Mahut's resistance, and his heart, you could watch Rafael Nadal's victory over Roger Federer in their epic 2008 Wimbledon final twice over, and be almost halfway through a third viewing.

You could watch The Lord of the Rings trilogy and leave yourself an hour and 47 minutes to wonder why you just did that.

Or you could watch all seven films in the Police Academy franchise and have a spare hour and four minutes to ruminate on whether Mahoney had a heart of gold or a hollow soul.

In 46 hours and 34 minutes, you could indulge your own Mission To Moscow fantasy and drive from the All England Club to the Russian capital, enjoying a couple of short overnight stays on the way.

EVEN THE SCOREBOARD COULDN'T BELIEVE IT

The truth is that barely anybody was engaged with Isner versus Mahut for its entirety. Different days mean different crowds at Wimbledon.

Isner, the 23rd seed, and qualifier Mahut were assigned a late-afternoon Tuesday slot on Court 18, one of Wimbledon's smaller show courts but a hidden gem, and it was only on the Wednesday, when the fifth-set score kept nudging up, that media-room interest began to whip up.

By tea time on the second day, it was the longest match in Wimbledon history, then the longest in all grand slams, going beyond the six hours and 33 minutes Fabrice Santoro needed to beat Arnaud Clement in their 2004 French Open tussle.

The big serving of both players was cooking up never-before-seen numbers.

The scoreboard stalled at 47-47, technology's own expression of disbelief. And yet tennis' Fischer versus Spassky continued, a trial of temperament as much as talent. There was no Cold War element, just the question of which man would crack as the pressure ramped up.

On day four, the UK's Queen Elizabeth II made a rare visit to Wimbledon, albeit not to spend the day on Court 18.

RECORD AFTER RECORD

Come Thursday's denouement, Isner and Mahut had contested the most games in a grand slam match, with 183 toppling the previous record of 112.

They had played the most games in a set, with their 138 eviscerating anything in the record books, and until the dramatic finale they had played 168 consecutive games without a break of serve. The run of holds began early in the second set.

The fifth set alone, lasting eight hours and 11 minutes, was longer than any entire match ever played in professional tennis.

Isner hit a mind-boggling 113 aces across the piece and Mahut made 103, a miracle of athletic achievement.

Serious aesthetes may have found little to love except the drama, but sometimes drama and shows of lung-busting human willpower outweigh finesse on the sporting field.

WHAT HAPPENED NEXT?

Isner bombed out a day later, thumped 6-0 6-3 6-2 by Thiemo de Bakker, with the American a victim of his own first-round excesses, but the match against Mahut will never be forgotten.

A plaque on the wall outside Court 18 marks what occurred there, Wimbledon's equivalent of a Hollywood star as passers-by queue to be photographed next to the permanent record.

The introduction of a fifth-set tie-break at 12-12 by Wimbledon in 2019 means there is no prospect of another 70-68 these days in SW19.

Freakishly, Isner and Mahut were drawn together again a year later in Wimbledon's first round. Second time around, Isner needed just two hours and three minutes to record a straight-sets win.

There's no plaque to mark where that happened – it was Court Three, for the record – nor is the rematch spoken of in the bars and restaurants of Wimbledon Village.

They still talk reverentially of the 2010 occasion though, with 'Isner-Mahut' shorthand for the spectacular sporting stamina that tennis had never known the like of before and surely will never again.

As Isner said, moments after walking off court: "I guess it's something Nic and I will share forever really."

Cern hopes to start building £18bn Large Hadron Collider replacement that could smash particles together with vastly more force

CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, has set in motion plans to build a new 100-kilometer circular supercollider.

The Large Hadron Collider, by comparison, is 27 kilometers long.

It is currently being upgraded, and expected to restart again in May 2021 until 2024, before starting its final run in 2027.

The new machine, called the Future Circular Collider, would likely cost at least €21 billion. It is expected to be build in an underground location in Geneva by approximately 2038.

While final approval has not yet been given, CERN can take a more proactive approach in designing the collider, utilising resources otherwise allocated to alternative designs such as a linear eletron-positron collider or a muon accelerator, according to Nature.

Cern’s pursuit of the elusive god particle

The later stages of CERN’s development will be building an electron-positron collider to produce and study the Higgs boson.

That machine would then be dismantled and replaced with a proton smasher, which would search for new particles to complete or disprove our current understanding of physics.

By 2050, it could be smashing the particles together with approximately six times the force (100 teraelectronvolts) as the Large Hadron Collider.

“It’s probing nature at the shortest distances and looking for the smallest things we can see … it’s a real exploratory mission. Everyone agrees that’s what we need to do. The question has been: what’s the best machine to do it?” said Professor Jon Butterworth of University College London.

However, the plan is not universally approved in the physics community. Scientists have said that it is a high-risk, high-reward scenario with little guarantee of getting a return on investment.

“We’re talking about tens of billions. I just think there is not enough scientific potential in doing that kind of study right now,” Sabine Hossenfelder, a theoretical physicist at the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies in Germany, told The Guardian.

“On some level I find it irresponsible,” she said. “Why don’t we put the money into an international centre for climate models or pandemic models?”

Slavery's shameful legacy.

An illustration showing slaves on board a slave ship. When the British government abolished slavery in 1833, around 47,000 individuals were compensated for the 'property' they had lost

The debt was only paid back in 2015. Academics at University College London have created a database which tracks the slave-owners who benefited.

Many of them had links to or founded some of the UK's biggest companies including Greene King, P&O, RSA Insurance, Barclays and even the Bank of England.

The sums paid out are not to be sneezed at: Benjamin Greene, founder of the Greene King brewery and pubs chain, was granted nearly £500,000 in today's money when he surrendered rights to three plantations in the West Indies. 

Simon Fraser, one of the founder members of the Lloyd's of London insurance market, was given nearly £400,000 to surrender an estate in Dominica.

The Bank of England apologised for its part in the kidnapping and transportation of thousands of slaves, promising to remove portraits of those involved in this 'unacceptable part of English history'.

Greene King and Lloyd's of London were also quick to apologise for their past role in the slave trade after news of their links were published. 

They have offered to make amends for their slave legacy, saying they will fund projects to help black and other ethnic minorities. They are right to do so, and to have reacted so promptly.

Cynics might say they did so to avoid any damage done to the brand if those same protesters who have been pulling down statues of slave-owners were to boycott their pints or insurance services. 

That view seems unfair. Greene King's boss, Nick Mackenzie, sounded genuinely mortified by the brewery's 'inexcusable' past. 

More pertinently – and more importantly for future generations – he said the company's website would be updated to include the history of its slave-owner founder. 

Similar contrition has been shown by Lloyd's of London, and the insurer will also be contributing to charities. But the banks, which also have links to the slave trade – Lloyds, RBS, HSBC and Barclays – have yet to comment on the UCL report.

Many will question where this thirst for raking over history will take us. Should every company in Britain, which was in existence at the relevant time, go through its archive to see what lies buried?

There are all manner of skeletons they would prefer did not come rattling out of the cupboard. The fortunes of many of our Victorian ancestors were built on the labour of women and children in the workhouses of the industrial revolution. Should their relatives be compensated?

And what about recent transgressions?

The list of corporates with dodgy not-so-distant pasts is long: clothing giants that make their fortunes from sweat-factories in Asia, banks such as HSBC laundering money for Mexican drug lords, or Standard Chartered channelling funds for Hezbollah.

Should they pay back their victims – assuming they can be identified?

Will there be boycotts as there was of Barclays in the 1980s over apartheid in South Africa? What about buying oil from rich Middle Eastern states which didn't stop slavery until the 1960s? 

When people drive their Porsche, do they worry about the Nazi past of its founder? These are delicate issues. 

This is not a cop-out but one way for firms to look at the past is to identify whether there are direct victims, or heirs to those victims. If so, make reparations to them.

If Lloyd's and Greene King, now owned by Hong Kong's richest man Li Ka-Shing, want to give something back, that's good.

What is of more importance is that they spend their charity money wisely on those who are truly disadvantaged. 

The cash should go to help those who face barriers to opportunity because of race and because of deprivation. Otherwise, companies should apologise and move on.

Signs of a bounce

The Bank of England has moved quickly to pump an extra £100billion into the economy after April's shocking GDP numbers, the biggest one month drop on record.

Policymakers voted 8-1 to increase the size of the bond-buying programme but also to keep interest rates at a record low of 0.1 per cent.

It would be silly to be too cheerful but the Bank also said the latest demand numbers are not quite as 'negative' as expected. 

Translated into ordinary lingo, that sounds like the Brits have rediscovered shopping again and spending figures for May and June look better than could possibly be hoped for.

The Australian book you've finally got time for: The Middle Parts of Fortune by Frederic Manning

Soldiers climbing over their trench on the first day of the Battle of the Somme, 1 July, 1916.

Why hasn’t Anzackery’s ever-rising tide washed Frederic Manning and The Middle Parts of Fortune further up the Australian literary shore?

Every Father’s Day and every Christmas publishers search, with increasing desperation, for fresh presentations of the Australian Great War experience. On that basis, one might have expected a combat novel lauded by Ernest Hemingway, TS Eliot, Ezra Pound, TE Lawrence and other immortals to exert more of a cultural presence.

But while Frederic Manning “revivals” have been announced ever since the 1960s, the canon invoked during Anzac season still somehow begins and ends with Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves and, perhaps, Charles Bean.

The problem might be traced to Manning’s marked divergence from the rugged Digger archetype celebrated by Bean and his acolytes.

The son of a wealthy Sydney financier, Frederic was always delicate and bookish. At the age of just 15, his parents allowed him to depart for England with his much-older tutor, the Reverend Arthur Galton – a man who’d once moved in the same Oxford circles as Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas. Together, they moved into the tiny village of Lincolnshire, where they maintained an intense (but perhaps non-sexual) relationship that shaped the boy into a scholar-aesthete like his mentor.

Biographer Verna Coleman describes Manning as “the Last Exquisite”, both because of the delicacy of his prose and because of a brittleness that prevented him from capitalising on his early literary success. By 1928, his peers regarded Manning as talented but strangely old-fashioned: a chain-smoking, semi-alcoholic asthmatic with a bad back and poor digestion, more attuned to the aestheticism of the 1890s than contemporary modernism, and congenitally incapable of completing a major work.

But that year the publisher (and fellow veteran) Peter Davies urged Manning to write about his experiences on the Somme – and locked him in his apartment until he did so. Supposedly, Manning wrote his loosely-fictionalised account entirely without revision, with Davies forestalling procrastination by rushing each chapter from the typewriter straight to print.

The Middle Parts of Fortune appeared anonymously in a volume only available to subscribers, with a bowdlerised edition subsequently released to the public under the title Her Privates We (another reference to the bawdy passage in which Hamlet declares fortune “a strumpet”).

The problem was language: rather unexpectedly Manning, the fastidious aesthete, had reproduced the genuine wartime vocabulary instead of the euphemisms to which other (more obviously transgressive) novelists resorted.

As a result, today his book cuts through the distancing of time. We’re accustomed to thinking of our great-grandparents enduring the trenches with Edwardian stoicism. Manning’s characters, however, respond to gunfire and mud with F and C bombs, just as we would.

Yet in other ways The Middle Parts of Fortune also conveys the deep gulf between now and then.

It follows the experiences of a private called Bourne – an obvious surrogate for Manning – for a few months on the Somme and Ancre fronts.

Critics have praised the book for celebrating the ordinary soldier, largely because its protagonist stays in the ranks rather than accepting the commission to which his education suits him. Yet Manning portrays Bourne as more misfit than egalitarian, alienated from the English officers as an Australian who didn’t attend a public school, and separated from the other men by his erudition.

Indeed, isolation defines the war, an experience that, despite moments of camaraderie, every man endures in solitude.

“One by one,” Manning writes, “they realised that each must go alone, and that each of them already was alone with himself, helping the others perhaps, but looking at them with strange eyes, while the world became unreal and empty, and they moved in a mystery, where no help was.”

The highly strung, deeply repressed man [was] always slightly out of kilter with his era

It’s that profound atomisation, conveyed in Manning’s finely wrought prose, that makes the book’s brief and hallucinatory battle scenes so terrifying, with modern combat a sensory overload inflicted on the individual psyche.

Famously, Wilfred Owen describes his subject as “the pity of war”. Manning takes a very different approach.

“To call [war] a crime against mankind,” he says in his introduction, “is to miss at least half its significance; it is also the punishment of a crime.”

Where militarists like Ernst Jünger show the conflict redeeming men through violence, Manning sees wartime suffering as facilitating a peculiar authenticity, as his characters “turn […] from the wreckage and misery of life to an empty heaven and from an empty heaven to the silence of their own hearts”.

The book is not, then, in any sense a pacifist or antiwar novel. The critic Arnold Bennett went so far as to describe it as “inspiring” because it “compels in the reader a reluctant belief that war is glorious after all.” But that’s not quite right either. After all, Manning describes heroism as “indistinguishable from despair”, an assertion that no militarist would make but one that reflects his almost existentialist preoccupation with the individual personality in extremis.

We might go so far as to say that Manning’s war reflected Manning’s peace. The highly strung, deeply repressed man always slightly out of kilter with his era seems to have experienced the Battle of the Somme as an intensification, almost to the point of liberation, of the isolation he already felt.

The final words of The Middle Parts of Fortune encapsulate the theme of one of the strangest, most compelling books from the Great War.

“They sat there silently,” the novel ends, “each man keeping his own secret.”