If you were of a certain temperament as a child, you spent a lot of time looking for loopholes in various rule systems. You'd think of things like: what if the presidential election was a tie? What would happen if a baseball team just couldn't record any outs? Unlike youth leagues and such, Major League Baseball has no mercy rule. If it's 39-0 with still nobody out in the top of the first, you play on. (OK this one has an obvious answer: the team that's way ahead would just purposefully strike out all the time to get the game over with.)
One of the most tantalizing loopholes was always to figure out how a game could stay tied forever. How long would the powers that be let it go on if a baseball game got to 47 innings or a basketball game got to its 15th overtime?
Well we're finding out how tennis handles it: they play on. And on. John Isner and Nicolas Mahut, two players unknown to the world outside hardcore tennis fans, had their first round match at Wimbledon suspended by darkness last night after four sets. That's perfectly ordinary, and unworthy of attention. They'd play the fifth set today, the winner would lose soon after in a later round, and that would be that. The fact that the match was played on Court 18, which looks pretty much like a high school court with a few more seats, exemplifies how mundane this match should have been. Except that the fifth set could not be completed in one day, because they're tied at 59 games each. Fifty-nine! The score of the match is 6-4, 3-6, 6-7, 7-6, 59-59. To say that's a record is to understate it. I can't find the record for most games in a set, but it looks like it might be something like 46, and these guys are at 118. The fifth set by itself would have shattered match length records, both on number of games and elapsed time.
That's the kind of loophole you pester your dad about: what if two tennis players can't break each other's serves, at all? Do they just play until somebody passes out? Irritated dad eventually responds that somebody always wins eventually, and don't you have some homework to do? But what if they don't win, you ask yourself silently, and you wonder if you'll ever find out.
