The Joyful Approach of Nicolas Mahut, Best Known for a Loss

American tennis fans are likely to think of France’s Nicolas Mahut with a certain wistfulness—the melancolie that attaches, in sport, to any agonizing loss. The loss, in this case, was epic, and if that sounds like a sports cliché, allow me to recall it for you: at Wimbledon, in 2010, Mahut, a twenty-eight-year-old journeyman entering the tournament as a qualifier, played his first-round match against John Isner, who beat him 6–4, 3–6, 6–7 (7), 7–6 (3), 70–68. Those last two numbers are not typos: there are no fifth-set tiebreaks at Wimbledon. The match took eleven hours and five minutes to complete—the longest match in history. It unfolded in the course of three days. I was travelling, and watched various parts of it on TV in my suburban New York bedroom, at Newark airport, in a Hertz office in Fort Lauderdale, and at a South Beach hotel bar, where, as the match was in what turned out to be its final throes, I convinced the server that I would continue to order untouched late-morning drinks if he didn’t switch to World Cup soccer. Mahut won a summer’s worth of games but did not advance to the second round. Tennis does not get more cruel than that.

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