Sports Journalism at it's best

With the Soccer World Cup occupying every aspect of thought and conversation at the moment; I was thrilled to come across a recent article about a tennis match which, eclipsed by the Beautiful Game, made history of epic proportions.

It's not only the actual game that captured my imagination as much as the inspirational journalistic style of the article. In my opinion, this is a brilliant view of the true raison deitre of sport. I find Ed Smith's article of the 11 hour match between John Isner and Nicolas Mahut during Wimbledon's first round, worth repeating. I'd love to paraphrase the article, but this would not do justice to the (in my view) magnificence of his observations.

EPIC OF POETIC PROPORTIONS - ED SMITH

The word epic is nearly always an inappropriate cliche. Not this time. Breaking - no, smashing - the record for the longest tennis match, John Isner and Nicolas Mahut reminded us how sport can transcend the simple matter of winning and losing. In flinging themselves at the linits of human endurance in the first round of Wimbledon, Isner and Mahut showed how sport can inspire us all. For 11 hours this week (24 June 2010) they were locked in a relentless dual. The previous record match was a mere six and a half. At that point, Isner and Mahut were only warming up.

The psychological burden alone is astonishing. Serving to stay in the match just once is a nerve shredding experience. Mahut had to do it 55 times! It is rare that a single sports match takes players to the edge of their capacity in so many different areas: physical fitness, mental toughness and competitive fire. It is one thing to suffer complete exhaustion in endurance sports, but marathon runners don't have to decide to serve and volley at break point. In that respect, the Mahut-Isner match was like a cruelly draining hybrid of chess and triathlon.

How can we measure the achievement? I was going to say that it was like scoring 800 in a Test Match. But that doesn't quite capture it. Perhaps we must turn to the arts: Imagine waiting until Brunhilde had finished the final chord of Wagner's five-hour Gotterdammerung, then, just as the gods go up in smoke, telling her to start again - from the beginning. Epic is the only way to describe the Isner-Mahut duel: epic in emotional depth and epic in it's human dimension. Yes, Andy Roddick and Roger Federer gave us a wonderful final last year. But Mahut-Isner was all the more moving because neither is a star. An yet, they own a record that will almost certainly never be broken. It is likely that both will retreat into relative obscurity. But many greats never leave so deep an imprint. Here, surely, is a lesson for us all about the essence of sport. Too often, modern sport has retreated into the narrow-minded elitism of celebrity culture. Who cares about county cricket, people say, or Championship football? If it doesn't have the prefix "premier", let's turn to another channel. Sport gave us the modern saying "winner takes all". Sadly, it has now come to embody it.

There is another, better way to look at sport: It can produce great moments of human drama at every level - from the school pitch to the Olympic podium. We have all sat through boring matches in which two excellent sides retreat into a defensive stalemate. And every fan has watched two unheralded teams unexpectedly produce the match of the tournament. It is quite wrong to think to that superstars have a monopoly on great sport. Democratic unpredictability is sports ace card. No-one, not pundits, not broadcasters, not fans and certainly not  the players had any idea that the Isner-Mahut match would become a classic.

With the score a mere 7-8 in the final set, one fan popped into Wimbledon village to watch England play Slovenia. When he returned, it was locked at 28-27. We kid ourselves that sport is all about winning, about being the best, about quantifiable supremacy. It isn't. The phrase "winning is the only thing that matters" is both depressing and wrong. Sports inspires us most when it taps into timeless human narratives. We will never tire of watching reincarnations of Hector and Achilles.

On Wednesday, as the sun faded over London on one of the longest nights of the year, here was perhaps the oldest story of all: two men, locked in combat, finding a shared heroism in refusing to yeild, to except retreat.. In Thursday's final act, one of them (Mahut) had to lose 6-4  3-6  6-7(9)  7-6(3)  70-68. But by then, both had won something bigger than the tennis match. And it wasn't a place in history. For sport has one prize even swetter than that. They found out what they were capable of, how deep were their reserves of endurance willpower.

That is the ultimate prize in sport. And we should aplaud it to the rafters when we see it.

Source: The Times, London