Once in a while we do consider events to be of such a nature that they require us to drop what we are doing and respond to them. Case in point is the Wimbledon match that recently took place between John Isner and Nicolas Mahut. While we generally eschew lavishing undue praise upon professional tennis players that by their very title are only doing their job, we have to admit that a few eyebrows were raised.
Of course we aren’t going to parrot the myriad statistics, timestamps and trivialities spewing from the fourth estate. Let’s just say this match breaks the Wimbledon record for breaking the most Wimbledon records and leave it at that.
Upon further reflection though, the question arises: if these guys took 11 hours to do what the rest of us spend all day doing, what is noteworthy in that? Well, the answer of course is right there in the question – we saw ourselves and the greatness that we all are, engaging in the activity of everyday life.
Relegated to the outermost court and without fanfare, these two players simply held serve. They held and held and held and held. And in this day and age for many of us, simply holding on can be quite an extraordinary achievement.
-TtM
