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What else is there today in the world of sports except the anticipation of Mahut and Isner resuming their hostilities? A piffling triviality by the name "World Cup", you say? Tell you what, you give me a call when a World Cup game gets to 59-59, and they call a halt to it saying it will be resumed the next day.

Do give me a call, because that's a football game I want to see. 90 minutes, 59-59: if my mathematics abilities are still firing on all cylinders, that's better than a goal a minute. That, I want to see. A pox on these games that end 1-0, or even 0-0.

Mahut's career highlight was probably at the Queen's Club tournament in '07, when he made a run to the final and lost a tight match to Andy Roddick, 4-6, 7-6, 7-6. Lucky they had tiebreaks there, otherwise who knows? He and Roddick might still be on those other grass courts in London, flailing away at the ball.

This year, he had to come through the qualifying tournament at Wimbledon. In the second round there, he took four hours to beat a Briton, 24-22 in the third set. In the final, he went two sets down before coming back to beat Stefan Koubek, an Austrian now best known in tennis circles as another kind of choker.

Having done all that, he runs into John Isner in the first round at Wimbledon, and neither of them is willing to go quietly, or at all. If not quite yet the next great American hope, Isner is no slouch with the racket. At the US Open last year, he knocked out Andy Roddick in five sets.

So both players have tough matches with Roddick in their resumes. Perhaps that's some kind of prerequisite to battling to 59-59 in the fifth.

Far more eloquent words than mine have been written since they stopped play last night, so I'll leave you to find them. But I urge you only to consider the full meaning of what these two have put together in this match, captured for posterity in the caption for this picture.