Fortnight Is Not Enough : Men’s Doubles Final Will Finish Today After Postponement at 13-13 in Fifth Set

It was probably the longest Wimbledon men’s doubles final that nobody in America saw end.

Actually, it didn’t end. It just sort of stopped at 9:21 p.m. when the final between the team of John McEnroe and Michael Stich and Jim Grabb and Richey Reneberg was postponed until today because of darkness.

Grabb-Reneberg were tied with McEnroe-Stich, 7-5, 6-7 (7-5), 6-3, 6-7 (7-5), 13-13, after 4 hours 20 minutes and 73 games, Wimbledon’s longest men’s doubles final in terms of games.

The previous record was 70 games in 1968 when John Newcombe and Tony Roche defeated Ken Rosewall and Fred Stolle, 3-6, 8-6, 5-7, 14-12, 6-3.

Even if nightfall hadn’t stopped the match, NBC already had. On the West Coast, NBC left the doubles match in progress at 1 p.m. PDT to go to live coverage of the U.S. Olympic basketball team’s game against Venezuela in the final of the Tournament of Americas. The network then came back a couple of times to show play being suspended with the match tied, 13-13.

“We provided an hour extra of commercial-free tennis coverage when we could have left at 3 (EDT),” network spokesman Ed Markey said. “We had a commitment to basketball and we made the decision to go to that.”

It was the second consecutive day that NBC left live Wimbledon coverage and failed to show a match to completion. The network cut away from the women’s singles final at 11:21 a.m. PDT Saturday with Graf leading, 4-1, in the second set and showed taped segments instead of the conclusion of the match. Graf closed out the match in eight minutes, a result that wasn’t shown on NBC until Sunday morning.

The mixed doubles final between Dutch duo Jacco Eltingh and Miriam Oremans and Cyril Suk of Czechoslovakia and Larisa Savchenko-Neiland of Latvia also will be played today.

For McEnroe and Stich, the postponement was the end of a long, long day. They began it by finishing the last two sets of their doubles semifinal, a 7-6 (7-4), 6-3, 7-6 (7-4) victory over Guy Forget and Jakob Hlasek.

McEnroe spent about 20 minutes in the NBC booth during the first part of Andre Agassi’s singles final against Goran Ivanisevic, then took to the doubles courts again with Stich in the still-unfinished final after 4 hours 27 minutes.

So on Sunday, McEnroe-Stich played 95 games, three tiebreakers, more than five hours and still have to come back to work today.