What is the longest game ever played relative to the baseline measure for that sport?
For example, the longest baseball game played was 26 innings. Relative to the standard length of a game of 9 innings, that is nearly 2 extra games.
The longest hockey game had almost 6 overtimes. Again, that is nearly 2 extra games.
In the NFL, I think the longest a game has ever gone was into the 2nd OT. This would be less than 1/2 of an extra game.
College football and soccer use a different method in OT than in regulation so they don’t really count.
Has a basketball game ever had anything close to the equivalent of a full extra game in OT? At 5 minutes/OT you would need over 8 OTs to get to just 1 extra game.
I seem to recall in tennis that prior to the tie-break it was required to win the set by 2 games. Has a set ever gone up to a score of something like 18-16?
In golf I think a tie at the US Open is decided by an extra round the next day, so that is 1 extra round. Has it ever gone to nearly 2 extra rounds?
According to this the longest NCAA basketball game was a 7 OT game in 1981 between Cincinnati and Bradley, won by Cincy 75-73. That was before the shot clock was put in so judging by the score I’m guessing that both teams played hold-the-ball, four-corners style during the OTs.
glee and pravnik - my question requires that OT be involved. There are lots of games that can require a very extended period of time to complete, such as cricket or the Iditarod. But I’m after games which are somehow “timed” and end up tied at the end of regulation and require something extra to determine the winner.
So far Jas09 has the longest I’ve ever heard of. 33 innings is 3.67 games!
Even following the introduction of the tie-break there have been matches at Wimbledon with sets comprising 50 games and more.
As recently as 2007, Brazilian pair Marcelo Melo and Andre Sa beat Paul Hanley (Aus) and Kevin Ullyett (NZ) 5-7, 7-6, 4-6, 7-6, 28-26 in the second round of the mens doubles. In 1985 at the same venue, Michiel Schapers and Brenda Schultz vanquished Tom Nijssen and Andrea Temesvari in the mixed doubles, 6-3, 5-7, 29-27. I believe there was a 62 game set played at the 1968 championships but I do not know the participants.
The most games played per set that I am aware of (76) occurred in the 1973 Davis Cup American Zone Final, in which Stan Smith and Erik Van Dillen (US) defeated Patricio Cornejo and Jaime Fillol (Chile) 7–9, 37–39, 8–6, 6–1, 6–3.
Metal racquets were still in their infancy in 1973, although Connors and Gonzales had certainly used them, so it’s likely that the quartet used heavier wooden racquets. So the answer to your question is ‘probably not’.
Implementation of the tie-break in Davis Cup matches seems to have lagged behind other competitions. It wasn’t brought in until 1989. After this US/Chile marathon I would have expected the tie-break to be introduced pretty soon afterwards, given the system was in use elsewhere, and I find it odd this didn’t happen.
In the FA Cup competition, before the advent of the penalty shootout, teams would play each other until one of them emerged victorious. For example, in the 1971 4th qualifying round Alvechurch were drawn to meet Oxford City. The match was drawn so a replay was arranged. That was a draw as well. To cut a long story short, the two clubs played for a total of 11 hours in 6 matches on 6 different days before Alvechurch finally settled the tie 1-0.
This is, and will forever remain, an FA Cup record.
If a player gets to the fifth set of a grand slam final he shouldn’t lose the match unless he actually drops a service game. This isn’t to say that tie-breaks can’t be gripping (witness Borg v. McEnroe at Wimbledon in 1980 where the famous 4th set tie-break went to 18-16 in Borg’s favour) but I see no real reason for the US Open to differ from the rest in this respect.
Was this decision somehow made to satisfy TV schedules?
NHL games can’t end in a tie in the playoffs, so the teams have to keep playing until there is a winner. The longest game ever played was in Montreal on March 24, 1936. It was game one of the semifinal round of the Stanley Cup Playoffs between Detroit and Montreal. It ended when Detroit’s Mud Bruneteau scored the game’s only goal in the sixth overtime period after 176 minutes and 30 seconds of game play. In case you’re bad at math, that’s 3 1/2 minutes short of 3 full games.
During some of the long OT games in the playoffs, players get so exhausted & dehydrated that they take IV fluids between periods. To make matters just a bit worse, during overtime, there are no TV timeouts, so the players get even less rest.
Each “typical” set (one in which a player wins at 6 games) would have between 6 and 10 games. Using an average of 8 games/set and average of 4 sets/match, I would think on average there are 32 games/match. This match had 122 games!
That works out to about 3.8 matches! Wow.
This is a total of 112 games or 3.5 matches!
If this isn’t the record I’m not sure what would be. Playing an equivalent of 6 matches is pretty astounding. Playing 6 matches on 6 consecutive days has to be pretty grueling, but I wonder if it is less grueling than the 6 overtime game in hockey or the monster tennis matches mentioned above.
The article says the match was called after 10 days. If the usual time is 5 days, that means they played the equivalent of 2 matches. Certainly a very long match.
