So late Thursday night the hardworking staff finally caught up with that day’s New York Times report on Part Two of the Sisyphean John Isner/Nicolas Mahut Wimbledon rock-roll, which was suspended at 59-59.
As the match wore on, Isner, 25, appeared ready to collapse. He looked tired. Beyond tired. Can-you-believe-my-match-lasted-10-hours tired. He looked as if he wanted to cry, or crawl off the court, or find the nearest bed and sleep for a year, or five.
Instead, at 58-58, he tossed his racket on the grass and lumbered toward the bathroom. That might seem insignificant. So might a first-round match at Wimbledon between unheralded players.
Isner returned and scratched out his fifth match point, only to watch Mahut boom another ace.
(Ennhh. Sorry, that’s incorrect. But thanks for playing.)
That was actually Isner’s fourth match point. His fifth – as the Los Angeles Times, among everyone else, noted – came at 69-68:
The crack in Mahut’s final service game came on the second point, when he made a forehand error after leading 15-0. At 15-15 Mahut tried a delicate drop shot, but he put the ball into the net. Mahut won the next point with a volley for 30-30, but then, once again, Isner got a swing at a second serve and it paid off.
The 6-foot-9 American hit a forehand winner to give himself a fifth match point in the longest-ever set. As the crowd on Court 18 roared, Isner converted his fifth match point.
Which raises the question: Did the Times correct its – admittedly piddling – error the next day?
Let’s check it out in real – or what passes for real at the Global Worldwide Headquarters – time (which is to say 1:30 Friday morning):
New York Times Corrections:
FRONT PAGE
An article on Saturday about BP’s political connections described incorrectly the more than $77,000 in contributions that President Obama received in the 2008 election cycle from BP-related donors. All of the contributions came from BP employees; Mr. Obama did not receive any money from BP’s political action committee in the presidential campaign. (He did receive $1,000 from the company’s P.A.C. in his 2004 Senate campaign.) (Go to Article)
An article on Wednesday about the elimination of France from the World Cup on Tuesday misstated part of the English translation of the name of European soccer’s governing body, whose acronym is UEFA. It is the Union of European Football Associations, not the Union of European Soccer Federations. (Go to Article)
NATIONAL
An article on Thursday about the former lobbyist Jack Abramoff, who is working at a kosher pizzeria in Baltimore since his release from prison to a halfway house, described incorrectly the Washington restaurant Signatures, which was partly owned by Mr. Abramoff. It is not in fact a kosher restaurant. (Mr. Abramoff did open two other short-lived kosher dining places in Washington, Archives and Stacks.) (Go to Article)
SPORTS
An article on Thursday about the United States’ 1-0 victory over Algeria in the World Cup on Wednesday misstated the reason the American team would have been eliminated had the game ended in a tie. It was because the team would have finished third in its group, not because of a “complicated tie-breaker system.” (Go to Article)
OBITUARIES
An obituary on Wednesday about the business reporter Chris Welles misspelled the given name of the dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York, who praised Mr. Welles’s work. He is Stephen Shepard, not Steven. (Go to Article)
Interesting, as my increasingly fabulous niece Emily might say, but irrelevant.
Bottom line: Unforced error by the Times.
Campaign Outsider 