The Daily Feather — Strawberries & Cream

The 138th edition of the Wimbledon Championships kicks off today, arguably the most prestigious and tradition-rooted of tennis’s major tournaments. An all-white dress code is strictly enforced (one that drove a boycott by Andre Agassi from 1988-1990), the Royal Family are guests of honor, and spectators consume thousands of servings of Strawberries & Cream over the fortnight. This year marks the 15-year anniversary of American John Isner’s 6-4 3-6 6-7(9) 7-6(3) 70-68 victory over Frenchman Nicolas Mahut in the tournament’s first round, in what is still the longest match in recorded history. Clocking in at 11 hours and 5 minutes, play spanned over the course of three days, going on for so long that the scoreboard on their court malfunctioned. It hadn’t been built to go past 47-47, and thus required an IBM programmer working late into the night to fix it. Though Isner emerged the winner, it was a Pyrrhic victory as he was not given a day off to recover before having to play again. He lost his next match, the shortest of the tournament, in just 74 minutes.

Markets declared a victory of their own this past week, with the third-largest tech rally in history carrying the S&P and NASDAQ to record heights. The prior weekend’s strikes on Iran were treated as ancient history, as a trade framework being finalized with China and Friday’s comments by the President that “we can do whatever we want” in regard to his July 9th trade deal deadline were welcome developments. Not even Friday’s news that talks with Canada, our second largest trading partner, had screeched to a halt, were enough to snap markets out of their sanguinity.