For almost a century a set of tennis had no upper limit. If both players held serve, the set simply continued, and the only way it ended was when somebody finally broke or stopped being able to stand. The tiebreak, now so ordinary that nobody thinks about it, was once a deeply unpopular idea.
The problem was obvious to everybody and tolerated anyway. Matches ran past darkness. Schedules collapsed. Players who won a long set were frequently unable to win the next one, which meant the better player did not necessarily advance. Spectators, and later television, had no idea when anything would finish.
The man with the clipboard
James Van Alen was an American player and administrator with a long-standing interest in the sport's scoring, which he regarded as charming and indefensible in roughly equal measure. He ran the historic grass courts at Newport, and he spent years promoting a package of reforms he called a streamlined scoring system.
Most of his proposals were rejected, sometimes rudely. He wanted to replace the whole fifteen-thirty-forty structure with simple numbers, and he wanted sets decided at a fixed point. The establishment considered the traditional scoring part of the sport's identity, which it was, and refused.
The one idea that stuck
The tiebreak survived because it solved a practical problem that the authorities could no longer ignore. The United States championship adopted it first, in 1970, in a sudden-death form: first to five points, with the whole set resting on a single point if the score reached four-all.
It was dramatic and widely hated. Players disliked having a two-hour set decided by one serve, and the format was eventually replaced by the longer version used today - first to seven points, win by two - which gives the better player more room and still ends inside a predictable span of time.
How it actually works
At six games all, the players contest a single game scored in ordinary numbers. One player serves the first point, then service alternates every two points, and the players change ends every six points so that neither spends the whole tiebreak serving into the sun or the wind.
The alternation is the clever part. It means both players serve roughly equally, so a tiebreak is not simply handed to whoever happens to serve first, and the mini-break - winning a point on the opponent's serve - becomes the thing everybody is watching for.
Van Alen wanted to rebuild the whole scoring system. Tennis took one idea from him and left the rest on the table.
The final set holdouts
Adoption was gradual and the deciding set was the last battleground. For decades several of the biggest tournaments kept the final set open-ended on the grounds that a championship should be won outright rather than in a short sprint, and the occasional marathon that resulted was treated as part of the romance.
That position became harder to defend as matches grew longer and the physical demands increased. All four of the sport's major championships now use some form of tiebreak to end a final set, although the exact rules took years to converge.
Van Alen also pushed for a no-advantage scoring system, where a game tied at deuce is decided by a single point. It was rejected for singles but is now standard in professional doubles, where it keeps matches short enough to schedule.
What the tiebreak changed about tennis
It rewarded the serve. In a set that can be won without ever breaking, a player with a large serve and a weak return became viable at the highest level in a way they had not been before, because they only needed to steal a few points at the end.
It also created a new kind of pressure. A tiebreak compresses an hour of tennis into ten minutes, and players who are otherwise unflappable often have noticeably better or worse records in them. Coaches treat tiebreak play as a separate skill, practised separately.
The ordinary miracle
It is easy to miss how strange the tiebreak is as a piece of design. It uses different scoring from the rest of the sport, it changes the service pattern, it moves the players around the court on a different cycle, and it sits inside an otherwise unchanged structure without anybody finding it odd.
That is the mark of a good fix. Fifty years on, a set that reaches six games all produces no confusion in the crowd, no argument from the players, and a result inside twenty minutes. Van Alen never got the rest of his system, but he got the part the sport could not do without.
The marathon that made the case
Every argument for the final-set tiebreak was eventually settled by the matches themselves. The longer a deciding set ran, the less it resembled a contest of skill and the more it resembled a test of who could stay upright, with both players reduced to holding serve and nothing else happening for hours.
Officials watching those matches had a practical problem as well as a sporting one: the rest of the day's schedule disappeared, other players waited, and the broadcast lost whatever shape it had. The romance of an unlimited set was real, but it was being paid for by everyone else in the tournament, and eventually that bill came due.
