Remembering the longest single game of tennis with 37 deuces

It was the Surrey grass-court championships at Surbiton, on a Bank Holiday Monday, and it was all amateur players in those days. It was in the days when you could play the Surrey hard-courts tournament in Sutton in April and the grass courts at Surbiton in May. That would give the Wimbledon Championships an idea that you were still playing OK and help get you into qualifying.

I had played Tony in the first round of Sutton and although we’d had a very good game, he was a hard-court player because he was from what was then Rhodesia. I had lots and lots of break-points and game-points, but in the end he beat me fairly easily. So I thought I was in for a bit of a drubbing when I found out I was playing him in the first round at Surbiton. But the one thing in my favour was that this was on grass, which was not a surface he was that familiar with.

I won the first set on a tie-break – though the tie-breaks in those days were at eight-all, because they’d just introduced them – so I won the first set 9-8. And we got to a situation about 2-2 in the second set, and I started serving.

Judy Dawson – I think she was Judy Taggart at the time – a women’s player who I knew quite well, came on the next court and I nodded to her but carried on serving. And I continued serving … and serving. Then I noticed she was shaking hands on the next court, and I thought: “That’s funny, someone must have been injured”, but she had won 6-0, 6-0 and I was still serving the same game.

The crowds were getting bigger and bigger, and it was just going on and on – it was ridiculous, quite honestly. Tennis players have nightmares about rallies that never end, and that was the sort of game this had become. Whatever he did, I’d do something else, and it just