Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - The Longest Sports Games in History

Episode Date: November 14, 2020

Sometimes you might sit down to watch a sporting match and it is over before you know it. However, there are some games that seem to take forever. A rare few games last an extraordinarily long time, as no one can seem to win. Learn more about the longest games in history, in almost every sport, on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Sometimes you might sit down and watch a sporting match, and it's over before you know it. However, there are some games that seem to take forever. A rare few games last an extraordinarily long time, as no one can seem to win. Learn more about the longest games in history in almost every sport on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Fear is the virus is trending on TikTok. Vaccines are poison. Then your yoga teacher says that sex traffic children are being sacrificed by satanic liberals. but it's all okay.

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are always the result of one thing, the inability of the teams or players to beat each other. Sometimes competitors are so evenly matched, at least for that one day, that things just keep going on forever and a resolution can't be reached. Let's start our journey into the land of long games with two sports that do not lend themselves to long games, soccer and hockey. Both sports have two features that make long games unlikely. They are played to the clock, and they both allow for ties. The clock means that there's a theoretical limit to how long a game can be played, and the allowance of ties means that the game can end without a resolution. The longest association football match, aka soccer in the colonies, occurred in 1946 in England

between Stockport County and Doncaster Rovers in a Division III championship game. The match took three hours and 23 minutes to complete. The game itself was a replay of an earlier game between the two teams, which ended in a two-two tie. In the marathon game, the score was also tied two-to-two. They played the full 90 minutes, plus an extra 30 minutes without a resolution. After 120 minutes, they went into a golden goal period, where the next team to score would win, except that no one scored. At the 173 minute, Stockport scored a goal, but it was disallowed, making the match continue.

The game was eventually called after 203 minutes due to darkness. Yet another replay of the game was held, and this time, Doncaster won 4 to nothing. Today's rules would not allow for such a match to take place, so their record is safe. Over in hockey, the longest game belongs to a 1936 Stanley Cup semifinal between the Detroit Red Wings and the Montreal Maroons. You'll notice that many of the games I mention are championship. or playoff games, because those are the one time you can't have a tie. The game went into a record six overtimes and took 116 minutes and 30 seconds to finish, the equivalent of almost three games in total length.

The game was scoreless after regulation and through all of the overtimes. The game finally ended at 2.25 in the morning by Mud Bruzano to give Detroit a one-to-nothing victory. American football is similar to hockey and soccer, with the exception that ties are technically allowed, but highly frowned upon. The longest NFL game in history took place on December 25, 1971, in a playoff game between the Miami Dolphins and the Kansas City Chiefs. With a total of 82 minutes, 40 seconds of game clock time, the rules at the time stipulated that the first team to score any points in overtime was the winner. The game ended

seven minutes and 40 seconds into the second overtime when Miami kicked a 37-yard field goal. The longest football game in college history was a 2003 game between Arkansas and Kentucky. The game went to seven overtime periods before a winner was resolved. The NCAA rules stipulated that in each overtime, both teams got a chance to score from the 25-yard line. The score at regulation was tied 24 to 24. In the first overtime, each team scored seven points. In the second overtime, they each scored seven again. In the third, they scored three, in the fourth they scored eight, in the fifth they scored sixth, and in the sixth overtime, they scored eight again. In the final overtime, Arkansas scored eight and held off Kentucky to

win the game 71 to 63. The game lasted a total of four hours and 56 minutes. In high school, there was a 12 overtime game in Texas in 2010 between Jacksonville and Nacadocious. Jacksonville won 84 to 81, and the game took five and a half hours to finish. Basketball has a clock, but they never have tie games. The longest NBA game took place on January 6, between the Indianapolis Olympians and the Rochester Royals. The game is the only game in NBA history to have gone six overtimes. Indianapolis won 75 to 73, which is remarkable because it's possible for modern NBA teams to get almost that many points in a single half, let alone four quarters and six

overtimes worth of play. In 2009, a Connecticut versus Syracuse men's basketball game in the Big East tournament quarterfinals was the longest in NCAA history. It 2-16 overtimes with Syracuse winning 127 to 117. In high school, we get yet again more extreme cases. On February 29, 1964, in North Carolina, Boon Trail High School held off Angier High School to win 54 to 52 after 13 overtimes. The score was 44 to 44 after regulation, and the teams basically didn't score at all and held the ball for most of the overtime periods. As we move away from games with a clock, there is no theoretical maximum for the length of a game.

Baseball games can be notoriously long. The longest Major League Baseball game in terms of innings took place on May 1, 1920, between the Brooklyn Robbins and the Boston Braves. The Dodgers used to be called the Robbins, and the Braves are the same franchise which is in Atlanta today. They went 26 innings, and the game was called due to darkness. The score was tied one-to-one, and it was one of the very rare baseball games to end in a tie. The game, however, only took three hours and 50 minutes to complete. A May 8, 1984 game between the Chicago White Sox and the Milwaukee Brewers went 25 innings and had to be completed over two days.

The total game time was eight hours and six minutes. The White Sox won seven to six. However, no baseball game, professional or amateur, can hold a candle to the granddaddy of all long baseball games, which began on April 18, 1981, between the AAA Pawtucket Red Sox and the Rochester Red Wings. It went 33 innings and lasted 8 hours and 25 minutes over two days. The game set almost every record for most anything in one game, including outs, strikeouts, and at-bats. The game was stopped after 32 innings and continued four days later on April 25th.

The continued game was over in one inning and 18 minutes. After the game, both teams signed a baseball that went to the Hall of Fame, and they even held a 25-year anniversary of the game in 2006. Now, cricket fans might be listening to all of this and wondering what the fuss is. An average cricket test match can last up to three to five days. However, even cricket matches can have unusually long lengths. In 1939, South Africa and England played a test match in Durban, which lasted 12 days. Started on March 3rd, it ended on March 14th, and there was action on nine of the 12 days.

There were 43 hours and 16 minutes of play, 1,981 runs, scored, and, this is the best part, it ended in a draw. Individual sports have also had some legendarily long matches. There are two of which which really stand out. The first is the 2010 first round Wimbledon match between American John Eisner and Frenchman Nicholas Mahout. The match lasted 11 hours and 5 minutes and demolished the record of the previously longest tennis match by almost 4 hours.

The entire match, all 11 hours of it, is available on. YouTube, and it has almost half a million views. The match obviously went the full five sets, with the scores being 64, 36, 6-7, 76, and the last set being decided, 70 to 68. Eisner was the eventual winner. The game took three days to complete, and there's a plaque commemorating the match on the court where it took place in Wimbledon. There is a rules change after the match which instituted a tie-breaking system, ensuring that this record cannot be broken at Wimbledon. The French Open is currently the only remaining tournament that does not have a tie-breaking system. The score in the match went so high that the scoreboard couldn't display the results,

and IBM had to send in a team to fix it so it would display properly. After the match, both men were presented with a special crystal bowl by the All-England Tennis Club for their historic performance. John McEnroe speculated that the match might have shortened both men's careers by six months. The absolute longest competition I could find in any competitive activity occurred in the world of chess. The longest single game of competitive chess took place in 1989 in Belgrade, between Goran Asorovich and Grandmaster Predegnich Nikilusich in a game that took 269 moves and took 20 hours and 15 minutes just to end in a draw. The longest chess match was the 1984 World Championship between challenger Gary Kasparov and reigning world champion Anatoly Karpov. The rules of the championship were such that the first player to win six games would be the champion.

Carpov was up 4 to nothing after 9 games, and it looked like he would cruise the victory. However, Kasparov was stubborn, and he dug in. They played 17 consecutive draws. Karpov won game 27, and then there were four more draws before Kasparov won his first game. This was followed by 14 more draws, and then Kasparov winning games 47 and 48. After 48 games and five months of play, the match was called off by the president of the World Chess Federation to protect the health of the players. Both players, however, wanted to continue. It was the first and only time that a world championship was abandoned without a winner. The match was replayed in 1985, but this time it was the best

of 24 matches, and in the event of a tie, the champion Karpov would retain his title. Kasparov won, becoming the youngest world chess champion in history. Most of the competitions I've mentioned have their records secure because, once they've happened, rules were changed to make sure that they would never happen again. If you ever happen to be president, such a historically long game of anything. Remember to save some sort of souvenir because it's unlikely that it will ever be repeated. Executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is James Mackle. Please remember to support the show over at patreon.com where you can get exclusive merchandise

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