The better action was really over on Brooks’ blog. Checking in on his coverage throughout the afternoon proved the best ticket of the day:

4.05pm: The Isner-Mahut battle is a bizarre mix of the gripping and the deadly dull. It’s tennis’s equivalent of Waiting For Godot, in which two lowly journeymen comedians are forced to remain on an outside court until hell freezes over and the sun falls from the sky. Isner and Mahut are dying a thousand deaths out there on Court 18 and yet nobody cares, because they’re watching the football. So the players stand out on their baseline and belt aces past each-other in a fifth set that has already crawled past two hours. They are now tied at 18-games apiece.

He had no idea the match had barely begun. Nearly two hours later, he chimes in:

6pm: The score stands at 34-34. In order to stay upright and keep their strength, John Isner and Nicolas Mahut have now started eating members of the audience. They trudge back to the baseline, gnawing on thigh-bones and sucking intestines. They have decided that they will stay on Court 18 until every spectator is eaten.

Cannibalism became an apt theme:

6.48pm: The sun is sinking and the court is a blur. It is at this stage that Zombie Isner starts to look like Zombie Mahut and the Zombie Umpire stops croaking and starts to chirrup like a grasshopper. In other words, we’re here but we’re gone. Is anyone still alive up in the stands or have they now all been eaten? It’s 40-40. And that’s games, not points

And then later:

8.40pm: It’s 56 games all and darkness is falling. This, needless to say, is not a good development, because everybody knows that zombies like the dark.

A half-hour later the match was called after Mahut’s complaints about the darkness. The two will be back at it tomorrow, shuffling their aching Achilles toward history. We  only wish Brooks would be, too, but sadly he claims to have the day off. Be sure to check out his whole effort.

Kerry Lauerman is Salon’s executive editor. You can follow him on Twitter. 

Thankfully, we can now return to our regularly scheduled lechery, because Williams took to Twitter to settle this debate once and for all: “I am wearing undershorts the same color as my skin, so it gives the slits in my dress the full effect!” She designed the skin-tight, curve-accentuating shorts herself and, as Tennis FanHouse reports, Williams explained that “the whole idea is just an illusion” of being bare-bottomed. Well, I’m not sure why you would want to, but there is no question you successfully pulled off that trick, Venus. 

Just a thought: If the “Pants on the Ground” guy is looking for new material, he might look to this video for some inspiration. 

And so, as we sat at our laptops this year, aggressively hitting the refresh button on TMZ, we waited and watched for our icons to go off their meds, to lose their shit and to generally behave in a manner confounding, larger than life and just plain nuts. They did not disappoint.

Christian Bale

It seems like a million years ago already that the audio of Christian Bale’s expletive-rich tirade from the “Terminator Salvation” set went viral. That’s because since it first popped up in February, the debonair Brit’s apoplectic, American-accented rant at a lowly director of photography who dared to wander into his shot has become a mashup classic. It was parodied on “Family Guy,” spliced with the footage of that poor kid coming back from the dentist and, most brilliantly, turned into the dance remix of the year.

Bale, who in 2008 was arrested for allegedly assaulting his mother and sister, promptly apologized for his freakout, saying he “acted like a punk,” but we think he’s still got a follow-up hit in him. Somebody please, walk into his fucking light again.

Tila Tequila

When you name yourself after a potent alcoholic beverage, you’re probably pretty comfortable with unusual behavior. But after making serious allegations of physical abuse by her NFL-star ex-boyfriend, Shawne Merriman, the diminutive starlet went particularly coo-coo for cocoa puffs during a late-night session on Ustream. In the November clip, which apparently went on for hours (and Tequila quickly removed), she stripped, wriggled her ass and ranted that “I think a woman’s body is a beautiful thing … that’s why I’m a lesbian … I was born naked … anybody who is against that is gay and in denial.” And that her former beau was “sleeping with minors … little girls” and “don’t even support his own people” (sic).

For those of you short on time or patience with the incoherent, go directly to 2:46.

Tequila soon retracted her words, claiming the stress and anxiety from the alleged assault had sent her temporarily off the rails. She seems to have rebounded nicely — in December she announced her engagement to Johnson & Johnson heiress/grand theft larceny suspect Casey Johnson. Is she nuts? Chemically altered? “Anxious”? All we know for certain now is that like so many of us, Tequila loves to hang around at home singing and dancing in her underwear.

Susan Boyle

With one tear-jerking, ass-kicking breakthrough performance, Susan Boyle redefined the term “overnight star” last spring. Is it any wonder that the glare of swift and relentless fame took a toll on the unemployed, small-town woman with no professional experience?

After losing the top prize on “Britain’s Got Talent,” she wound up in a hospital suffering exhaustion and retreated from the limelight. Calling her sudden career catapult a “giant demolition ball,” she admitted, “I needed a rest, just to get away.” It seemed for a while she was destined to be the pop-culture blip of the month, going from fame to infamy to obscurity with breathtaking speed. But huzzah for Boyle, who told “Today” this summer that, “I’m the type of person that just couldn’t stand up for herself very well, but I got over it. I’m getting over it now.” In November her first album debuted at the top of the U.S. and U.K. charts. Dreams do come true.

Billy Bob Thornton

We’ve known Thornton had a whole heap of weird in him since back in the days he was strutting around with Angelina Jolie’s blood around his neck. But while promoting his band the Boxmasters in April, he outdid himself during an interview for a Toronto radio station. As the video of the conversation went viral, it was clear the episode had more uncomfortable moments than the entire run of the British version of “The Office.”

For an excruciating 15 minutes, Thornton stared blankly into the middle distance and intoned, “I don’t know what you’re talking about” when confronted with even the simplest of questions about how long his band had been together or his opinion of Willie Nelson.

He later explained his trip to Mars by way of Canada on “Jimmy Kimmel” by saying the DJ had “lied to me to my face,” saying “I told a DJ to kiss my ass, that’s all that happened.” And during the course of the interview Thornton did indeed take umbrage with host Jian Ghomeshi for mentioning his guest’s day job as an actor, telling him, “You were instructed not to talk about shit like that” and comparing himself to Tom Petty. (Hey, if we had Thornton’s recent film career we might not be bragging about it either.)

Yet, from the moment he was introduced on the show, the 53-year-old aspiring rock star did not appear to be in kiss-my-ass mode but closer to the flat-on-the-face zone, veering off on tangents about his childhood reading habits. But let’s take him at his word. Maybe Thornton really was just pissed at the DJ daring to not introduce him exactly the way he wanted, and punished him with sullen spaciness. Which would make him not crazy — just a raging douche.

Joaquin Phoenix

Dude, you’re supposed to walk the line, not lurch over it. At first it just looked like he was prepping to star in the Zack Galifinakas story. But when shaggy haired, slightly gone-to-seed Joaquin Phoenix took the stage on “Letterman” last February, he quickly entered the Farrah Fawcett “Late Night” Disaster Hall of Fame.

Professing that the was not going to act anymore, he shrugged and said, “I’ve been working on my music. I do hip-hop.” Then he commented on Letterman’s raggedy cuticles and stuck his gum under the desk. Things didn’t get better during a Miami “performance” in March, when he jumped offstage to go after a heckler. The skeptical have suggested Phoenix’s latest incarnation is a piece of Andy Kaufman-esque performance art, noting how brother-in-law Casey Affleck conveniently always seems to be around to film his meltdowns for a documentary they’re rumored to be making. So the actor, who did a stint in rehab in 2005, is either slumming in Crazy Town or currently residing there. Either way, we miss that smoldering Oscar nominee of the not-so-distant past.

Mischa Barton

She earned herself a DUI in 2007. Rumors of hard partying swirled around her in 2008. Then this July, the 23-year-old former “OC” star called the police to her home and wound up in involuntary psychiatric hold at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. Citing a bad recovery from having her wisdom teeth removed and too much stress and pressure, she referred to the incident as a “meltdown” and “rock bottom” on a September episode of “The View.”

And as she told Time Out, “I was down in the dumps about everything there for a while … I got completely stressed-out and couldn’t handle everything, and now I feel really in control.” Hope that resilience holds: Her new series, “The Beautiful Life,” was canceled after two episodes.

Heidi and Spencer

Proving that even people who compulsively star on reality shows have their limits, world’s most overexposed couple Heidi and Spencer Pratt hit the wall in June while filming “I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here!” Taking the title literally, Spencer hooted, bellowed, made unusual noises and howled into the Costa Rican jungle that “I’m too rich, I’m too famous and I’m outta here.”

His bride, meanwhile, wept copious on-camera tears because her fellow contestants “completely took off all my labels and everything on my dry shampoo.” They threatened to quit. They really really threatened to quit. Then they quit, and ulcer-ridden Heidi wound up in the hospital. Did we mention that before the very publicly Christian couple hightailed it out, Spencer got himself baptized by Stephen Baldwin? They then followed up their summer of love by getting into a feud with Al Roker (Al Roker!) and shopping around a new reality series. Had enough? We’re just an innocent public. Get us out of here.

Serena Williams

Sending journalists into a frenzy of epiphanies that female athletes can be as temperamental as their male counterparts, the crankier of the Williams sisters went ballistic on a lineswoman at the U.S. Open over a foot fault. In a tongue-lashing that threatened to short-circuit CBS’s bleep button, Williams swore she was “fuckin’ takin’ this ball and shovin’ it down your fuckin’ throat. I swear to God.” She ultimately lost the Open, but won herself an $82,500 fine and a place in the upper ranks of legendary outbursts.

Courtney Love

A year without Love sticking her foot in her mouth would be like a year without Kanye West sticking his foot in his mouth. So imagine our total lack of surprise when the singer, a true pioneer in the world of online oversharing, took to Facebook in November to apply her creative spelling and punctuation to the sentiment that “britneys dad molested her, imagine the father that molested you owning you for slavery while your forced to sing songs picked for thier sexual content every night, insane right? i have it on First had authority, and fight as hard as she is and does she still didnt pull that card, its a pride thing i can relate to, However they want to play dirty, lets go, Im SO not affraid of the little trolls who hit this when i was f***** up who are called lawyers. lets GO.”

Appropriate response of the year award goes to Spears’ camp, which replied, “We’re not commenting on Courtney Love, or any aliens who might come to Earth to impregnate people.”

Let us now switch the husband’s gender. He is now a she: a lesbian tennis star willing to use the legal system to extract herself from another unhappy relationship. This makes the case more complicated, to be sure, but it does nothing to alter the injustice. And, if anything, the outrage should be greater.

In the past week, Martina Navratilova has been sued by a former lover, Toni Layton, who claims she was unceremoniously dumped and is now owed millions of dollars in damages and spousal support. Layton claims she and Navratilova had agreed “to evenly share all funds and assets earned and obtained by either while together.” These assets apparently include four multimillion-dollar homes.

By now, the suing of athletes by ex-lovers has become a staple of tort law, but unlike Roberto Alomar or Michael Jordan or Chris Bosh, Navratilova is able — and has been willing– to take advantage of a legal double standard that is both sexist and homophobic. And the gay community should be first in line to oppose it.

I say this with some regret because I have enormous admiration for Navratilova. She is one of the two or three greatest women ever to play the game of tennis. She has transformed society’s understanding of athleticism. And she has been candid and unapologetic about her sexuality at a time when most gay athletes, male and female alike, still have to be dragged from the closet.

But her current legal troubles remind us that even gay icons have some growing up to do when it comes to gay relationships. We cannot know whether all the assertions in Toni Layton’s lawsuit are true. We can say, however, with some certainty that the two women lived together as a couple, that they celebrated their relationship in a ceremony in New Hampshire, that they shared property and assets, and that Navratilova is much the wealthier of the two. If this were a no-fault heterosexual divorce, the law would unequivocally side with Layton, awarding her alimony and some division of property.

But the law, of course, still has different standards for same-sex relationships, and Layton has been forced to file a “domestic partnership” lawsuit in the deeply inhospitable legal climate of Florida, which has traditionally taken a dim view of alternative lifestyles. Barring a settlement, then, Navratilova stands to emerge from her most recent long-term relationship with little more than bad press and some whopping legal fees. If, that is, she can convince a court that her relationship with Layton doesn’t rise to the contractual level of heterosexual marriage.

This stratagem is not new to her. In 1991, Navratilova’s ex-lover Judy Nelson sued her for $7.5 million in spousal benefits — or, as the slavering tabloids used to call it, “galimony.” To buttress her case, Nelson argued that the two women had engaged in not one but two marriage ceremonies and had filmed a video will together.

Nelson also got vocal support from another Martina ex, Rita Mae Brown. In her memoir, “Rita Will,” Brown writes that her sympathies shifted toward Nelson during a pretrial hearing in which Navratilova’s lawyers argued (Brown’s words) that “Martina and Judy had had a contract for sex,” which “amounted to prostitution and therefore was against public policy.” By demoting same-sex relationships to the level of a roll in the hay, Brown argued, Navratilova “could inflict colossal damage on every gay person in the United States.”

Brown’s motives in entering the case were suspect — she had famously shot out the back window of Navratilova’s BMW after a quarrel, and she herself enjoyed a brief liaison with Nelson — but politically she was on target. The only way Navratilova could escape her financial (not to mention moral) obligations was to argue that her gay relationship did not carry the same legal standing as a straight relationship.

What was cynical then has become indefensible now. Martina Navratilova can no longer cast herself as an apostle for gay rights while using a homophobic legal code to deny her ex-partners alimony. This is more than bad behavior, it is bad precedent. And it comes at the worst possible time.

Very soon — sooner than anyone could have guessed — gay marriage will become the law in much of the land. A great deal has been written about whether straight America is ready; less has been written about whether gay America is ready. Not just to be held to the same contractual standards as heterosexual couples but to believe (after years of being told otherwise) that their relationships really are of equal standing. And to go on believing it when those relationships collapse.

In reporting on Toni Layton’s lawsuit, Britain’s Daily Mail used the following headline: “Martina Sued for Millions by ‘Wife.’” I hope and expect that those archly condescending quotation marks will one day disappear, but it is the job of the gay community to make them go. If we want our relationships to be taken seriously, if we want the legal sanction of marriage, we must be ready to stand by our contracts and our obligations — no matter how expensive or inconvenient it is and no matter what example is set by our culturally designated “heroes.” Equality has its blessings. It also has its price.