Tag: doubles

Last year, after Carlos Alcaraz beat Miomir Kecmanović in the fourth round of the Australian Open, Jim Courier asked Alcaraz, in an on-court interview, who his favorite players were. “Well, I’m a huge fan of tennis,” Alcaraz began. He reeled off a few names: Daniil Medvedev, Novak Djokovic, Jannik Sinner. Courier pressed him: What about the women? “Well, I watch W.T.A. as well,” Alcaraz said. “Uhhhhh,” he said, and ran his hand through his thick dark hair. He laughed, nervously, as the crowd murmured. “No, I mean, when I can obviously. Uh, when I turn the TV on, if it is W.T.A., A.T.P., whatever, I like to watch it, obviously.”

Afterward, Alcaraz was criticized for his failure to name a single female tennis player, but I didn’t think much of it. With a few notable exceptions, most men’s-tennis stars are not outspoken champions of gender equality, and, besides, I’d have trouble naming my own children if I were pressured to do it in front of fifteen thousand people, not to mention TV cameras. If anything, the expectation that Alcaraz should be watching women’s tennis at all spoke to the relative egalitarianism of the sport he plays. How often is Anthony Edwards asked to account for his W.N.B.A. viewing habits? Then I checked X, and saw that Alcaraz had subsequently confessed that he’d been too nervous to give his real answer, the young English player Emma Raducanu. Why? Because, he said, he was “shy with girls.” Wait, I thought, is that a real quote? It was not, though it was getting passed around as though it were.

I had the same reaction in late June, when I read that Raducanu and Alcaraz would be teaming up in a bid to compete in the “reimagined and elevated” mixed-doubles championship at the U.S. Open this summer. This isn’t real, is it? This time, though, it was, and I should have seen it coming. In February, the United States Tennis Association, which hosts the U.S. Open, had announced that the mixed-doubles tournament would be held on August 19th and 20th, in the midst of what’s known as Fan Week, during the qualifying tournament before the traditional start of the main draw. The participants would be decided by a new formula. Instead of the usual thirty-two teams, there would be sixteen—the top eight with the best combined singles rankings, along with eight wild cards. Given the framing of the tournament’s reinvention, there was little doubt that most, if not all, of those wild cards, which are chosen at the discretion of the tournament, would include the most famous singles players, too. The point, clearly, was to draw as much attention as possible. And no one, short of a comeback from Serena Williams, would draw more attention than the puppyish five-time Slam winner Alcaraz and Raducanu, a telegenic Brit who rocketed to fame when she won the U.S. Open as a qualifier four years ago. But to what end?

The fact that men and women can compete seriously against one another in legitimate competition has always been part of the recreational appeal of tennis—and part of what makes it unique as a spectator sport. The first mixed-doubles Grand Slam title was awarded in 1892, at the tournament now known as the U.S. Open. The winners were an American man, Clarence Hobart, and an Irish woman, Mabel Cahill. Cahill also won the singles and women’s-doubles titles—and, around the same time, published a book called “Her Playthings: Men,” which was panned. For the next century, it was standard for many of the game’s best players—from Suzanne Lenglen to Rod Laver, from Martina Navratilova to Martina Hingis—to play mixed doubles, in addition to singles and doubles. A Grand Slam was a Grand Slam.

But, as the sport became more physically taxing and as the rewards for solo success began to vastly exceed those for doubles, fewer and fewer top athletes played doubles seriously, particularly on the men’s tour, where the matches during majors were longer—best-of-five sets instead of best-of-three—and the financial incentives to focus on singles were generally even more skewed. And even fewer played with a partner of a different gender. As the sport became more star-focussed, singles matches took on far greater weight. A Grand Slam wasn’t a Grand Slam after all. It became routine for top players to pull out of doubles matches if they went deep into the singles draw. Doubles grew to be dominated by specialists, especially among men. (There have been some top women, most notably the biggest American star, Coco Gauff, who is a former world No. 1 in doubles, but they almost always focus on singles in the long run.) Talent, people said, was draining out of the doubles discipline; still, the level of the game remained high, and many fans are devoted to it. Doubles fans relish the quicker pace of the game’s points, the ping-ponging net play, the extreme angles and masterful spins that players deploy on their shots; and they understand the tactical nuances and complex chemistries of teamwork. But mixed doubles, specifically, have become an afterthought at Grand Slams. The matches are shoehorned into the tournaments, often on outer courts and at odd times. Last year, the U.S. Open mixed-doubles final, which was won by Sara Errani and Andrea Vavassori, was played on a Thursday, in front of a half-empty crowd. They split a prize of two hundred thousand dollars. The winners of the singles tournaments got $3.6 million.

This year, the mixed-doubles champions will split a million dollars. The runners-up will get four hundred thousand. The matches will be played on show courts and broadcast on ESPN. In terms of buzz, the strategy is already a success. Even people who don’t follow doubles, including me, are talking about it. The tournament will be able to sell tickets, satisfy its television partners, and goose interest as never before. Fans want to see stars, and this approach offers a high concentration of them, in a novel situation. It will probably be quite fun. It’s easy to justify the changes: the tournament could bring in new fans, introduce more people to mixed doubles, encourage more tennis participation, and highlight the complementary qualities of men’s and women’s tennis being played on the same stage. Doubles players, who are already facing reduced opportunities as the tours put more resources into singles, may suffer for it. But there is no rule that an organization has to prop up the least successful and least lucrative part of its enterprise. The new format is good for business.

But what is it? A tennis tournament is an entertainment vehicle, but it’s also an athletic competition, not a popularity contest. Attention can be converted to money, but it’s not the equivalent of value. A popularity contest is an exhibition, and that’s what this looks like. To persuade top players to play, the tournament has insured that matches won’t interfere with their ambitions in the singles tournament—that’s why it’s now a two-day event. The scoring format of matches has been changed to make that shortened time frame possible: sets are first to four games, with a possible third set replaced by a ten-point tiebreak. Throughout the past two months, the tournament has turned the process of determining the field into its own kind of reality show, periodically announcing who’s put their names forward, who’s in, who’s out. Fourteen of the sixteen teams have been chosen so far—with some shuffling owing to injuries—and some of them are delightful. Venus Williams and Reilly Opelka should have a wild card into the Super Bowl, as far as I’m concerned. But only one pairing—the defending champions, Errani and Vavassori—has extensive success together. The world’s top female doubles player, Taylor Townsend, is playing, but her inclusion probably has more to do with her teammate, Ben Shelton, who happens to be an American in the singles Top Ten. The second-ranked woman in doubles, Kateřina Siniaková—who was just overtaken by Townsend for the No. 1 spot—put in a bid to play alongside the No. 1 men’s-doubles player, Marcelo Arévalo, but so far, at least, they’re not included in the contest. “When two world No. 1s in doubles don’t get into the tournament, there’s probably nothing more to say about it,” Siniaková said to a Czech reporter.

Last year, Siniaková, playing alongside Tomáš Macháč, won an Olympic gold medal; they crushed Medvedev and Mirra Andreeva, who are among the fourteen pairs so far confirmed to play at the U.S. Open, as it happens. Siniaková and Arévalo may still have a chance, as injuries and absences continue to shake up the pairings. Navarro, who’d been paired up with Sinner, is among those who have withdrawn, which is probably just as well; the two players had never spoken before their respective management teams submitted their names together. And Sinner is still alive in the Cincinnati Open, which will play its final less than a day before mixed-doubles play is set to start at the U.S. Open. (So, for that matter, is Alcaraz.) It may be that the combined talent of the best singles players is superior to a longtime doubles team. But nevertheless it would be interesting to watch them try. That’s not what’s happening here.

Instead, the U.S. Open is giving us a reality dating series—really. (This is another thing I had to fact-check.) It’s called “Game, Set, Matchmaker,” and, in it, an ice skater turned Pilates instructor will go on dates with seven men around the grounds of the U.S. Open. More mixed doubles! And more of what young people want, which is, apparently, derivatives of the show “Love Island.” That brings us back to Raducanu and Alcaraz, who have been rumored to be dating for years, mostly on the basis, it seems, of knowing each other’s names. The U.S. Open, understandably but cynically, used them to lead the competition’s hype video. Never mind that Alcaraz’s advancement to the final in Cincinnati on Monday will make it difficult—or perhaps impossible—for him to play in New York on Tuesday. Or that neither Alcaraz nor Raducanu has played much doubles at all, let alone together. “I know Emma since a really long time ago,” Alcaraz explained, of their pairing. Raducanu spoke of a “genuine connection.” I would be surprised if their management teams weren’t involved. Raducanu once replied to some kind words from Alcaraz after she had had surgery; that post, too, turned out to be fake. The two were once spotted saying hello, at a distance, in the warmup area of the Madrid Open, and recently did an event together for Evian, which sponsors them both. They were promoting artisanal water. The tabloids, meanwhile, have been shipping them for months. ♦