Seeing Doubles Has Extra Significance on Davis Cup Weekend

Doubles are extra-base hits or happy hour bargains or what you see after consuming happy hour bargains or a form of tennis normally played behind grandstands rather than in front of them.

As applied to tennis, doubles results are the ones that get the smallest of type at the even the largest of tournaments.

How often, on the Monday morning after the U.S. Open or Wimbledon, is the water cooler conversation centered on who won a doubles title? In truth, how often does anyone know who won what doubles title?

These people are under the “also played” heading, sort of like a junior varsity basketball game. Doubles teams are the bearded ladies or the two-headed snakes of tennis, mere sideshows to what’s going on under the real big top.

Take, for example, a Davis Cup press conference in San Diego one day this week, at which singles players John McEnroe and Andre Agassi sat on one side of U.S. captain Tom Gorman and the doubles team of Ken Flach and Robert (Goose) Seguso sat on the other.

A seemingly interminable string of questions was tossed at McEnroe and Agassi as the media made a thinly veiled attempt to ignite a spark of controversy from these volatile personalities.

After a while, when it became obvious neither was going to rise to this bait, someone looked at Flach and Seguso and noticed Flach’s chin was on the table and Seguso’s eyelids were drooping.

“What are you doing here, Goose?” a voice asked.

“I don’t know,” Seguso said.

Later, Flach would say: “Doubles is treated like this all the time. We take kind of a back seat, but we’re used to it. It happens every week.”

But this week, of all weeks, Seguso did know what he was doing here. Nothing gives doubles teams their due quite like Davis Cup competition. Even then, there is only one doubles match and four singles, but that one doubles match is oh-so-important.

Day 2 of the three-day competition, today, belongs to the doubles.

“Saturday,” Flach said, “is set aside for us. It’s a chance to showcase doubles play. And that’s nice.”

This is a pivotal match regardless of what happens in the two Friday night singles matches. A doubles team is going to be in position to enable its country to (a) wrap up the match, (b) break a 1-1 deadlock or (c) stay alive.

And U.S. doubles has been in very good hands with Flach and Seguso, who are unbeaten in 10 Davis Cup matches. Of the leading doubles teams that have represented the United States in the event’s 89 years, none of the others are unbeaten.

What’s more, Flach and Seguso have combined to win doubles championships at the U.S. Open (1985), Wimbledon (1987 and 1988), Canadian Open (1988) and Olympics (1988).

Coincidentally, neither Seguso nor Flach have enjoyed much success in singles. Flach, for example, is ranked sixth in the world in doubles but 264th in singles. Seguso is seventh in doubles and 47th in singles.

“Doubles,” Flach said, “is a totally different game. It’s a game fans should relate to. You go to a country club, and 90% of the players are playing doubles. Fans can’t relate to what McEnroe or Boris Becker are doing, but they can implement, or try to implement, what we do. The basic strategies are the same.”

Togetherness, obviously, comes into play with this part of the U.S. Davis Cup team.

What difference does it make if McEnroe and Agassi have been sniping at each other for a few months? Neither can either help or hurt the other once a match begins.

Flach and Seguso have to mesh. McEnroe and Agassi have to mesh about as much as a quarterback and cornerback or a third baseman and right fielder. Doubles teams are like second-base combinations or quarterbacks and wide receivers or maybe synchronized swimmers. They have to know and trust the whereabouts of someone they cannot always see.

And this doubles team seemed almost born to play together. They were born 23 days and 600 miles apart in 1963, Flach in St. Louis and Seguso in Minneapolis.

A predictable story line would have them meeting on campus at UCLA or Stanford or at a tennis academy in Dallas or Miami or on a flight to Monaco or London, undoubtedly in first class.

Isn’t that the way it is for tennis players?

Not exactly.

Flach and Seguso went to Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville, a city of about 15,000 with an economy based on coal mining and farming. It’s more a town Lou Holtz or Bo Schembechler would visit in search of football players.

Nevertheless, SIU-Edwardsville was where Flach and Seguso were born as a doubles team seven years ago.

“We were the best players on the team,” he said, “and the coach wanted a strong No. 1 doubles team.”

Little did the coach realize that the No. 1 doubles team in Edwardsville someday would be good enough to be the No. 1 doubles team for the entire United States.

“Not likely,” Flach said. “Not coming out of a little town in Illinois. Edwardsville is not a big tennis hotbed.”

All things considered, maybe obscurity is a good place for a doubles team to be born. After all, except for special days like today, obscurity is where these guys live.