Doubles Demise : Once a Proud and Popular Sport, Doubles Tennis Has Become Merely a Sideshow to the Singles’ Circuit

Although doubles is the tennis game of choice of most hackerly Americans, and is frequently more entertaining than singles at the professional level, players of the team variation will be pariahs at the U.S. Open. Hidden away like Rochester’s crazy wife in “Jane Eyre,” doublists are the lost boys and girls of big league tennis-out of sight, out of mind.

No headlines, virtually no image-making minutes on TV. Their comings and goings are confined-and then only sometimes-to back-page agate, the inky catch-all of teeny-type. If Jimmy Hoffa were playing alongside the Unknown Soldier at Flushing Meadow, nobody would blow their cover.

Everybody knows that Pete Sampras and Steffi Graf won the 1995 singles titles. But the doubles? Cheech and Chong? Thelma and Louise?

It wasn’t always this way: Not in the days before the dawning of prize money tennis in 1968. Before that, and going back to 1917, a national doubles championship tourney for men and women stood on its own, apart from the singles, and did very well on the lawn of Boston’s Longwood Cricket Club.

Doubles, just doubles. Everyman’s game.

“It was great,” remembers Aussie farm boy, all-timer Roy Emerson, the victor with countrymen four times as an amateur, 1959-60 with Neale Fraser and 1965-66 with Fred Stolle. “Those were the days of the Eastern grass court circuit, when all the important tennis in the U.S. and Australia was outdoors and on grass. You’d go to Boston, tune up your game playing doubles, then move on to New York-Forest Hills-for the U.S. singles”--which Emerson won in 1961 and 1964. “The two tournaments were the year’s climax.

“We loved it as much as the crowds. For one thing it was a tournament uniquely devoted to doubles, a game dear to Aussie hearts. For another, they also held U.S. titles in senior and father-and-son doubles at the same time. We didn’t have those events in Australia then, and enjoyed watching the old guys and the kids.”

But the verdant 17 rectangle circus was closed down by the U.S. Tennis Assn. in 1968. Hoping to create an American version of Wimbledon, the USTA pulled the men’s, women’s and mixed doubles to Forest Hills-later moving to Flushing Meadow-under the banner of the U.S. Open.

“It’s too bad,” reflects 81-year-old Gardnar [SENTENCES MISSING HERE] Talbert had been the mainstay of the diminished home front circuit, along with frisky Ecuadorean Pancho Segura, an NCAA title-winning scholar at the University of Miami. Talbert was glad to see his partner, Mulloy, back from combat duty as skipper of a Naval landing craft.

“We felt we could be the No. 1 team and get the doubles slot for the Davis Cup final against Australia,” Talbert said. “The Cup had been on hold since 1939, and taking it back from the Aussies was on everybody’s mind.

“It was either Mulloy and I or Kramer and Schroeder. They had won in 1940-41 so we both had two legs on the old trophies and could get them for keeps with a third win. There was no prize money in that amateur time, just room and board. But the trophies that went back to 1923, sterling umbrella stands with such names on them as Bill Tilden, George Lott, Ellsworth Vines, Johnny Van Ryn, Don Budge, Gottfried von Cramm. They seemed like a million bucks to us then.”

Mulloy says, “The Longwood committee couldn’t decide who to seed first, so they flipped a coin, and it was us.”

No such problem with the women. Margaret Osborne--the future Mrs. duPont--and Louise Brough had won four straight on the way to a record 12 titles. They won their fifth in 35 minutes, 6-1, 6-3, over Pat Todd and Mary Arnold Prentiss, a totally California encounter.

But the male favorites struggled, and the Kramer-Schroeder duo failed to keep its final round appointment, stunned in the semifinals, 7-5, 6-3, 6-2, by McNeill and the skittering 5-foot-6, 141-pound Guernsey.

Mulloy and Talbert barely dodged extinction. Belgians Philippe Washer and Jack van den Eynde were two points from victory on the latter’s serve in the third round. Frank Parker and Bob Falkenburg led by two sets and held two match points in the semis. “We always won the big points that year,” says Talbert.

Seven very big match points they snatched from Guernsey and McNeill as the house-filling audience of 2,500 jiggled in delicious suspense through the 90-minute fifth set.

“They didn’t win the sixth,” insists Guernsey of Talbert’s debatable was-it-in-or-out? volley in the 28th game. Witnesses seemed evenly divided.

McNeill says, “I don’t know. It was over on Frank’s sideline. I felt bad for him, the only one of us not to win that title.”

Although they broke McNeill when he served for the title at 5-3. Mulloy and Talbert were ever behind, continually sidestepping calamity in the closing set. Mulloy slithered out of 0-40, match points 1-2-3, to 7-7. Four games later he rescued himself to 11-11 from 15-40, Match Points 4-5, with an ace and a service winner.

The appealing little Guernsey reaped hurrahs by slipping a break point to 15-14, and up came Talbert to serve the questionable game. When Mulloy flubbed a routine smash Talbert faced Match Point 6 at 30-40. Guernsey backhanded a low return and Talbert came in to angle a backhand volley cross-court. Guernsey looked at the ball alighting, grinned, pitched his racket high and rushed to grasp McNeill’s hand.

It was over-or was it? As the crowds whooped it up for their upset pets, Mulloy was pointing at the sideline judge whose palms were parallel to the turf, the signal for a good shot.

“It was very close. I thought it touched the line-but I was hoping he’d see it our way,” says Mulloy. “And he did. We looked at the newsreels afterward and you couldn’t tell.”

Guernsey will be happy to show you blow-up frames of those movies “proving the ball clearly out.” The line judge, Roger Fenn, headmaster of a Concord (Mass.) prep school bearing his name, had the same photos which he claimed confirmed his call.

None of that mattered. Umpire Dave Niles announced, “Deuce!” to shouts of “No!” and some booing. “We argued for a while, but you know how far that goes with a judgment call,” says McNeill.

Still, they immediately had Match Point 7, but a shaken Guernsey netted his return.

Groans greeted McNeill’s loss of serve to 16-17. But he and Guernsey lifted the crowd by retaliating, two points from defeat, by cracking Mulloy.

Tiebreakers were 24 years up the road, and it appeared this might be the match that would never end. However, the champions capsized McNeill to 19- 18 and Mulloy served it out in four points.

It seemed interminable, but really lasted 2 hours 40 minutes, hardly remarkable today. Could anybody play 74 games so quickly in these dawdling days?

“Are you kidding?” says Mulloy. “We didn’t sit down on the changeovers. Just kept going. The rule was: play is continuous. They don’t even play best-of-five sets at Flushing except for the final.”

Mulloy showered, then returned to the court to lose the father-final with his sire.

“I think my dad was drained, sweating out my match with Talbert,” he says.

A few weeks later Guernsey visited a dentist to have a couple of teeth pulled. He was given gas, and awoke to a horrifying sight.

“I was drenched in my own blood,” he says. “The dentist looked stunned, and wondered what happened. He had his instruments in my mouth when suddenly I went wild. He had to get help to hold me down.

“I apologized and told him about the match. I dreamed it all over. Talbert’s shot was out again but the line judge called it good again. It was too much for me this time. I charged the guy and strangled him.”