Doubles Troubles : Team Tennis Has Become Merely a Sideshow to the Singles’ Circuit, but That Wasn’t Always the Case

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,” doubles players 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 it was ended 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 Mulloy of Miami, the four-time champion in Boston with his Davis Cup partner, Bill Talbert, in 1942, ‘45, ’46 and ’48. “Nobody pays any attention to doubles at the Open. But at Longwood you had good crowds and press coverage, and in the later years even daily TV on the public stations.”

Doubles has practically not been shown on TV since PBS abandoned ATP tour coverage to the rights-fee-paying commercial networks in the early ‘80s. Longwood in 1967--John Newcombe and Tony Roche, Billie Jean King and Rosie Casals the champions--probably drew a larger number of viewers than will catch this year’s title bouts at some odd hour in Flushing.

In Boston, such Californian pairs as Don Budge and Gene Mako, Jack Kramer and Ted Schroeder, Stan Smith and Bob Lutz, Louise Brough and Margaret Osborne duPont became favorites.

“But the women went to watch Gardnar Mulloy,” sighs Longwood member Mary Louise Wogan. “He was a heartthrob. Tall, slim and handsome. A smoothie.”

Still is, campaigning on the over-80 circuit that he rules: a willowy 6-foot-1 with all his hair and strokes, if a couple of steps slower. This is a golden anniversary year for him and 78-year-old New Yorker Talbert, director emeritus of the Open. And for Oklahoman Don McNeill and Texan Frank Guernsey, whom Mulloy-Talbert beat by escaping seven match points in 1946 in the best-remembered, longest, most exciting--and controversial--of U.S. Doubles finales, 3-6, 6-4, 2-6, 6-3, 20-18.

“They did not!” is the good-natured declaration of 79-year-old Guernsey. To this day Guernsey, an ex-fighter pilot who downed two Nazi planes over Europe, believes he and McNeill were shot down by shoddy officiating. “In my heart I know Don and I won, 15-13 in the fifth. I’ve got the photos that prove it. But,” he laughs, “Mulloy and Talbert are in the record book and have the trophies.”

With World War II having ended, Bostonians were eager to see old favorites again. Wartime travel restrictions and manpower shortage had led the USTA to lump the doubles together with the singles, as today, though severely reduced in entries and time. For four years, 1942-45, one week was allotted at Forest Hills to play 32-player draws in men’s and women’s singles, 16 in doubles.

But the usual separation was resumed that sweet first postwar summer of ‘46, when another former pilot, Ted Williams, was crashing home runs once more, leading the Red Sox to a pennant at Fenway Park. Four miles to the west, Mulloy, McNeill, Guernsey, Kramer and Schroeder, among others, had also shed military uniforms, and were swinging lustily too.

Kept out of the service by diabetes, the urbane Talbert had been the mainstay of the diminished home front circuit, along with Pancho Segura. 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. There was no prize money in that amateur time, just room and board. But the trophies 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 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.

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.”