Is this just a quirky one-off, or does mixed doubles have unrealised potential? Well, the organisers of the recent Masters 1000 event in Cincinnati clearly see some upside. A week ago, tournament director Bob Moran staged a mixed-doubles exhibition for those who had already been eliminated from the conventional knockout draws.
They played it indoors, with four pairs – featuring the likes of Donna Vekic, Pablo Carreño Busta and Britain’s Katie Boulter – and a top prize of $50,000 (£37,000) to be shared by the winners. One observer described it as “a fun round-robin with players calling their own lines, and a variety of well-known names – Pam Shriver and John Isner among them – sitting in the umpire’s chair.
“The fans loved it,” my eyewitness continued. “If I were a tournament director, I would halve the men’s and women’s doubles draws and bring in mixed at tour events, because the crowds really go for it.”
Mixed doubles is hardly a new idea. It has been part of tennis ever since athletic curates started chasing eligible young ladies around the rectory lawns of Victorian England.
But the genius of the US Open’s “reimagining” is that it allows top singles players to participate. The matches usually last less than an hour – thanks to “fast-four” scoring and sudden-death deuces – and they happen during the preliminary week of singles qualifying, rather than clashing with the pointy end of the tournament proper.
Despite worldwide enthusiasm for last year’s inaugural event, organisers probably cursed the fact that the only specialist doubles pairing in that original 16-team draw – Italy’s Sara Errani and Andrea Vavassori – came through to lift the trophy ahead of big-shots such as Alcaraz, Naomi Osaka and Venus Williams.