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.<\/p>\n
They played it indoors, with four pairs \u2013 featuring the likes of Donna Vekic, Pablo Carre\u00f1o Busta and Britain\u2019s Katie Boulter \u2013 and a top prize of $50,000 (\u00a337,000) to be shared by the winners. One observer described it as \u201ca fun round-robin with players calling their own lines, and a variety of well-known names \u2013 Pam Shriver and John Isner among them \u2013 sitting in the umpire\u2019s chair.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe fans loved it,\u201d my eyewitness continued. \u201cIf I were a tournament director, I would halve the men\u2019s and women\u2019s doubles draws and bring in mixed at tour events, because the crowds really go for it.\u201d<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
But the genius of the US Open\u2019s \u201creimagining\u201d is that it allows top singles players to participate. The matches usually last less than an hour \u2013 thanks to \u201cfast-four\u201d scoring and sudden-death deuces \u2013 and they happen during the preliminary week of singles qualifying, rather than clashing with the pointy end of the tournament proper.<\/p>\n
Despite worldwide enthusiasm for last year\u2019s inaugural event, organisers probably cursed the fact that the only specialist doubles pairing in that original 16-team draw \u2013 Italy\u2019s Sara Errani and Andrea Vavassori \u2013 came through to lift the trophy ahead of big-shots such as Alcaraz, Naomi Osaka and Venus Williams.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Is this just a quirky one-off, or does mixed doubles have unrealised potential? Well, the organisers of the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":57978,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[271,295,21792,122,113,28,616,285],"class_list":["post-57977","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-wimbledon","tag-carlos-alcaraz","tag-comment","tag-gaeumll-monfils","tag-serena-williams","tag-sport","tag-tennis","tag-us-open-tennis","tag-wimbledon"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57977","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=57977"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57977\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/57978"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=57977"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=57977"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=57977"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}