The heat at the Australian Open, which launched the tennis season this week, has breached a hundred and twenty degrees on court. Nine singles players have retired from matches so far, many citing the heat; one started hallucinating—he said that he saw Snoopy, from “Peanuts”—before collapsing on court. This is doubles weather—less court to cover, less sweat. And the doubles draw, as it happens, has been the site of the tournament’s most notable non-weather story so far: the unexpected return of Patrick Rafter, a Queensland native who hasn’t played professional tennis in more than a decade but teamed up with fellow Aussie Lleyton Hewitt.
Rafter, who is forty-one, has three Grand Slam titles to his name; he and Hewitt are the last two men to win a singles title and a doubles title in any of the Majors over their careers. In the decade since, the top men’s players, and most of the top women’s players, have all but abandoned the doubles game. The Williams sisters are the exception, having paired with each other to win thirteen Grand Slam doubles titles on top of their combined twenty-four in singles. On the men’s side, Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal, Novak Djokovic, and Andy Murray have won thirty-eight singles titles among them. Their doubles total? Zero.
This was not always the case. John Newcombe won seven Grand Slam singles titles and seventeen in doubles; Roy Emerson collected twelve and sixteen, respectively; John McEnroe, seven and nine. In addition to becoming the world’s No. 1 singles player, briefly, in 1999, Rafter was, at one time, a Top Ten doubles player, winning tournaments with a host of partners: Pat Cash, Jim Courier, Mark Philippoussis, and Jonas Björkman, with whom Rafter won the Australian Open, in 1999.
Good singles players can be good doubles players, but the skills required for each game are neither identical nor mutually exclusive. As an aspiring tennis player, I spent time at most every practice session trying to perfect Rafter’s backhanded overhead, in much the same way that my taller friends tried to perfect Larry Bird’s turnaround jumper. Doubles is a game won at the net, and Rafter’s overhead made him lethal from either side of the court, no matter where the ball was hit.
In a post-match interview, Hewitt suggested that the partnership with Rafter had been as much about education as anything else. “He puts the younger guys through their paces,” Hewitt said of Rafter’s doubles training with the Australian Davis Cup team. For years, many top players of years gone by have extolled the benefits of doubles, none more so than McEnroe. “I know that it helped me play better singles working on my doubles game,” he said last year, before the U.S. Open.
But McEnroe acknowledged that it was unlikely that the top players would suddenly split their time. “Why we are even playing doubles at this point is a mystery to me,” he said, in December. His point was, in part, that the doubles game had changed, with players now standing so close to the net that points rarely last longer than a few quick volleys. But it was also a comment about finances: the great, self-perpetuating problem for doubles is that, as the prize money has increased on the singles side, the imperative for tennis’s one per cent to play doubles has decreased. They skip it, and TV does, too, with exceptions made for the Sisters Williams, and, occasionally, for the Brothers Bryan; the lack of sponsorship depresses the prize money further and gives top players even less incentive to play. It doesn’t help that singles has become an ever more physical game. Asking Rafael Nadal to play another match on the same day as a three-hour, one-on-one showdown won’t do much for the longevity of his knees. McEnroe now thinks the money devoted to doubles might better be diverted to prize money for lower-ranked players, who often have to play doubles just to cover expenses.
And yet, at an Open tune-up in Brisbane, Federer saw enough value in the doubles game to make the surprise announcement that he would play with Nicolas Mahut. Federer had played doubles in just three tournaments in the previous two years (one of them being the Olympics, where patriotism provides an extra incentive), so his entry had the air of a man looking for any way to regain form that saw him drop to seventh in the world, his lowest ranking since he was twenty-one—at this point, for Federer, anything might be worth a shot. Federer advanced to the semifinals (he made the finals of the singles draw) and boosted his doubles ranking to three hundred and fifty-one.
Federer isn’t playing doubles at the Open–he hasn’t entered a Slam on the doubles draw since 2004–and neither are any of the Big Four on the men’s side. Still, they were enthusiastic about Rafter’s return. “Watching Doubles on TV, love it #Hewitt #Rafter c’mon,” Federer tweeted. “Great to see rafter playing again,” Murray said, also via Twitter. “Holding his own as you would expect! Classical game you don’t see nowadays.” You couldn’t see it for long: Rafter and Hewitt lost in the first round. And if the game’s stars don’t start backing doubles with more than just tweets, the game may soon be nowhere to see at all.
_
Photograph by Ella Ling/Rex/BPI/AP