What Mixed Doubles Tennis Players Do After Hours

There they were today, two young men and two young women, somewhat clothed in white attire, in the Finals of the Mixed Doubles at Wimbledon. It was then my imagination took flight towards after-hours places and situations it shouldn’t have, but the mind sometimes goes where it wants to.

Do the man and woman on each team eat dinner together after the match? Do they dress nicely for dinner to impress each other? Jewelry? What kind? How much do they talk about tennis versus, you know, other things? After dinner, do they hold hands and walk home and enter the same hotel room and, you know?

You do know.

What happens after these tennis matches – not so much during them – is what I wanted to know. What happens if the man on one team starts liking the woman on the other team more than his partner? How does that affect team chemistry? Can you win in mixed doubles when your partner goes out with someone else?

“Mixed doubles tennis teams don’t stay together very long,” said ESPN broadcaster Pam Shriver today. “A lot of dating goes on.”

I bet it does. Seems as natural as a ripe peach on a vine.

Mixed doubles tennis is largely, if not completely, about estrogen and testosterone, the libido, id, and superego, animalism, skin exposure, athletic movements and dexterity, Adam and Eve, and the birds and the bees.

For the past few months, I’ve concluded that no sports are entertaining, but I take that back. This one grabbed my attention today. My main interest was not so much about the play on the court but the action off it.

If a mixed doubles team isn’t getting along romantically, I assume they don’t play well as a team. So it follows that the two teams that made it to today’s final are getting along pretty darn well. Know what I mean?

Off the court, all is going smoothly.

How else are we supposed to interpret this?

When you watch them play,y they often give each other hand signals before serving. I wonder if those are really about where to serve, or flirtatious gestures only the two of them would understand, perhaps about what happened the night before, or what they want to happen later that night, when alone, after dinner, without tennis racquets in their hands.

I’m disappointed in myself. How could it be that my sophomoric predilection has never once triggered me, until now, to write about mixed doubles tennis after hours in hotel rooms with “Do Not Disturb” signs? This should have been the focus of the first blog I ever wrote.

What a miss.

There’s something else. If you win the mixed doubles Wimbledon title, each player gets about $60,000, a pittance compared with the million-plus for the singles’ winners. Does this mean they don’t go to the high-end restaurants after matches and stay in pedestrian hotels?

And if that’s the case, not being as rich as singles’ players, do they fight over money? Do they argue about whether to stay in a three-, four-, or five-star hotel at tournaments? Does the woman want to date the winner of the men’s singles title and vice versa for the men, because they like what more money affords them?
Do they really stay in separate hotel rooms? Animals wouldn’t if they didn’t have to. Why should mixed doubles players behave any differently?

In one scintillating and spine-tingling sport, we are gifted the most basic of human instincts, the inexorable pull of men towards women and women towards men.

Attraction, allure, and mystery entertain endlessly.

This is the greatest sports story never written – until right now.