Unfriendly Confines for the Bryans

Roger Federer isn’t the only surefire Hall of Famer who has extra incentive to win the ATP World Tour Finals. Can you name the other two?

If you didn’t automatically roll your eyes and say, “Bob and Mike Bryan,” you can’t say you’re all-in when it comes to tennis. You may adore “full-flight Federer,” buy a certain brand of underwear just because Rafael Nadal was photographed in it, or perhaps you even cut gluten out of your diet. It doesn’t matter. Your real street cred as a tennis fan hinges on whether or not you can name the No. 2 seeds in the World Tour Finals doubles draw, make an informed comment on whether or not Nenad Zimonjic and Vasek Pospisil truly are the team of the future, or tell me when the Bryans last won this particular title.

The answer to that last question is: 2009. That means that the Bryans are suffering from the longest significant title drought of their long and distinguished careers. Bob and Mike have won every major title, including the Olympic gold medal, since they last won the year-end shootout. It was the first year that the season-ending event came to London’s O2 arena. Since then, it’s become an unfriendly place for the Bryans.

Don’t for a moment think that the Bryans aren’t in a bit of a snit about this. They were already looking ahead last week when the won the Paris Masters, becoming the first players in either singles or doubles to win six Masters 1000 titles in the same year. After the win, Mike said, "We're very happy to win Paris again, especially since we had to beat four quality teams along the way. . . We hope to keep our level high going into the last tournament of the season."

It’s impossible to get through more than two or three sentences about the Bryans without using the word “record,” so let’s get that out of the way. In addition to locking down six Masters finals this year, the Bryans added title No. 102 to their unprecedented haul. And they'll finish the year as the No. 1-ranked doubles team for a record 10th time, no matter what lies in store in London.

Now, some fans who actually have made an effort to follow doubles might claim to be a little Bryan-ed out. It’s easy to think of the 36-year-old twins as title hogs, exercising their natural advantages to dominate the discipline. (They’re twins, and lefty and righty to boot. No fair!) But isn’t that a little too much like complaining that 17-time Grand Slam singles champ Roger Federer is too good? Besides, as outstanding as the Bryans are, the doubles event in London is likely to be more competitive than the singles.

In each of the past three years, the eventual doubles champions in London were first-time winners at the World Tour Finals. In order, starting in 2011, they were: Max Mirnyi and Daniel Nestor, Marcel Granollers and Marc Lopez, and David Marrero and Fernando Verdasco. The Bryans were the beaten finalists on only one of those occasion, last year.

It says something about doubles that the only team among those champions that made the cut this year is Granollers and Lopez, although Nestor is contending again, albeit with his off-again/on-again partner Zimonjic. The realities of today’s game are such that it’s almost impossible to form a partnership and stick with it over an extended span of time. Only dedicated doubles teams can afford to coordinate their schedules so closely, yet even they are subject to the familiar danger of going stale, or slumping. And at that point, it’s time to change partners.

Observers often suspect that when doubles teams break up it’s because the principals have begun to rub each other the wrong way. They’re bickering. It’s time to divorce. But that isn’t always true. One of the key differences between singles and doubles is that certain partners can actually make you a better player, while in singles you’re stuck with yourself. Doubles offers virtually unlimited combinations, and the magic bullet just might be the new guy from Croatia whose locker is two doors down from yours. Why not take a chance to improve?

This, by the way, points to one of the great qualities of the Bryans, both as individuals and as a team. They’re twins, and therefore calling it quits or trying something new and different is fraught with all kinds of implications that guys like Nestor or Granollers don’t have to deal with. But were the Bryans any less gifted and hard-working, their twin-ship could easily have become an albatross. Unlike other doubles players, these guys are stuck with each other, yet it’s impossible to imagine either of them doing any better were they to have all the options available to others. Don’t you wish you could be be stuck with someone that way?

On paper, the Bryans ought to run away with this title. They are the top seeds in Group A, and enjoy a 12-1 win-loss advantage over the other members of their group. The only team that has defeated them is the No. 3 seeded pairing of Alexander Peya and Bruno Soares. Then again, the Bryans handled them on seven other occasions.

The biggest threat to the Bryans, on form, is the second-seeded team of Nestor and Zimonjic. This isn’t their first county fair; the team has played the season-ending championship on three other occasions, and they’ve won the title twice. Just to add a little more intrigue, this is their first appearance together at this event since the last time they won, in 2010. That year, they knocked off the Bryans in the semifinals.

Like the Bryans, Nestor and Zimonjic have lost only one match all year to another team from their group (it was to World Tour Finals newbies Julien Benneteau and Edouard Roger-Vasselin, at Cincinnati). You can bet they will be gunning for the Bryans, hoping to go out in a blaze of glory, having already announced that this is their last tournament together.

Don’t count on it, though. If first-timers are going to win this title for the fourth year in a row, start boning up on Group A’s teams of No. 3 seed Jean-Julien Rojer and Horia Tecau, or No. 8 Lukasz Kubot and Robert Lindstedt. The other debutante team is Group B’s fourth-seeded Benneteau and Roger-Vasselin.

It ought to be an entertaining and unpredictable doubles tournament. My only complaint going in is that the ATP chooses to use the two-set format with no-ad scoring and a match tiebreak. That is a travesty, and it commits the most serious sin against the game—it diminishes the credibility of the results.