by Pete Bodo
They were like two youngsters shaken awake from an afternoon nap: each of them was thinking, What day is it? Where am I? Who am I? The answers were: Thursday, Sept. 10th, 2009, they were in Arthur Ashe Stadium, and they were Travis Parrott and Carly Gullickson, the newly crowned US Open mixed doubles champions. As Gullickson said, "Ummm. . . just being out there on that court today (it was Gullickson's first appearance on Ashe) and, you know, even during the trophy presentation, like, it was surreal a little bit."
Surreality was a fitting ending to the story of these two young Americans, whose journey to the final - where they dispatched two of the great doubles players of our time, Leander Paes and Cara Black - began in the improbable, detoured around the impossible, took the short cut to ridiculous and climaxed with the mind-blowing. Oh, what a ride they had!
Okay, I know it was "just" mixed doubles. But you know what, For Parrott and Gullickson, it beat a poke in the eye with a sharp stick, which is what both of them experienced in the pre-historic period of this tournament. Gullickson qualified for the singles, but lost in straight-sets to fellow American Jill Craybas - one of the few players on whom that doubles wizard, Paes, has seniority (at 35, she's just a year younger). Ouch.
Gullickson survived two rounds partnered with Alexa Glatch the the women's doubles, but let's face it - in doubles, you either have to win a tournament or brain one of your opponents with the racquet to get any attention.
Think I'm being a smart alec? The highlight doubles moment of this summer was that YouTube video featuring the big World Team Tennis dust up occasioned when Robert Kendrick drilled Paes with a serve and the players - including John McEnroe - almost staged the equivalent of baseball's bench-clearing brawl. This is something Miss Carly would know about, her dad having been major league pitcher.
Parrott, a native of Portland, Ore., has been a journeyman on the tour for seven years. He was nowhere near the singles draw, but he did get into the men's doubles (with Filip Polasek) as a no. 13 seed. "We had two match points and we lost," Parrott said. "I was devastated for three days. But I had two days to recover (before the mixed event began) and it just changed my mind-set. I was happy to be out there again, having fun. And Carly and I said from the beginning, let's just have fun."
The beginning almost didn't happen. Gullickson was supposed to play with Rajeev Ram, but they figured out rather late that they weren't ranked highly enough to get in. Parrott was meant to play with Abigail Spears, but some World Team Tennis machinations resulted in the USTA offering Spears a wild card - if she played with her WTT teammate, Kendrick. This House of Borgia (no relation to the Swedish tennis icon) goes on in doubles all the time, and Spears did what any other self-respecting, upstanding, win-hungry doubles player would do - she dumped Parrott.
She wouldn't have Parrot, but in a tale familiar to anyone who's ever had a hopeless crush, Spears she offered to hook Parrott up with a friend. . . Carly Gullickson. Male doubles players, like most men, are dogs; Parrott forgot all about Spears and immediately texted Gullickson. It was two days before the US Open began, and although they signed a wild-card request form late, they were given the berth.
I'd love to report that they played Spears and Kendrick in the first-round, but it didn't work out that way. What happened may have been even better.
Gullickson and Parrott drew the no. 6-seeded team of Max Mirnyi and Nadia Petrova, and won, after trailing 9-7 in the Super Tiebreaker (the first-to-10 'breaker that decides the match when the teams split sets). They neutralized the first match point when Gullickson and Mirnyi the Belarusian thunder-maker, got into a point-blank volley exchange."I think Travis took a second serve and maybe lobbed over Petrova," Gullickson said, when asked to re-construct the point. "She got it back, then Travis reflexed the ball back, and it was like a 10 or 11 ball rally at the net. . "
"Just volleys," Parrot interjected. "like the kind of under the net, dipping low kind of volleys."
"And then, I think I, like, hit a winner or something down the line," Gullickson finished.
Or something?????? You've got to love Carly; she's a modest Kentucky girl; I half expected her to blush and bat her eyelashes as she finished her blow-by-blow.
Parrot, perhaps feeling that he could at least pull his share of the load, then hit a service-return back at Petrova, who blew the next shot. "That part was kind of uneventful," Parrot conceded.
Over the ensuing days, Gullickson and Parrott took out high-quality teams: Sania Mirza and Daniel Nestor, LIsa Raymond and Marcin Martkowski (seeded no. 3), and the top seeds, Mahesh Bhupathi and Liezel Huber. Those who were hoping to see Bhupati and Paes fire decapitation-grade volleys at each other (they were once a great team, but the relationship blew up and turned ugly) were disappointed, while Gullickson and Parrott finally recognized that it was time to take things seriously - at least a little bit.
Up until the final, they confessed, all those profound baseline conferences that doubles squads hold were less about whether Parrott should cross on Gullickson's first serve, or she should serve wide to the backhand, than who had said what in the locker room, and who was flying back to New York to watch them play. But today was different. "All of a sudden, it's like, Wow, this is a Grand Slam," Parrott said. "We should probably take this more seriously. So we were kind of talking some strategy out there today."
That was a good idea, because their opponents, seeded no 2, were Black, a veteran whom all women players ought to study because she actually know how to serve - her motion isn't just smooth and pretty, it transcends the mandates of gender. Black actually tosses the ball well out in front, so she lands a few feet inside the court at the finish, ready to take the ball on the rise, or - egads! - attack the net. Most women don't do this, because they want to land squared up, very close to the baseline, where they can clutch their racquets with two sweaty, trembling little hands, hoping to win the ensuing rally. You want to talk about a true pioneer of women's tennis, check out diminutive (she doesn't quite crack 5-6, and doesn't bother to lie about it), serve-and-volleying maniac Cara Black. In some ways, she makes me think of Justine Henin, and that's not at all a bad thing.
Furthermore, Paes is a bad dude, a doubles outlaw who don't take nothin' from no one. That suggests great pride and a refreshingly McEnroe-esque love of doubles, even if you don't approve of trash-talking, or taking every feeble overhead lofted your way as a great opportunity to drill a hole in the forehead of the other team's netman. Paes was appropriately dressed in gray shorts and a sleeveless black sausage casing; those who get off on studying a guy's armpit hair were in hog heaven.
The balance of experience lay heavily across the net from the American squad: Black, who's 30, and from that distinguished family of doubles specialists spawned in Zimbabwe, has won a pile of women's doubles majors and three mixed titles; in all, she had 46 doubles titles going into 2009. Paes had 40 doubles titles by the end of 2008, including nine majors in men's and mixed. Of course, neither the WTA nor the ITF (which provides the daily media packets and cheat sheets at Grand Slams) bothered to run off a precis of the mixed final - I can just see the respective parties saying, "You do it - no, you!" before deciding that nobody really cares so to hail with it.
So Gullickson and Parrott might have been forgiven for asking for their opponents' autographs; instead, they utterly out-maneuvered them when the balls began to fly. And it was encouraging to see a respectable crowd gather in Ashe for the match.
I've always enjoyed mixed doubles; it's represents a form of gender bi-partisanship that's welcome amid all the white noise generated by the gender warriors on both side of the divide. I enjoy watching women hold their own against men without all that Hear Me Roar crap. And I like it when men treat women a equals, without condescension, but know where to draw the line when it comes to intimidation, or bullying.
When Parrott was asked if he "lets up" on his serve for the woman, he immediately shot back, "Hell, no!" Yet at one point in the match, when he smacked a warp-speed winner at Black - and it was all she could do to fend it off with her frame - he immediately raised a hand and said, "Sorry." Black merely nodded to confirm that she accepted the shot, no offense taken.
Paes and Black had an uncharacteristically bad day, and Parrott and Gullickson played very well. So the games went by fast, the Americans breaking twice in each set to win 6-2, 6-4. Black, in particular, struggled, perhaps because the wind presented particular problems related to her size. Did the winners get together and decide to beat up on the "little" girl?
"No," Gullickson said, "Because Cara, I played her in doubles so many times. I mean, she got some of Travis' balls (including rocketing serves) back today, and at the net she has such good hands. I mean, Cara is obviously really good. She's No. 1 in the world."
!90576535 Parrott served very well and showed a great knack for opening up the court - he created angles to exploit, and then finished with sharp, clean volleys. Perhaps more important, he trusted his partner completely and implicitly, which kept him from taking on more than he should, or could, handle. As he said, "For me, the psychology changed because Carly's so good at the net. I don't feel the pressure to have to come up with a big serve. In mixed doubles, in the past I'd end up double-faulting more because I had to get a lot more free points. With Carly, put a good serve in there and she'll clean it up. And it's just. . . I don't know."
Indeed, Gullickson has wonderful hands and she put them to great use yesterday. One point near the end of the match stands out: Parrot served and Gullickson intercepted Black's return with an acutely angled drop volley with severe underspin. The shot caught Paes going the wrong way. He turned raced toward the umpire's chair to make the get, with Parrot sliding over to cover his line - thereby leaving the middle open. Paes made a great retrieve and belted the ball down the middle, but Gullickson, anticipating the shot was closing the gap. She took the ball moving in and punching it through the real estate vacated by Paes.
Mary Jo Fernandez had it right when she said that Gullickson was the Most Valuable Player, and the way she played the game just begged the question: Is there a doubles specialist inside Carly Gullickson, dying to get out?
"Umm, for the last few years I've always done better in doubles. But this past year my singles has, you know. . . I've won a few tournaments and qualified for a few Grand Slams. So I got a few more points and a lot more confidence in my singles. But, I just think my game suits doubles more, and maybe that's why I have more success in doubles. I definitely love doubles. I probably could say I like doubles a little bit more than I do singles, probably because it's less stressful. But. . .I don't know."
This is a dilemma many a player with a conspicuous talent for doubles has faced, and while a few players made the conscious decision to abandon their singles dreams, most have continued to emphasize singles (think Todd Woodbridge) until rankings and other considerations force them to re-consider and accept their fate. Doubles is a great game; in fact, there's only one thing wrong with doubles. There's also this game called singles.
But becoming a doubles specialist doesn't exactly qualify as a fate worse than death. Life can be fun in the House of Borgia.