During the first week of Wimbledon in 2019, even with two grand slam singles titles up for contention, most of the attention early on came from an unexpected direction. Serena Williams and Andy Murray had announced at the last minute that they would compete together in mixed doubles and, as they marched through the early rounds, for once doubles commanded the spotlight. Williams spectacularly deflected 138mph first serves for clean winners while Murray coolly navigated the net, and this unexpected meeting of two greats provoked a jubilant atmosphere that seemed even more joyful than many other famous moments before them.
Months earlier, Williams and Roger Federer had started the season by facing each other for the first time in mixed doubles during the Hopman Cup, an instance that landed them on the front pages of newspapers around the world even though it was only an exhibition.
Both events illustrated one of the unique aspects of professional tennis, qualities that the sport has never really embraced since the dawn of the Open era. Women’s tennis has long been the biggest women’s sport in the world and tennis is the one major, lucrative global sport where male and female stars can command comparable popularity while competing on the same courts and stages.
The Hopman Cup was one of the few places where those players would converge in competition, but while it was enjoyable and popular, it was ultimately an inconsequential exhibition. Its removal from the calendar after 2019 had minimal impact on the sport and its return later this year, on clay after Wimbledon, will likely complete its slide into irrelevance.
The new tennis season, however, will see the sport’s first attempt to harness the combined force of men’s and women’s tennis with the inaugural United Cup, the first tour level mixed-team event headed by the ATP and WTA, which is run in partnership with Tennis Australia.
The event will be played across Brisbane, Perth and Sydney, with six round robin groups of three teams, $15m prize money and a maximum of 500 ATP and WTA points available. Still, question marks surround the proposed format. Rather than ties being contested over best of three rubbers, the event will be held over a more expansive best of five rubbers with 18 teams and the ties will be played over two days. Each team includes up to eight players, with three men and women singles players and one doubles player each.
As a consequence, the prospect of watching Spain’s Rafael Nadal alongside Paula Badosa, Iga Swiatek and Hubert Hurkcaz for Poland or Stefanos Tsitsipas of Greece competing with Maria Sakkari is counterbalanced by the numerous far lower ranked players present. While this presents a great opportunity for players such as Michail Pervolarakis, the world No 504, some of the matchups fall short of what the ATP, WTA and Tennis Australia surely hope will grow into a premier team event.
There was a time not long ago when men’s and women’s tennis still seemed to see themselves as adversaries. The ATP’s website and social channels would often appear to go out of their way to refrain from mentioning the WTA or its players. During joint tournaments acquiring basic information such as a full order of play was a chore in itself, with the ATP and WTA websites sometimes only publishing the court times of their own players.
Things have shifted over the past few years, particularly under the tenure of Andrea Gaudenzi, who became ATP CEO in 2020. While there is no current prospect of a merger between the tours, as Gaudenzi has aggressively pursued his new ATP strategic plan, he has stressed a greater willingness to work with the WTA. At a time when both the social and financial value of women’s sports is rising, and the WTA remains the most lucrative of them all, it also benefits the ATP to present a more united front.
From the audience’s perspective, mixed doubles involving the top singles players can often be wildly enjoyable. The men are often dominant when serving against their female opponents, but otherwise doubles lessens other physical differences between men and women.
Many of the top women players enjoy absorbing the greater pace provided by male players from the baseline, and from Angelique Kerber outrallying Federer in forehand exchanges during the 2019 Hopman Cup final to Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova marking herself as the undisputed MVP during the mixed doubles competition at the Tokyo Olympics last year as she and Andrey Rublev won gold, the dynamics of mixed doubles between high-quality players makes it uniquely thrilling. The question for the first week of the new tennis season is whether the United Cup will truly be able to reflect that.
On Wednesday, on the eve of the new event and season, the event began with the news that Australia’s Nick Kyrgios had withdrawn due to an unspecified injury, meaning his keenly awaited match against Nadal has been cancelled. Great Britain are the final team in the three-team round robin group, with Cameron Norrie, Harriet Dart, Dan Evans, Katie Swan, Jan Choinski and Ranah Stoiber representing GB as singles players, and Jonny O’Mara and Ella McDonald as the doubles entrants. Great Britain will face Australia on Thursday and Friday, with Norrie beginning at 8am GMT against Alex de Minaur before Nadal awaits on Saturday.