Your Call, 10.10

Mornin' everyone. This will be brief, but I'll be back with a post later in the day. Did you notice the doubles results posted at the ATP website today? Fabrice Santoro and Michael Llodra advanced to the semis of the Kremlin Cup by virtue of a 6-0,6-1 win over Janko Tipsarevic and Viktor Troicki, whom I wouldn't exactly characterize as cannon fodder.

I rarely write about doubles, even though Bob and Mike Bryan (never mind the Big Dog Bryan, father Wayne) are not just an outstanding doubles team headed for the International Tennis Hall of Fame, but truly model citizens of TennisWorld. The Bryan family does an enormous amount to grow the game, it's given back to charity in ways that put some top singles players to shame, and many of you will remember the way the Bryans stepped up to donate a stringing machine (and they insisted on it being a high-quality, expensive stringing machine) to our tennis-playing friends in Baghdad. And that was back in the really dark days, at the height of insurgent campaign against the Iraqi government.

Okay, so I went off on a bit of a tangent, but the bottom line is that I don't feel I do enough for those guys, or the doubles game in general. It's tough, though, for a variety of reasons - starting with the fact that no other major sport has what might be called two divisions. Imagine if soccer had a second, popular, credible sister-game (say five-man soccer, with a few tweaks of the rules, like a smaller playing field), and it was played right before or after your typical, mainstream soccer match.

Doubles is a great game that will never get the respect it deserves because singles exists. In fact, the proof that doubles is a fantastic game is right there in the fact that it continues to exist in spite of singles, even if it will never generate quite the same degree of interest. Anyway, I'm starting to run on at the mouth - and to think all I really wanted to do in this Your Call is point out that given the nature of doubles, an oh-and-one win is quite a feat. In high-quality doubles, service breaks are more of a rarity than in singles. I could think of a lot worse ways to spend my time than watching Santoro and Llodra play doubles (like watching either of those guys play Nadal or Federer in singles!)

Enjoy whatever it is you're watching today, I'll see y'all later.

-- Pete