Why KC is the luckiest city in World Team Tennis
Every year, Kansas City tennis fans shell out a measly 25 bucks to get a glimpse of what people pay hundreds to see: the best doubles team in the world.
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| Nicole Reinertson |
| Bob Bryan serving for Kansas City |
This week the twins start defending their 2008 title in the U.S. Open -- and they're a hot commodity. So hot that two of the nation's top magazines, The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine, unwittingly published profiles about them in competing issues. As Wall Street Journal writer Richard Turner points out, that kind of coincidence is incredibly rare; the only comparison he could come up with was when Bruce Springsteen took the covers of both Time and Newsweek the same week in 1975.
Even if you don't know the difference between a tennis racket and a fly swatter, the profiles are a fascinating look at a pair of sports stars that we in Kansas City, in a small way, can claim as our own.
Both The New Yorker and The New York Times open with photos of the Bryan brothers frozen in mid-air, their bodies colliding in their signature chest bump. Both stories describe the twins semi-crazy upbringing by parents determined to make their kids tennis stars and skilled musicians. As The New Yorker's Burkhard Bilger writes, the twins got a Nintendo only after they completed a year's worth of special chores and agreed to play video games only from seven to eight on Friday nights. When they deviated from the specified time slot, their dad chucked the system into a ravine.
The articles also describe the twins as almost freakishly inseparable -- in college, Bob dragged a mattress into Mike's room, and even now the two share a house and bank account and rarely vacation separately. They even, Bilger writes, reserve the right to veto the other's choice in women.
Inevitably, even after raking in $6 million in prize money in their 11 years on the professional circuit, sometimes the brothers get on each others nerves. As Bilger writes, a loss at Wimbledon in 2006 unleashed the worst:
In the locker room afterward, the usual quips turned into shouts and then into a fistfight on the shuttle back from the tournament. "The car was rocking back and forth," Bob says. When they got to their apartment, Mike ran up the stairs with Bob scrambling after him. Mike reared back and mule-kicked his brother in the chest, then ran into the bathroom and locked himself in. Bob went into the next room, picked up Mike's new acoustic guitar and smashed it to splinters on the floor. "It was a good one, too," Mike says. "Bob is the more violent twin."
Despite their private spats, Bilger paints the Bryan brothers as the saviors of their craft. In 2005, some European tournament directors were looking to scale back the doubles circuit, which doesn't draw nearly as many spectators as the big-name singles matches. Wayne Bryan, the twins' father, started a campaign, going so far as to raise money for a legal challenge, that batted back the most dramatic changes. "Without the Bryans, a number of players told me, the doubles tour would no longer exist," Bilger writes.
That's not to say the Bryans have a one-dimensional mindset -- or set of talents. This month, they're releasing their first album, a compilation of original rock numbers inspired by their tennis experiences. In his piece, New York Times writer, Eric Konigsberg, sat in on one of their jam sessions. Mike plays guitar; Bob fingers the keys.
The songs are about tennis and the grind of the tour. From "Let It Rip": "I can't be broken again/I've got to hold on now." And from "Autograph" (on which Bob raps): "See the little girl with the Sharpie in her hand/She's walking my way ignoring her man/Waited two hours just to see me move/Gimme that pen and feel the groove.""I've got to say, while we've been doing this, tennis has been the farthest thing from my mind," Bob said.
Uh, don't quit your day job just yet.
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