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Braden's view of the California court manners of recently unleashed female players competing against their own sex is borne out by experiences elsewhere in the country. Says a Georgia psychiatrist: "They look at the ball and think of it as the washing-machine repairman, and flail away." The Atlanta Lawn Tennis Association, which began in 1950 with just 35 members, now has 10,000, among them 4,500 women who compete every week on 400 organized teams. This year the competition on and off the court, and the consequent bickering, grew so hot and ludicrous that many veteran players withdrew from the game. Said the program's coordinator, a woman: "They couldn't pay me to do this job again." Efforts to psych the opposition ran all the way from intentional on-court talking (and even smoking) to giving wrong driving directions to teams headed for a remote court, so that the enemy would be more than 20 minutes late and thus forfeit the match. Off-putting snide remarks, of the sort now openly urged by many books as part of tennis strategy, flourished. ("Are you paired with Sue? You'll never win.") In Class A, where some of the best women tennis players in the city compete, a woman with a reputation for making bad line-ball calls to her side's advantage sued for defamation of character when her opponents protested.
If Freud were living at this hour, he would not have to ask "What does a woman want?" The answer is a big serve. The spectacle of women trying to prove that anatomy is not destiny and —temporarily, at least, turning into cavepersons on the mixed-doubles courts as a result—may be either good news or bad in the long run. One who thinks cutthroat competition for women is bad is Anthropologist Margaret Mead. She admits that if women turn their backs on the home and childbearing, they may need sport to give them confidence in their bodies, as men have done since the beginnings of society. But she thinks Americans are terrible sports ("We're always saying, 'Kill the umpire' "), and she wishes that in or out of sports, American women would set a better example for men. They still could. Significantly, perhaps, it appears that among the new wave of women players, those who have full-time jobs and, like men, play the game at night and on weekends seem most calm and mannerly. For the Women's Movement and mixed doubles alike, that phenomenon may have many happy returns.
* A remorseless doubles player once had a standard set of pregame excuses printed up on cards and handed them out to his weekend opposition in the form of a check-off list. Among his selections: Sunday-morning hangover; ill-strung racquet; soggy tennis balls.