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Untold fortunes are dribbled away on fringe gimmickry. Samples: Kingaroo Practice Pouches that carry eight tennis balls at the player's waist; Volley-Hi, the taller tennis-ball basket stand; GRABIT, a tiny claw set on the racquet butt for picking up single balls without bending; Lobster, one of the many mechanical tennis partners able to shoot practice balls at you every 3% seconds. Stores bulge with any or all of the several hundred tennis books now in print. (Sample title: How to Increase Your Net Value). Alluring fashion ads offer raiment ranging from the new see-through tennis dresses to maternity clothes for tennis-playing moms-to-be—along with some advice from doctors on why it is safe to play while pregnant. Also available are cute court togs for the baby ("the little lobber"). Tennis, in short, has become a billon-dollar-a-year business.
The most salient fact about the newest wave of tennis players is that more than half of them are women, and the name of the game that has done most to turn the simple teaching pro into a combined guru, shrink, social worker, friend and sounding board is mixed doubles. Of course, mixed doubles—a man and a woman partnered against another man and woman team—has always been part of the game of tennis. And much of U.S. tennis, whether singles or doubles, is still largely played men v. men, women v. women. But in monosex tennis, the stresses and strains of competition are more easily confined to the court, the conventions and etiquette more firmly established and double faults less susceptible to double meanings. A Jimmy Connors tantrum against a male opponent may be unseemly, but it is not ungallant or worse. However, mix sexes on a tennis court and all sorts of extra-tennis emotions are stirred: recall, for instance, the reverberations of the Bobby Riggs-Billie Jean King match. Something more than just racquet meeting ball all too often becomes involved, and that is what is making mixed-doubles play a fresh and fascinating battleground in the ancient war of the sexes.
More and more, tennis is the sport in which American domestic hopes most visibly converge and conflict, the recreation that most remarkably reveals those double-fault lines in American marriage—a want of kindness, a shortage of manners. The swift transformation of a game once played mainly by the happy few—mannerly, immaculately clad and, to the popular mind, a bit sissified—into a mass middle-class mania, which may soon be pursued by more women than men, has already worked a number of apparently permanent small changes in American social life.
In some suburbs, tennis courts are outselling swimming pools. At a minimum cost of $11,000, they greatly enhance property values and encourage togetherness. Explains a New Jersey housewife: "The boys will use it. And if my husband is playing around, at least I'll be able to keep my eye on him." Around the country, the rent-a-court tennis party is beginning to challenge cocktails and the sit-down dinner party as standard entertainment. It is also blossoming as the ideal way to draw large congenial crowds for local benefits, like raising money for the P.T.A. Tennis camps for the young are thriving, as are tennis vacations for Mom and Dad.