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In most major cities, swinging-singles tennis clubs have sprung up. If the object is marriage, sex or companionship, the immediate subject is tennis. At the Lakeshore Racquet Club in Chicago, for example, Friday and Saturday are Swingers Nights. Single players pay $7 apiece for drinks, use of the chalet-like lounge overlooking the courts and a chance to enjoy musical tennis, i.e., mixed doubles played by six-person teams—three men, three women—so that two can always be sidelined to encourage light conversation. A tennis pro makes sure everyone "mixes," and gives sporadic pointers on the play.
The Tennis Corp. of America reports that all the mixed-doubles social programs it runs in six cities are always sold out—and have long waiting lists. Half a dozen pros have been joined to players in holy matrimony, and the groups average about five or six marriages a year between the clients themselves. Commenting on the swingles system, former U.S. Information Agency Director Carl Rowan, an avid Washington tennis player, observes, "It's a safer and healthier way of getting a date, but it sure costs a lot more than buying three martinis." Confided a single girl at a New York City tennis club: "It's not like being picked up in a singles bar. At least you have tennis in common."
Thus far, no fond literary genius has come forward to do for romance and tennis what the late P.G. Wodehouse did for love and golf in stories like The Heart of a Goof and The Clicking of Cuthbert. Nor has any opera or fairy tale yet taken up the game. Still, whenever a starry-eyed young thing with a shaky backhand contemplates courtship and marriage through mixed doubles, some dreadful figure should come out of the woodwork, wave a gnarled ringer and howl: "Beware, my pretty! Tennis may prove no bond but a curse." The best warning that exists is a Buchwald column about a tennis-blighted romance between Patty and Bob. Its message can be taken in two quotes from Bob. Premarital: "You look so cute when you miss." Postmarital: "Don't hold your racquet down, stupid."
Partly with that comic contrast in view, Douglas Wallop (The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant) has just finished a novel about mixed doubles and infidelity in the suburbs. Another effort, Courting by Sue Costello, promises to be a tennis player's version of Fear of Flying. But the best stories of the mixed-doubles scene might better be told by a writer like Edward Albee of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, who could chronicle the explosive marital tensions of the game. "What we'll soon need around here," says California's celebrated tennis pro Vic Braden, "is mixed-doubles counselors, not marriage counselors."