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To be fair, it is true that many men have been caught in an agonizing shift in court customs largely created by the consciousness raising of Women's Liberation. "In the old days," Columbia's Dr. Hendin points out, "winning was not considered important in mixed doubles. It was expected that the man would poach and hit easy balls to the women." Even where winning was important, tradition and good tactics tended to give women a subordinate role. Pauline Betz Addie, now a teaching pro in Washington, remembers being teamed with Bobby Riggs in a championship mixed-doubles match when she was the No. 2 female player in America. Said Riggs: "Stand in the alley. Don't hit anything that isn't going to hit you." Recalls Addie: "We won. And that's still good advice, provided the man is a really good player."
There is still an unstated convention among mixed-doubles men that a male player is never beastly to the woman across the net. When it is broken, reports Ethel Kennedy's tennis pro Bob Graham, male rage is aroused. Says he: "I've never seen men actually come to blows, unless they're playing with their wives." Today, however, more and more women are acquiring the skill to be beastly on their own and to hit hard. "I love to shock men by coming back with a strong overhead," says Debbie Humphreys, the wife of a New Jersey teaching pro. Women, especially those under 35, often demand a hard serve. One reason: being patronized is more humiliating than risking the loss of a point.
Whatever the provocation, the result is soon clear. A surprising number of men, in fact, admit to unbearable tennis behavior, reflecting on it bemusedly like sobered drunks, as if at a loss to explain what gets into them. Things go wrong even when they are trying hard to be helpful—sometimes for just that reason. Every tennis player has watched a husband encouraging his wife. The harder she tries, the more encouragement he offers. The worse she gets, the more he grits his teeth to be nice. Says one woman: "Even when he doesn't say anything, I feel watched."
"I tell myself. 'Don't be impatient. Treat her like anyone else.' But how can you treat your wife like anyone else? You say things to your wife that you would never say to another woman or to a man." The speaker is an even-tempered, otherwise happily married tennis pro, a former English teacher and Ph.D. in education who used to play mixed doubles with his wife. As Gardner Stern, a Chicago supermarket executive who met his second wife on a tennis court, says, "With my wife on the court, I'm a regular Jekyll and Hyde."