Making history When Divij Sharan and Samantha Murray Sharan played at Wimbledon last summer they were the first married couple to enter the mixed doubles there for 30 years
HUSBAND-AND-WIFEPAIRINGSUSEDTO BEACOMMONSIGHT INMIXEDDOUBLES ATGRANDSLAMTOURNAMENTS
Katerina Siniakova, a Grand Slamand Olympic women’s doubles champion, played inMelbourne this year alongside her boyfriend, Tomas Machac, but girlfriend-boyfriend combinations are generally rare in mixed doubles. Ajla Tomljanovic playedwith her then partner, Nick Kyrgios, at the AustralianOpen in 2015 and 2016, but has not competed inmixed doubles with her more recent boyfriend, Matteo Berrettini, though they considered doing so at Wimbledon last summer until the weather disrupted their singles schedules. DominicThiemonce said that his former girlfriend, Kristina Mladenovic, was such a good doubles player that he would be “embarrassed” to play with her. Leslie Godfreemight have said something similar in 1926, but he went on to win theWimbledonmixed doubles title alongside his wife, the former KittyMcKane. They remain the only husband-and-wife team to have won the All England Club title. While Godfree had been given the honour of playing in the very firstmatch onWimbledon’s newly opened Centre Court in 1922 and hadwon themen’s doubles title there the following year, hiswife had a higher profile. One of the first female players to rush the net, she played in a total of 14Grand Slamfinals, won theWimbledon singles title twice andwas the only player ever to beat the great HelenWillsMoody at the All England Club.
Clarence and Augusta Hobart won themixed doubles at the US Championships (forerunner to the US Open) in 1905, but the only other husband-and- wife Grand Slam champions were in Australia in the 1930s. Harry and Nell Hopmanwon themixed title in 1930, 1936, 1937 and 1939. Their opponents in the 1930 final were Jack Crawford andMarjorie Cox, who married the followingmonth andwent on to win the Australianmixed doubles title together in 1931, 1932 and 1933. Nevertheless, husband-and-wife pairings were a common sight inmixed doubles for many years. In 1968, for example, 13 of the 80 teams who played in mixed doubles at the All England Clubwere husband- and-wife combinations. They included John and Angela Barrett (Angela was the 1961 singles champion as Angela Mortimer), AlanMills, who went on to become theWimbledon referee, and his wife Jill, and the Australians Bill and Lesley Bowrey. Chris Evert played in the long-defunct WorldMixed Doubles Championships with her then husband John Lloyd in 1982. The following year she won the same tournament playing alongside Jimmy Connors in their first matches together since breaking off their engagement nine years earlier; they had last played mixed doubles together at Wimbledon in 1974, which
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