Why KC is the luckiest city in World Team Tennis

Every year, Kansas City tennis fans shell out a measly 25 bucks to get a glimpse of what people pay hundreds to see: the best doubles team in the world.

Bob and Mike Bryan have been the playing for the Kansas City Explorers, our local franchise of World Team Tennis, since 2005, drawing huge crowds when they take the court at Barney Allis Plaza each summer. They’re fan favorites not just because they’re among the best in the game, but because they’re characters. They mug for the crowd, pull off fancy stunt shots when they’ve got the game under control and never leave the court without at least one signature chest bump.

This week the twins start defending their 2008 title in the U.S. Open — and they’re a hot commodity. So hot that two of the nation’s top magazines, The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine, unwittingly published profiles about them in competing issues. As Wall Street Journal writer Richard Turner points out, that kind of coincidence is incredibly rare; the only comparison he could come up with was when Bruce Springsteen took the covers of both Time and Newsweek the same week in 1975.

Even if you don’t know the difference between a tennis racket and a fly swatter, the profiles are a fascinating look at a pair of sports stars that we in Kansas City, in a small way, can claim as our own.