You’ve probably seen the news: There was suspicious betting activity on a mixed doubles match a few days ago, hinting that some bettors knew ahead of time that David Marrero and Lara Arruabarena were going to lose to Andrea Hlavackova and Lukasz Kubot.
I don’t know whether it was a fix, or if someone leaked information, or if it was a publicity stunt by Pinnacle, who reported the suspicious activity. I don’t really care. Instead, what stuck out to me was this odd claim from Marrero, as reported by the Times:
“Normally, when I play, I play full power, in doubles or singles,” said Marrero, who won the doubles title at the 2013 ATP World Tour Finals. “But when I see the lady in front of me, I feel my hand wants to play, but my head says, ‘Be careful.’ This is not a good combination.”
As the Times also points out, Marrero’s record in mixed doubles is abysmal: 7-21 (with nine different partners), including 10 consecutive losses. He has, at times, ranked among the best doubles players in the world, yet managed to lose mixed matches alongside other greats, such as Hlavackova and Sara Errani. In six matches with Arantxa Parra-Santonja, a doubles specialist with eight tour-level titles, he’s lost the lot.
Assuming Marrero isn’t regularly fixing Grand Slam mixed doubles matches–after all, fixing a match this week would be awfully dumb–it’s clear that he’s not very good in this format. Here’s the weird thing: Before this mini-scandal, nobody was paying any attention.
Yeah, of course, it’s mixed doubles, which is little more than a glorified exhibition. Tennis isn’t great when it comes to statkeeping, and there’s virtually no one paying attention to doubles stats. The situation with mixed doubles is even worse. But if singles player had a losing streak of 10 of just about anything, fans would know about it, and people would be watching closely.
Given the nature of the mixed doubles event–specialists frequently switch partners, and the format includes a super-tiebreak in place of a third set–we wouldn’t expect too many extremes. In fact, of the 36 players who have contested at least 15 mixed matches since 2009 (28 slams plus the 2012 Olympics), only Leander Paes, with a 63-21 record, has been as good as Marrero has been bad. No one else has won more than 70% of their mixed matches.
And since mixed doubles draws are full of non-specialists (like Naomi Broady and Neal Skupski, who beat Marrero and Parra-Santonja at Wimbledon in 2014) we would expect the specialists to perform better than average. Sure enough, of those 36 regulars, 25 have winning percentages of 50% or better, and all but four have won at least 43% of matches. Only Marrero and Raquel Atawo (formerly Kops-Jones) hold winning percentages below 36%.
Let’s say we give Marrero the benefit of the doubt–as far the fixing goes, anyway–and accept his claim that he’s uncomfortable playing when there’s a woman across the net. It’s a strange state of affairs when (a) he continues playing almost every possible mixed doubles event despite his discomfort; (b) women choose to partner with him, either ignorant of his discomfort or simply happy to get into the draw; and (c) it’s possible to play 21 Grand Slams before the public gets any inkling that one of the 64 players in the mixed draw has a fundamental issue playing normally on the mixed doubles court.
Such comprehensive, long-standing ignorance isn’t out of place in tennis, especially in doubles. But given what we now know about David Marrero, the suspicious betting activity isn’t the influx of money against him–it’s the fact that anyone ever put money on him to win a mixed doubles match.