“Tennis is hard, you lose every week unless you are the best player in the world. For this reason, it is very nice to have your best friend at your side. We would have stopped the competition for a long time if there was not this link between us”.
Tennis most famous doubles team – Mike and Bob Bryan – say that they will continue to partner even after their tennis careers are over. The 40-year-old twin brothers have dominated the men’s doubles game for years now and are still motivated to continue playing.
The Bryan Brothers are identical twin brothers Robert Charles “Bob” Bryan and Michael Carl “Mike” Bryan, American professional doubles tennis players, and are the most successful duo of all time. They were born on April 29, 1978, with Mike being the elder by two minutes.
The Bryans have won multiple Olympic medals, including the gold in 2012 and have won more professional games, matches, tournaments and Grand Slams than any other men’s pairing. They held the World No. 1 doubles ranking jointly for 438 weeks (as of October 25, 2015), which is longer than anyone else in doubles history.
Bob and Mike Bryan were not allowed to beat up on each other as kids. Their parents never allowed them to face each other in junior tournaments, forcing them to take turns defaulting a final if they were scheduled to play each other.
Bob Bryan talks about playing each other in singles. “At the age of 17, during a major game of the Under-18 Championship, the American Federation told us we could not give up.
We talked together, we discussed it and we decided that we were mature enough to fight each other. We knew our level was similar. I won in two sets with a tie-break.
Being twins also played against us sometimes because we did not want to say things that could hurt the other.
Together, the American twins had played 76 consecutive grand-slam events until last year’s clay-court swing, when Bob injured his hip at the Madrid Open 2018. But the duo made a return exiting in the quarterfinals of the 2019 Australian Open.
They continue to share a doubles career that has made them the most successful team in tennis history.
