The trend that wasn't (but we still wrote 900+ words about it)

Proponent of Two-Racket Tennis Finds Few Believers

You don't say.

As a leading proponent of a quirky, unorganized offshoot of tennis, Mueller is committed to advancing his cause, a game he simply calls two-racket tennis. It is played with the same rules as regular tennis, except players are allowed an extra racket.

Mueller, who relishes the role of madcap scientist, has been pushing the game for the last few years. It seems his main purpose in doing so is merely to find partners to play with.

“I would like as many people as possible to try this out,” he said this month. “If enough people do, then maybe one day we could have tournaments.”

Ha ha.

Mueller, who has a Ph.D. in chemical physics and a sideline in daffy showmanship in the persona of “Dr. Bones,” serves as an adjunct professor at Concordia College in Bronxville, N.Y., and at New Jersey City University. He says he likes to think of himself as a comedian as much as a professor, and indeed, many consider his two-racket obsession a joke.

Ugh.

Mueller, who is ambidextrous, has a Web site, tworacket.com, and a regular advertisement in Inside Tennis magazine, which, he says, has cost him about $4,000. He spends some of his spare time calling newspaper editors looking for publicity for the unsanctioned sport.

And no one fell for it until the New York Goddamn Times. Don't you people have higher aspirations than this? Or if not higher than "writing trend pieces about trends that only one guy is responsible for," at least "not blatantly calling out that your reporting was spurred by this guy sending you a press release and some editor seeing it and going 'yeah, what the hell?'" If I were like Dexter Filkins I'd be like sigh.

“It took a long time for the epiphany to hit me in the head like a brick, but it did,” Mueller said. “I was hitting against the wall and switching hands and I suddenly thought, Why am I switching the racket back and forth in my hands?”

"And then I realized, 'because that's how you fucking play tennis, for Christ's sake,' and then I went inside and drank a bottle of Liquid Plumr."

But he was not the first to have this revelation. In fact, two-racket tennis has been around for more than 30 years, since J. T. Houk began playing it. Houk, considered the godfather of the game, calls it forehand tennis on his Web site, boobackhands.com.

"Hey, I've got this great scoop. It's about the guy who invented and popularized two-handed tennis, except he didn't popularize it because no one else plays it, and he didn't invent it."

"Print it! Here's $400,000!"

(they blast off on their rocket-shoes)

GOOD RIDDANCE DYING NEWSPAPERS (except New Hampshire Union Leader LONG LIVE NEW HAMPSHIRE UNION LEADER!)

Still, the article wasn't a total waste. To wit: