There has always been a transactional element to doubles, teams forming and breaking up with some regularity, driven apart by personality conflicts, injuries and oftentimes just diverging schedules.
Then there is Rajeev Ram and Joe Salisbury.
The former college stars (Ram at Illinois, Salisbury at Memphis) have played together almost exclusively since the beginning of the 2019 campaign. In their first tournament as a tandem that season, they reached the Brisbane final, and they backed that up by reaching the Round of 16 at the Australian Open and winning the title in Dubai.
With that, a partnership was born—and a fruitful one to boot. The American-British duo won the 2020 Australian Open title, reached the Melbourne final the next year, and advanced to the semifinals at Wimbledon in 2021 and 2022.
They’ve saved their best, however, for Flushing Meadows, reaching the semifinals in 2020 and winning back-to-back-to-back championships from 2021 through 2023. That run marked the first US Open men’s doubles three-peat since Maurice McLoughlin and Tom Bundy won three straight U.S. Championships titles—the last of which came in 1914.
Next up for Ram-Salisbury: Fred Alexander and Harold Hackett, who won four in a row from 1907 to 1910.
“This partnership is really special,” Salisbury said in a 2023 on-court interview. “It has been five years, and we have got pretty close. Especially on the court, we know we are going to give it our all. Fight hard and give it our best until the very end.”
The good fight has produced great results—and with it, a record for consecutive titles that no one has achieved in New York in more than 100 years. And, amazingly, one that has eluded the best doubles teams in tennis history. Bob and Mike Bryan won an Open Era-record five titles together, Bob Lutz and Stan Smith won four and Peter Fleming and John McEnroe won three, but not a single one of those came consecutively.
In fact, prior to Ram and Salisbury, the last team to win even two men’s doubles crowns in a row was the famed Woodies, Todd Woodbridge and Mark Woodforde, in 1991-92.
“I’m a bit of a tennis history junky, and to say that we have done something that no one’s done they said since 1912, so for sure, not the Open Era, I really don’t even know [what to say],” Ram said. “It will be something that I will carry with me forever, and I’m incredibly proud of and really humbled to say that we have done something in a sport that no one else has done.”
The question now is how much longer the two can stay on top. While there is still magic in Ram’s racquet—he teamed with Austin Krajicek to win silver at this year’s Olympics, his second silver medal, the first coming in 2016 in mixed doubles with Venus Williams—he is now 40 years old and has largely been retired from singles since 2017.
Moreover, the long-running duo has struggled this year, at least by their high standards. They lost in the third round at the Australian Open, the quarterfinals at the French Open and the second round at Wimbledon, and they haven’t won a tournament since opening the year with a title in Adelaide.
Still, they did reach the final in Montreal a few weeks ago. And they entered last year’s Open in a similar funk, not advancing past the third round at any of the year’s majors, before a charmed run through the draw—one that ended, for a third time in three tries, with trophies in hand.
“There is something about being here, about doing it again and I think doing it after the year we have had,” Salisbury said following the team’s 2023 US Open title. “We have had some struggles, had some pretty low times. To come here and do this together with all of our team, and just knowing the work we've put in and just how hard we've had to fight to be in this situation, I think it just kind of just came out a bit at the end how special this is.”
