Unseparated Since Birth

Some of the things Bob and Mike Bryan share include: an origin in the same dividing zygote; the No. 1 doubles ranking on the Association of Tennis Professionals World Tour, a distinction they have held at the ends of four of the last six years; the titles of all four Grand Slam events; two houses; a car; and a bank account. "Most of our friends, if they're looking for one of us, probably want to tell us both the same thing, and they know we're probably together," Bob says.

They do have different girlfriends. "They usually call us on our cellphones," Mike says. The twins also have different phone numbers.

The joke on the tour about their inseparability is that even if you played doubles with the same partner your entire life, the Bryan brothers would have nine months' more experience together than you. When they were little, their mother would come to wake them to find that one had crawled into bed with the other overnight ("I guess we felt safe that way," Mike, who is older by two minutes, says). A month into their first term at Stanford, where they were assigned to different dorms, Bob dragged a mattress onto the floor of Mike's room and slept there for the rest of the year.

Dick Gould, their college coach for two years, had trouble telling them apart. "I just addressed them both as 'Hey, Champ,' " he recalls. "Other than one of them being a lefty"--that would be Bob -C "I never really got to where I thought of them as two separate people."