by Pete Bodo
There may be no better day in tennis in any given year, in terms of advertising the global reach and energy of the game, than opening day of World Group Davis Cup play. I look forward to it roughly the same way I anticipate the U.S. Presidential election day (although I'm glad that event happens just every four years). When you fire up the computer on Saturday morning on or around March 3 and go to the official Davis Cup site, chances are the scores from the varying sites—"early returns" in the political patois—are already rolling in.
And you say you want the entire DC shooting match held in one place (presumably, some giant arena notable mainly for its Jumbotron, ghastly laser show, and hopelessly outdated pop background music)? You're nuts. Plain and simple. Only the NCAA college basketball tournament (which also will soon be upon us) offers a comparably exciting and diverse athletic pageant. And were you also streaming that clash between the Czech Republic and Kazakhstan?
Or maybe I'm the one who's nuts, and just a sucker for all those colorful little flags on the DC home page.
Cliff Drydale, Butch Buchholz and others in tennis, even Pat McEnroe, obviously a Davis Cup loyalist, keep trying to convince me that the format of the competition has to change; everyone has a plan with one common feature—a mega-showdown featuring at least four teams to end the competition every year, played in a major media market venue. I say don't even think about it. My solution is this: keep it exactly how it is, but make it work. Period. Even those who presently don't like it, or don't get it will come around and if they don't to hail with them.
Perhaps I should say make Davis Cup work better, because the truth of the matter is that for most of the world, especially nations that produce decent players (which, these days, is many nations) but have few or no noteworthy tournaments, Davis Cup does work. The U.S. media, which in relative terms is as ignorant of the rest of the world as the typical ethanol farmer in Iowa, still doesn't get that, even as editors have embraced soccer now that Hollywood cuties and slacker dudes walk around wearing Brazil jerseys or Manchester United track suit jackets.
Of course, nothing is perfect, and I can think of two immediate improvements I would make in Davis Cup. First, I would mandate Hawkeye technology for all World Group ties. If a small nation with scant resources happens to make the WG and can't pony up the fee for the electronic line-calling technology, the ITF should pick up the tab.
But an even bigger change, which would be both enormous and in a very basic way no change at all, would be changing the name of the competition. Sacre bleu! Change the name...Davis Cup? Yes.
The competition is named for the trophy donated to the cause by the American kid who dreamed up the event in 1900, Dwight Davis. He was a student at Harvard at the time, and went on to be a political figure in St. Louis and, ultimately, the United States Secretary of War under President Calvin Coolidge. Perhaps more vital to our interests, during his tenure as parks commissioner for St. Louis, Davis built the first municipal tennis courts in the U.S. That's ironic, given how Davis Cup seems so...old school and elitist.
