If you've been reading Ed McGrogan's Fed Cup posts, as well as the other standard media sources, you know that it was another wacky Fed Cup weekend. Oh, you could criticize many of the top players for pulling out of the event, call out this or that ITF affiliate for daring to hold the Fed Cup in a place off the mainstream media radar (Castellaneta Marina, Italy? Stowe, Vt.?), pooh-pooh the significance of the results, but. . .
You know what? Davis and Fed Cup work. I don't know if they work for network honchos and newspaper editors, but they work for me.
Despite all the liabilities - not the least of which is the group-think of America's sports editors, who refuse to cover Davis Cup or Fed Cup, but sit around wondering why nobody is reading newspapers anymore - these team competitions have so many dimensions and frequently spin off so many story lines that they invariably suck me in and always leave me satisfied. This is the subject of my current ESPN blog entry, which should be up soon. But let me flesh out my thoughts in a little more detail here.
A good place to start would be with this email from a long-time TW reader, Todd, from Lebanon, Ohio. He wrote me just this morning, saying:
You are justified, Todd - and many times over. Once again, we are coming up on the most frustrating part of the year, Withdrawal Season. This always reminds me of how much I dislike the conventional, age-old format to which tennis is wedded - the typical 32 or 64 or 128-draw single-elimination tournament. The concept is time-tested, of course, but it was tested at a time when tournaments were few and far between. Sure single-elimination tournaments are the best way to crown a champion. But do we really need to crown a different champion every danged week?
Do we really need to put a small army of players through the wringer in places like Mason, Ohio, week-after-week, to end up with a winner - a champion, sure, but in what significant or meaningful way? Do we really need to make the players commit to a 5 or 6-match, seven-day grind, with ranking points and prize money at stake, week-after-week, as the only tennis format?
Let me put it this way: who won Cincinnati last year (and don't go on-line to look, either!)?
Let me put in another way: I couldn't care less who won Cincinnati last year, or any year - and it isn't because I don't like Cincinnati. What I don't like is the glut of tournaments and players, which has created this great, seething mass of events, matches and player, a quasi-meaningful free-for-all, with players grabbing for paychecks and ranking points and whatever goody bags they can wrangle before moving on to the next open house, where it starts all over.
In some ways, tournament tennis highlights the grim, grubby aspects of an individual-based, one-on-one sport wedded to a tournament-based ranking system.
Davis and Fed Cup weekends always make me think of tournaments in the worst possible light, as utterly lacking in texture, context and, well, clever formulation. Tournaments are organizationally primitive. You invite 32, or 64, or however may players and just let them fight it out, round-by-round, right? No tournament is a "story" - it is 32 or 64 private, modest stories (Can Santoro get out of the second round with a bad elbow?), most of them having no relation to each other or, as often as not, to the endless number of other tournaments that come before or after.
Tournaments are linked by just one thing; they play a part in generating a player's world ranking. Tournaments should be significant, periodic comings-together of the community of players (just think of the Grand Slam events) to settle any dispute over the pecking order. I don't think they should be the vehicle carrying the game from week-to-week as they do now - belching, backfiring, breaking down along the way. And in that way they are getting less reliable, instead of more.
By contrast, Davis and Fed Cup ties have a narrative far stronger than determining whether, say, Daniela Hantuchova is the No. 14 or 16 player in the world. They ultimately determine a year-end champion among the tennis playing nations, and they are open to all nations that would take part. That so many of the players are indifferent to international team play is a pity, but so what? Ignore the deadbeats and enjoy the action for what it is.
If you are lucky enough to get The Tennis Channel, you saw that the USA vs. Russia tie in Stowe, as well as the Italy vs. France tie in Castellaneta, drew big crowds of enthusiastic fans. Were they Australian Open or Roland Garros-grade crowds of 20,000-plus? No. Who cares? The stands were packed and the atmosphere at both ties was terrific. Davis and Fed Cup takes the game to places were your typical, sprawling tournaments cannot go, partly because those big events aren't portable. With a 5-match format, the international team competitions can - and do - go anywhere and everywhere. I love that about them.
When you got to a typical tournament on, say, a Tuesday, you spend most of your time running around to one of some six or eight courts, trying to catch the action on all of them. Oh, you're getting to see 8 or 10 or 15 top players, but you aren't really getting a story - a specific narrative, unless you happen to watch one or more of the players for an entire match. What you're doing is similar to attending one of those 10-screen movie-house complexes and madly rushing from one screening room to another - oh, look, there's Julia Roberts! Look, it's Matt Damon! Look, George Clooney!
By contrast, the 5-match format is streamlined and focuse; it gives you plenty of tennis. I don't think anyone every felt ripped off going to a Davis Cup or Fed Cup match. In Davis Cup, they play two singles on Friday, a doubles match on Saturday, and then the reverse singles on Sunday; in Fed Cup, they play over just two days, with two singles each on Saturday and Sunday, followed by a tie-deciding doubles (if needed) on Sunday evening. I dislike clutter, and tournaments are full of clutter - it's part of their charm, but it's nice to get a break from it sometimes as well.
The real appeal of Davis and Fed Cup is the team basis of the events, which has a few major repercussions. First, it prevents even the most dominant of players - a Roger Federer or Serena Williams - from taking control of the action and winning the event, single-handedly. It also brings the strategy of player selection (nomination) into play. Team competition also feature elements of coaching strategy that can have disproportionately large impact on the result.
Consider this: Russian captain Shamil Tarpishev was heavily second-guessed for naming 20-year old Elenv Visnena to the squad that played the US in Stowe. But Visnena, who was just 1-1 in Fed Cup (both times in doubles), and the experienced Nadia Petrova, pulled out the tie for the Russians with a big win over a marquee squad: multiple doubles Grand Slam titlist Lisa Raymond paired with the Wimbledon singles champ, Venus Williams. This call added another chapter to the growing legend of Trapishev.
A recent change in the rules governing substitution helped further empower captains, and gave them a larger say in how a tie was likely to play out. Time was, you named your No. 1 and 2 singles players and that was it; you were wedded to using them, in the order you specified, in the tie. Now, with freer substitution rules, personnel management is a richer issue. These changes somehow make the team competitions seem more - what, mature? textured? - than knock-out singles competition. And then there is this little matter of doubles. The tandem game is never on better display than in Davis or Fed Cup, because in the team competitions doubles not only counts, it is accorded a place, and respect, that it simply will never have at any singles tournament. And we all know that the only thing wrong with doubles, as a game, is that there exists this other game called "singles."
This weekend, both ties were decided by the doubles. In Davis Cup, the doubles is played on Saturday, after the two, Friday singles. As the only Saturday match, as well as the third match of any Davis Cup tie, the doubles is absolutely crucial. In fact, the sheer importance of the doubles is not only odd, it also adds further texture to the event, opening up all kinds of strategic and personnel issues that simply wouldn't exist if the team competitions were all about singles. Why, in fact, should doubles play a role? This is a subtle but easily overlooked element that helps make the team events even more compelling.
In Fed Cup, doubles doesn't get quite the same stand-alone billing, but it can also decide a tie in a way that it never does in Davis Cup, in the final, do-or-die match. I wonder how many people left the stadium at Stowe because they weren't interested in doubles, or because they felt they had watched enough tennis, or because doubles lacks the drama of singles. Actually, day-in and day-out, doubles can be more competitive than singles. Team chemistry is unpredictable, and in doubles one player can pick up the slack for another. In singles, a bad day by either player basically translates to "blowout."
So the big story of the Fed Cup weekend was Francesca Schiavone. I'll tell you what - Schiavone will never be the big story of Wimbledon, or the US Open; if she is, it will be an anomaly. But that's the beauty of the team competitions. Much like in baseball's World Series or the NFL, a journeyman can steal the show because team competition can inspire ordinary mortals to accomplish great things, and because each player in a team competition is a single piece of a larger puzzle. Big a piece as he or she may be, the puzzle is incomplete without a few other pieces fitting into place.
If you review the weekend - and isn't it great to have a tennis event that is over and done in a weekend? - you'll see that Venus Williams and Francesca Schiavone both gave the most that can be asked of a player in Fed or Davis Cup - two singles matches and a partnership in the doubles. That Schiavone, not Williams, emerged as the weekend's hero is a tribute to the nature of Fed Cup, and to the unique qualities of doubles. I feel badly for Venus - how could you not? - but it's comforting to know that the game doesn't entirely and exclusively belong to the two or three top singles players (of either gender), and that the pecking order that is so glaring in singles doesn't apply to team competition.
I wish there were more viable alternatives to the ruling tournament formula, but for now I'll just have to settle for the breath of fresh air represented by the current international team competitions.