Butch Buchholz, who just retired as the chairman of the Sony Ericsson Open in Miami, tells the London Times that the Davis and Fed Cups must be reformed. Buchholz is collaborating with Mike Davies, formerly an ITF official, on a proposal for a format in which the finals would be held every other year, in one location, over 10 days, and the event would feature 32 teams. The ITF has thoroughly rejected the idea to date.
"We are not working against the ITF, we want to work with them," Buchholz said. "We aren’t going in there saying 'we have a better idea than yours' because they won’t buy that but, we believe they must evaluate whether the Davis Cup in its present format is working and whether they are really making the most of their prime asset. We don’t want to run the Davis Cup, it is the ITF's asset but unless something changes soon, we fear it will simply become a junior Davis Cup…The TV situation isn’t working, it ought to be covered worldwide and it's not. We had a dinner here a month or so ago with 200 tennis people and not one of them could raise their hand and say who won the Davis Cup last year and who America’s first opponents were. We have to open the Davis Cup up to the world."—M.C.