By Randy Walker
@TennisPublisher
Davis Cup is my favorite competition in tennis, perhaps in all of sport. I’m not sure if it still is in this new format that just made its debut in Madrid, but the jury is still out on that.
I grew up watching this fascinating sporting event in the 1980s when ESPN would broadcast the matches involving the U.S. team. I loved players competing for their countries and also playing in exotic locations like Asunción in Paraguay, Bucharest in Romania and Goteborg in Sweden among others. What I also came to love about this storied competition was its quirkiness.
Strange things happened at Davis Cup. As they said “Anything can happen in Davis Cup” and this usually applied to the results in matches, where relative unknown players would rise to the occasion of playing for the country and upset much higher-ranked players, who would sometimes wilt under national pressure.
As I read more about the history of Davis Cup – and while fulfilling a dream of serving as the press officer for the U.S. team from 1997 to 2005 – I was enamored and entertained by the stories and anecdotes of many of the off-court Davis Cup unpredictabilities and the quirky disasters and controversies that you wouldn’t get at your normal ATP or WTA event. There are many stories about biased “homer” linespeople making calls in favor of the home team, crazed and passionate fans with their national chants, songs and sometimes threats thrown at opposing players, matches being played on crazy surfaces like indoor wood, cow dung and even a circumstance in Charlotte, North Carolina during the 1971 Davis Cup Final where a court had be to lit on fire with gasoline to dry it to be suitable to play on!
Some of the wackiness of Davis Cup I got to experience myself. In 2015 ten years after I stopped working for the USTA, I was contracted to work the USA vs. Uzbekistan tie in Tashkent. During the opening match between Stevie Johnson and Denis Istomin (one of the most dramatic matches I’ve ever seen in person as I wrote about here: http://www.worldtennismagazine.com/archives/12490) the stands at the Uzbek National Tennis School were jam packed. However, it was filled almost exclusively with students, all wearing the same outfit, a white top and dark pants/skirt. It looked like an Uzbek day version of a “White Out” at a Penn State football game. And then, when the match was over, every single student left and the second match of the day between Jack Sock and Farrukh Dustov was played in front of only a few dozen fans. Talk about weird!
Then there was the time in Bratislava, Slovakia in 2003 when in an absolutely critical moment in the tie, the entire lights went out in the arena of the brand new Slovakian National Tennis Center. Freshly-minted U.S. Open champion Andy Roddick, in his first event since becoming a Grand Slam tournament champ, had just been shockingly upset by Dominik Hrbaty to put the USA in the 0-1 hole and Mardy Fish, now the U.S. Davis Cup captain, was facing break point down a set and at 5-5 in the second set against Karol Kucera when the arena went pitch dark! Terrorism against the U.S. team was immediately what came to mind, but after everything settled and the lights went back on after a lengthy delay, Fish served three aces/service winners to hold serve, then broke Kucera to win the second set en route to saving the day for the USA in a four-set victory.
During the USA vs. Zimbabwe World Group first round tie in 2000, a heavy African rain storm during Andre Agassi’s match caused for the tin roof – yes TIN ROOF – of the arena to leak and cause for a slight delay in play. The phone lines in the arena weren’t of the highest standard and when the American media complained to the International Tennis Federation representative in attendance, he just shrugged. What was he to do? Re-wire the entire nation’s telephone grid? I remember waiting almost an hour before I could send a publicity photograph of U.S. captain John McEnroe at Victoria Falls through email. This was kind of a 20-years-ago problem with the modern-day Davis Cup app not being up to par. Also during that series, Grace Mugabe, the first lady of Zimbabwe, refused to sit next to USTA President Judy Levering after Americans in the audience held signs that made light of Zimbabwe’s petrol shortage at the moment. This was part of the Davis Cup’s kookiness and what made it, for me, something you had to watch because you kind of felt like there would be some sort of train wreck that you just had to watch.
Enter the Davis Cup Finals in Madrid.
In the first year of this new condensed one-site, one-week event, there were quite a few wrinkles in what was, in theory, a first-year start-up event. Let’s start with many of the early matches not involving the home country being played in front of sparse crowds. It certainly created another weird Davis Cup atmosphere, similar to what I experienced in Tashkent. However, this has happened on bigger stages as well, like the 1973 Davis Cup final in Cleveland featuring all-time greats Rod Laver, Ken Rosewall and John Newcombe of Australia against Stan Smith and the United States that didn’t even feature 5,000 fans in attendance for any one of the three-day sessions, despite the event featuring so many all-time greats.
In the 1978 Davis Cup Final in Southern California desert, only 300 fans were in the stands at the end of Buster Mottram’s win over Brian Gottfried that evened Britain up at 1-1 over the John McEnroe-led American team after the first day of play, as you can read about here: https://www.si.com/vault/1978/12/18/823253/the-kid-didnt-kid-around-john-mcenroe-19-played-his-best-tennis-and-was-on-his-best-behavior-winning-two-matches-as-the-us-beat-britain-in-the-davis-cup After McEnroe and U.S. won that 1978 Davis Cup title, it was said that McEnroe was the player who saved Davis Cup as interest in the event rose with this charismatic champion showing so much passion for this storied competition that until then had started to grow a bit stale. Some could say that Rafael Nadal’s performance in leading Spain to the 2019 title in Madrid could have a similar effect.
I also remember a poorly attended USA vs. Italy Davis Cup semifinal in Milwaukee in 1998 that I worked at during my run as press officer for the U.S. team. The biggest cheer on the final day that featured two dead-rubber matches after Italy had already clinched the 3-0 upset came in the middle of a point when the local Green Bay Packers NFL football team scored a touchdown and fans in the stands, with the radio broadcast of that game in their ear, expressed their pleasure. There was also a match between Israel in Sweden in Sweden that was played in front of ZERO fans as threats of terrorism against the Israelis caused officials to have the event played in private!
The point here is that Davis Cup matches without many fans happens sometimes and is just part of the peculiar ebb and flow in the history of the event sometimes. Of course, the biggest crowds to ever watch sanctioned (non-exhibition) matches have been in Davis Cup. The Davis Cup Finals in Lille, France in 2014 featuring France against Roger Federer and Switzerland featured a world record crowds daily of 27,432. The 2017 and 2018 Davis Cup finals in Lille against Belgium and Croatia, respectively, also were played in front of 26,000 daily fans. The Spain-Argentina and Spain-United States ties in Seville, Spain also featured then world record crowds of 27,200 fans daily. For years, the world-record standard for largest crowd to watch a Davis Cup final came in 1954 when Tony Trabert and Vic Seixas upset Ken Rosewall and Lew Hoad in front of daily crowds of 25,578 fans at White City in Sydney, Australia. Many of the Davis Cup ties in the 1960s in Australia featured sell-out crowds of 20,000-plus fans. A massive interest in Davis Cup also necessitated the construction of Stade Roland Garros in Paris (now the home of the French Open) for the 1928 Davis Cup Final between Bill Tilden and the USA against Rene Lacoste and the “Musketeers” of France.
Other quirks from this year’s edition of the event was the flawed round-robin system where a team’s advancement in the quarterfinals hinged on percentage of sets and games won, which the players, captains, fans and media could not calculate without a mathematician nearby with a calculator. The tournament app was extremely flawed and U.S. television coverage was awful and not treated with the respect it deserves. Many matches also finished well after midnight, including the now famous and historic 4:04 am finish between the United States and Italy (As documented here: http://www.worldtennismagazine.com/archives/17812), which is the second-latest finish on record in tennis history. Would this match be as remembered or as famous if it finished at 4 pm? No, and that is part of the unusual, dare I say “charm,” of these seemingly endless unusual circumstances that you find more often than not in Davis Cup.
Much was written and tweeted about Roger Federer’s absence from the Davis Cup in Madrid and him playing exhibition matches against Alexander Zverev in South and Central America in front of huge crowds, including a world record 42,000 in Mexico City. Top players not playing Davis Cup is also part of long history of Davis Cup dating back to the first series in 1900 when both Britain and the United States were without their top players, but not because of politics or scheduling but because they were recovering from injuries and sickness sustained in the Boer War and Spanish-American wars, respectively.
All those who have played in, worked at, attended or watched Davis Cup tennis have some quirky Davis Cup story of some glorious happening or some unusual misfortune. It’s all part of the beautiful disaster of Davis Cup. The 2019 version is just another chapter.
