Hypothetical branding by Luke Shuman
Open Rod Laver’s autobiography, The Education of a Tennis Player, and find yourself reminded again and again that there was a time when Davis Cup tennis mattered. Really mattered. Mattered to top players. Mattered to fans. Mattered to Bud Collins, who wrote the book with Laver. (Mattered to Australia, of course, which dominated Davis Cup play in the 1950s and 1960s.) Mattered to tennis’ sense of itself—the way the majors continue to matter, but Davis Cup no longer does.
Laver ranks the pressure he felt playing Davis Cup with that of playing at Wimbledon. He recalls the 1959 Davis Cup final on grass at Forest Hills, where Australia wrested the cup from the reigning American champions—and where the young Laver lost both his rubbers, or matches—as being “as tense as anything I’ve been through.” He loved playing for his country—and how the fans and the press got worked into a frenzy—and believed the other players of his time did, too. He quotes Arthur Ashe, who thought Davis Cup was bigger than the Olympics: “[Y]ou can’t escape the fact and feeling that your country is depending on you and your game.” Laver’s only complaint was with the format, which kept him from playing more Davis Cup tennis. If you were defending the cup, you only played in the final tie, or round, against the survivor of the preliminary elimination ties.
That changed: Beginning in 1972, the Davis Cup became a knockout tournament, and the defending champion was required to compete in all rounds. Other changes followed, as tennis increasingly became a global sport. (Until 1974, only four countries had ever won the Cup: the United States, Australia, Great Britain, and France.) But those changes have not kept up with the times—neither with the overwhelming demands placed on today’s male players by the nature of the game and the crowded ATP schedule; nor with the way fans, both those watching live and the millions more in front of their TVs, immerse themselves in sport. And, as a result, Davis Cup has become something of a sideshow. The stars of the game often enough skip a year, or more than a year. Fans only care, if they care at all, when their team is playing a home final. Tennis as a national- team sport—at a time when national-team sports like soccer have never been more popular, and when men’s tennis has been experiencing a golden age—languishes. In the global pop culture, where sport today resides and thrives, Davis Cup tennis is a hazy, intermittent, peripheral undertaking, musty with nostalgia and lacking the focused intensity and electrifying spectacle that have fixed a place for athletic greatness in the public imagination.