Tennis starts up own Ryder Cup
Europe team take on World side in Laver Cup Mcenroe and Borg are non-playing captains
The spotlights beamed down on a black tennis court in Prague yesterday, picking out five tennis legends from very different eras.
Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal sported blue tracksuits, as did Bjorn Borg, the non-playing captain of the European team. John Mcenroe, captain of the World team, wore red. Alongside them, in a blazer and comfortable sneakers, stood Rod Laver – the man whose name adorns the whole enterprise.
Ostensibly, the Laver Cup, which begins today with a programme of four matches, is meant to celebrate Laver’s achievements, while earning him a small fraction of the riches he would have collected in the modern era. But an event on this scale – marketed as tennis’ answer to the Ryder Cup – cannot pop up amid the crowded schedule without making a few enemies.
The idea began with Federer, his agent Tony Godsick, and their management company Team8. It was supported by Tennis Australia, who unveiled the project in January 2016 without informing such major players as the All England Club committee or the ATP Tour. And the body that should be most concerned is the weak and dysfunctional International Tennis Federation. Because it is the precipitous decline of the Davis Cup – a tournament which is run, in the loosest sense, by the ITF – that has emboldened all manner of entrepreneurs.
If the leading players do not want to appear in the Davis Cup, the thinking goes, why can they not be enticed to participate in something else? “I think we are all excited and hopeful that this is going to be successful,” said Mcenroe, “and force some people to take a good, hard look at the rest of the schedule.”
So much for the politics. What of the sport itself? The players were keen to emphasise that they are not treating this weekend as an exhibition, but as something more intense and visceral. There is no prize money – the six-figure appearance sums for the leading names are not conditional on results – so the incentives will be peer pressure and the honour of representing your continent, or multiple continents, in the case of a World team which combines four Americans with one Australian (Nick Kyrgios) and one Canadian (Denis Shapovalov). “We’re definitely the underdogs,” said Kyrgios, “so to cause an upset would be pretty cool.”
Marin Cilic v Frances Tiafoe is not the most eye-catching of openers, but the evening doubles match – Nadal and local hero Tomas Berdych against Kyrgios and Jack Sock – has an appealing look to it.
There’s no sense in rushing to judgment – it took the Ryder Cup a good half-century to grow into the behemoth we know today.