Davis Cup braces for end of an era

Final or funeral? Opinions diverge as France and Croatia meet this week for the Davis Cup title in the northern French city Lille.

It will mark the end of another too-lengthy tennis season but, more poignantly, it also will mark the end of an era for the men’s team event that began in Boston in 1900.

That first final, played in trousers and whites at the original site of the Longwood Cricket Club, matched the United States against Britain over three days, with a best-of-five-sets format.

The Americans, whose team included the competition’s founder, Dwight Davis, swept the visitors, who had crossed the Atlantic by ship without their two best players: the Doherty brothers, Reginald and Laurie.

The Dohertys eventually were persuaded to make the same journey, winning the Cup for Britain at Longwood in 1903. But 115 years later, it is the flickering interest of tennis’s present-day superstars that has led to radical change.

If Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic all had made Davis Cup a priority at the same time, they might have lifted the event into a new golden era, just as they have elevated their sport as a whole.

But it was not to be. Individual ambition, injuries and the demands of an overstuffed tennis calendar conspired against it. Federer and Nadal have played 38 times but never in Davis Cup competition.

Djokovic has played Nadal and Federer only once each in the Cup, both matches coming before he entered his prime.

Beginning next year, the Davis Cup will abandon its traditional two-team final for an 18-team final phase in November in Madrid; in the new format, the stakes will be reduced from four singles matches to two, along with one doubles match, all contested over best-of-three-sets.

Critics have taken to calling it the Kosmos Cup or Piqué Cup: references to the investment group headed by Gerard Piqué, Spain’s polymathic soccer star, that is largely bankrolling the revamped competition and intending to make a profit.

Officially, however, the competition will remain the Davis Cup, at least in the short term, with the champions still getting their mitts on one of the oldest and grandest trophies in global sports.

“The Davis Cup is dead, and part of the history of our sport is gone for a handful of dollars,” Nicolas Mahut, the French doubles stalwart, wrote on Twitter after the ITF surprisingly voted for the proposed changes in August.