The increasingly crammed and drawn-out tennis season ended this past weekend with the Davis Cup final, and with it went one of the game’s oldest and—at one time, anyway—most celebrated tournament formats. The format will change drastically next year: the International Tennis Federation, which oversees the Cup, has more or less placed it in the hands of an investment group, headed by Gerard Piqué, the Spanish soccer great. The group will provide most of the funding and will look to turn a profit. What you think of this likely says a lot about your feelings toward professional tennis as it adjusts—or tries to adjust—to contemporary notions of time and worth, and, beyond, to broader habits of mind and heart, what the French refer to, suggestively, as mentalité.
This year’s final—the hundred and seventh in a tradition that began when Dwight Davis, fresh from Harvard, invited a team of young British men to play Americans at the Longwood Cricket Club, outside Boston—was played in France, in the northern city of Lille. The location was chosen by the French Davis Cup team, which won the final last year. They reached it again this year, after winning their “tie” (that’s Davis-Cup speak for a best-of-five series of matches) against Spain, in September, in the fifth and final rubber (Davis-Cup speak for a best-of-five-set match). The Spanish team was playing without Rafael Nadal. To those who’ve been pushing for a new format, an absence of that kind is the problem—or one of the problems.
When the Spain-France tie was played, Nadal was recovering from an injury to his right knee. But the truth is that, for years now, the top players on the men’s side have regularly foregone Davis Cup play. Nadal has never faced Roger Federer, for instance, in the Davis Cup, because it’s been a once-in-a-while thing for both of them, not an annual event. Nadal did play Novak Djokovic once, and Djokovic once faced Federer, way back when, but Djokovic has never squared off against Andy Murray. The Big Four players, and not only the Big Four, have too many other money-making, point-garnering tournaments keeping them busy to make time for the three rounds—over weekends in the winter, spring, and late summer—required to reach the Davis Cup final.
This year, in the final, France suited up only one singles player in shouting distance of the Top Twenty. Still, more than twenty thousand fans filled the Stade Pierre-Mauroy to watch and cheer each day of the weekend in Lille. France’s opponent, Croatia, had, for its singles’ rubbers, the twelfth-ranked Borna Ćorić, one of the tour’s toughest young stars and a brilliant defender, and Marin Čilić, who reached No. 3 in the world this year and owns a U.S. Open title. Čilić also has a frightening serve and, at thirty, an improved forehand that he can flatten out and launch with a startling bang from a fully open stance. As the home team, France got to choose the playing surface, and perhaps it was that Čilić pace that led the team to choose a court of gritty red clay, which can slow down the ball a bit. Très Français, la terre battue—except that France’s best players, of this era, have been hard-court players.
It probably wouldn’t have mattered. On Friday, the first day of play, Ćorić beat Jérémy Chardy in three straight sets. Then Čilić beat the injury-plagued Jo-Wilfried Tsonga in three straight sets. These matches were followed by the “reverse singles,” in which the players switch up their previous opponents. But, on Sunday, the French team captain, Yannick Noah—in the Davis Cup, the captain is a coach and does not play—called on Lucas Pouille, rather than Chardy, to face Čilić. Čilić beat him in straight sets, too, securing the cup for the Croats. In all of the singles matches, no French player secured a break of serve, never mind a set. The only competitive tennis of the weekend occurred on Saturday, when, in keeping with Davis Cup tradition, just one match was played—a doubles match. It was a long and hard-fought four-setter, which France won, thanks to the fluid court-savvy choreography and big-point cool of Pierre-Hugues Herbert and Nicolas Mahut, one of the best doubles teams in men’s tennis of recent years. Mahut struck a near-impossible reflex volley at the net to seal the victory, and the home-town crowd went berserk for Les Bleus: flags were hoisted, iPhone lights were waved in unison, trumpets were blown, tears were wiped from cheeks.
Mahut, thoughtful and passionate, has been among the most outspoken players lamenting the changes coming to the tournament. “The Davis Cup is dead,” he posted on Twitter last summer, after the International Tennis Federation voted for the new format. But this last of the old-fashioned finals was a poor advertisement for tradition—it was hardly “The World Cup of Tennis,” as the I.T.F. calls it. And the changes coming next year might make that appellation more fitting. There will be an eighteen-team final phase, to be held in Madrid, in November. There will be two singles matches per tilt, not four, along with one doubles match. Sets will be best-of-three, not best-of-five. Things will be sped up, in other words. One tent-pole event will be good for TV, and good for Nike and Adidas and so on. Why shouldn’t it draw the international fans who jet to the U.S. Open and Wimbledon?
Its chief battle may not be with traditionalists but with the Association of Tennis Professionals, which oversees men’s tennis. The A.T.P. has its own team competition in mind, which will be held in Australia, in January, 2020, as a curtain-raiser to the Australian Open. The format that has been proposed is similar to the new Davis Cup format, and the prize money, fifteen million dollars, is just a bit shy of what Davis Cup is promising. There is also a crucial difference: the A.T.P. team tournament will offer ranking points. Players on the men’s side are backing the A.T.P. tournament more strongly than the newfangled Davis Cup, because, ultimately, ranking points mean better seedings in other tournaments, better sponsorship deals—more money. It is hard to see how an already too-long season can make room for both tournaments. Why, in all this scheming, no one has proposed a team tournament that brings together top men and women is beyond me, by the way. (Women currently play a Davis Cup equivalent, called the Fed Cup.) It’s probably the one major sport on earth that could pull it off.
Tennis needs team play of some kind, whatever shape it takes. For the players, it provides an opportunity to shake, just for a while, the too-clarifying loneliness of being on court, and to represent something larger than one’s gladiatorial self. It is bracing for fans, too, who get to enjoy their brimming Victorian silences as points are played and yet participate, with fellow-feeling attendees, in loud and shared sports-arena delirium when games and matches are won. Team play has a way of feeling more like play, for everybody. The tangle of tennis bureaucracies and interests should get it right. Whether they will is another matter.
