What’s lost here? The home final, of course, which is no small thing. The cacophony of fans rooting for their home team! It is what makes Davis Cup special. In particular, there are the smaller nations that have hosted a Davis Cup final but that are less likely, in truth, to win a bid as a neutral site. In recent years, there’ve been the Czechs and the Swiss; there were the Croats in 2005, and all those years in the 1980s and 1990s when the Swedes were so dominant. However, run your eye down the list of nations that have won the Davis Cup over the years. It’s a very, very short list: thirteen. (Fourteen if you count South Africa in 1974, but that final tie was never played; India boycotted the event to protest apartheid policies.) It is not hard to imagine a couple dozen nations that might host a neutral- site final. Or look at it this way: There are only eight nations whose teams have won more than one Davis Cup. Under the format change I’m proposing, sixteen nations each year arrive at the World Cup of Tennis with a chance, over ten days, to win. The host nation could be selected four years in advance, or more, providing plenty of time for planning and promotion. Fans travel the globe to see World Cup soccer; tennis isn’t soccer, of course, but it’s not hard to envision fans flying off to a ten-day team tournament, as they do to majors. Television rights to a year-end Davis Cup like the one being proposed here have got to be worth more—eventually, much more—than those for the current format. And wouldn’t the Fed Cup soon adopt this sort of format for women’s team play should Davis Cup do so? There could come a time when the two would be combined over two weeks, and perhaps intermingled, and this fully realized tennis World Cup becomes a kind of fifth major, with ATP and WTA points awarded. Now, there’s a tourney that would matter.
Gerald Marzorati , a former editor of The New York Times Magazine , is the author of Late to the Ball , a memoir about tennis and aging. He writes about tennis regularly for the newyorker. com.
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