WHEN Britain won the world’s premier team men’s tennis competition in 1936, then named the International Lawn Tennis Challenge, the result seemed almost a foregone conclusion. The dynamic duo of Fred Perry and Bunny Austin had already led their homeland to three straight titles, and cemented their legacy by eking out a 3-2 victory over Australia. But it would be 79 long years before the nation that invented the game would once again hoist the trophy of the sport’s principal nation-based tournament, now called the Davis Cup. After eight decades in the wilderness, on November 29th Andy Murray (pictured) secured the championship for the birthplace of tennis, lofting a magnificent running backhand lob over the head of Belgium’s David Goffin.
Partisans of British tennis will be sure to cite this achievement as a long-overdue restoration of their country to its rightful spot atop the world tennis tree. (“History has been written”, proclaimed the website of the Lawn Tennis Association (LTA), the sport’s governing body in Britain.) But fans hoping that the result presages a broader renaissance of British tennis are likely to be disappointed. Only by virtue of a fortuitous alignment of the current configuration of the country’s tennis talent with the tournament’s idiosyncratic format, as well as a depressingly depleted field, did Britain make it to the top.
Although Mr Murray deserves the biggest share of credit for his team’s victory, perhaps the second-most valuable contribution was made by an American: Dwight Davis, the tournament’s founder and namesake. In 1899, as an undergraduate student at Harvard, he commissioned a pricey silver trophy bowl and announced it would be given to the winner of an annual international tennis competition. When Britain answered the call the next year, Davis decided that each match (called a “tie” in the Cup’s lingo) would be a best-of-five series, with four of the contests (“rubbers” in Davis Cup-ese) singles and one doubles. Pairs of singles, with a minimum of two singles players per side, would take place on the first and third days of a tie, and opponents would switch round in the middle (although team captains were free to introduce new players for the second pair). The doubles rubber—in which non-singles players could also participate—would occur on the second day. The format gave captains substantial flexibility regarding the size of their line-up: they could deploy anywhere from two to six players.
With three of the four modern Grand Slam tournaments (Wimbledon, the US Open and the French Open) already established in the 19th century, the Davis Cup was supposed to distinguish itself by being a competition for countries rather than for individuals. However, Davis’s choice of rules, which has never been modified, partly undermined this feature. Because one player can take up as much as half of a team’s rubbers (two of the four singles, plus forming one-half of a doubles squad), the format strongly favours “top-heavy” nations with one or two superstars at the expense of entrants with deep, balanced rosters. If, say, a country happens to have the world’s best player, but no one else in the top 100, it would still be competitive against one that occupied slots two through 100. Assuming the singles played out according to rankings with a 2-2 split, the tie would be decided by the doubles. And because doubles matches tend to be less predictable than singles ones, and great singles players are not always good at doubles, the doubles format tends to act as a leveller: the world’s best- and 101st-best players would certainly stand a healthy chance in doubles against a team of the second- and third-best.
Such an extreme hypothetical example might appear outlandish. But in the 2015 Davis Cup, it more or less became reality. Britain has one exceptional player in Mr Murray, who is now second in the Association of Tennis Professionals’ (ATP) world rankings. Its next-best eligible singles competitor is currently Kyle Edmund, who holds the lofty perch at number 102. Mr Murray was always likely to win all his singles rubbers, which he did. That meant that Britain could secure 3-2 victories simply by eking out victories in doubles. In the first round, against the United States, an upset win by James Ward, the country’s second-string player, made the doubles irrelevant. However, Mr Murray essentially won each of the next three ties by himself, bearing half the load in the doubles rubbers (paired with his brother Jamie) as well as coasting to victory in singles. For all intents and purposes, Britain’s 2015 Davis Cup squad was a one-man team, and its championship in an event billed as the “World Cup of Tennis” is barely more of a shared national triumph than Mr Murray’s Wimbledon singles title in 2013 was. Only under Davis’s distinctive system could Mr Murray have willed his country to a title with so little help.
The outcome of this year’s event is not necessarily an indictment of the collective nature of the tournament overall. The British team was indeed unusually lopsided: Mr Murray won 11 competitive rubbers in a single Davis Cup, a feat equalled just once in the previous three decades. However, it also reinforces a concerning pre-existing trend. In the 30 years to 2011, the average Davis Cup winner included 3.76 players who won at least two competitive rubbers. During the past four Cups, the figure has been just 2.25. Captains who ask their top talent to shoulder a disproportionate share of the burden are increasingly being rewarded.
Even if one regards the Davis Cup as an individual tournament disguised as a team one, however, a British victory would still have been improbable had every country been playing at full strength. Mr Murray’s résumé, with “just” two Grand Slam titles by the age of 28, is surprisingly modest for a player of his skills, because his peak years have coincided with those of three transcendent all-time greats in Roger Federer, Novak Djokovic and Rafael Nadal. Switzerland, in particular, represents the Platonic ideal of a Davis Cup team, since it can play either Mr Federer, Stan Wawrinka (currently the world’s fourth-ranked player) or both in every single match. The pair won the 2014 Davis Cup handily. Spain, with Mr Nadal and seventh-ranked David Ferrer, is not far behind, and Serbia will always be a leading contender as long as Mr Djokovic, whose 2015 annus mirabilis may well be the greatest season in the sport’s history, is on the court. All of these teams would have been favoured against Mr Murray and his merry band of tennis dwarves.
However, the Davis Cup today is at best a poor imitation of the world-class competition it offered for most of its 115-year history. Modern players are expected to play far more matches in less time than those of prior generations were, and the physical demands of the game have been rapidly increasing. As a result, tennis stars have become ever-more concerned about fatigue and injuries, which have intermittently waylaid Mr Nadal (whose style of play is uniquely gruelling). Since no one will voluntarily sit out a Grand Slam event, players have become ever more selective about deigning to participate in “lesser” tournaments.
The Davis Cup, in particular, has deteriorated from a virtually mandatory event up through the 1990s to little more than an optional exhibition, in which the sport’s superstars essentially take turns playing unopposed. After Spain won the competition in 2011, Mr Nadal was hurt in 2012, skipped the 2013 tournament (in which Spain was upset by Canada), and wound up injured again in 2014, preventing his country from even qualifying for the main event this year. Mr Federer announced in February that he would pass on the 2015 Cup after securing the title last year, and Mr Djokovic withdrew in July. That left Mr Murray as the only giant left standing: the strongest player he faced along Britain’s road to the title was Gilles Simon of France, currently ranked 15th in the world. And of the 11 ties in the main event that did not include Mr Murray, only two featured at least one player in the global top ten. Mr Murray has already promised to be available for the first round of the Cup next year. But given his harsh words for the LTA following his victory, it would surprise no one if he bows out at a later stage.
The Davis Cup is unique in a tennis landscape crowded with tournaments for individuals, and its decline is stripping the sport of precious variety. One simple adjustment would make it more reflective of the breadth and depth of a country’s talent: limiting each player to one singles rubber rather than two, with the matchups determined by world rankings. That would aid countries like France (which has four of the world’s top 19 players), Spain (four of the top 25), America (four of the top 48) and Croatia (three of the top 44) at the expense of one-man bands like Serbia, Britain or Kei Nishikori’s Japanese team. But thanks to the doubles match, countries with two stars, such as Switzerland, could still put at least one of them on the court in 60% of their rubbers (down from 100% in the current format).
The Cup’s second ailment—the absence of so many stars—is a graver problem that requires a more radical solution. The ATP has neither the authority nor the inclination to make the event mandatory for reluctant players. But while it is powerless to address the demand side of the equation, it can certainly reduce the supply. If the Davis Cup were scheduled along the lines of football’s World Cup, held every four years with qualifying matches in the interim, players who feel their legacy demands that they secure the trophy at least once—as Mr Federer seemed to—could ill afford to squander one of just two or three opportunities to do so during their primes. Given the circuit’s over-saturation of tennis tournaments, “less is more” may prove the best way to preserve Dwight Davis’s novel and noble vision.
