Heed this warning before reading on: this might be nothing more than a little paddle in the pool of sporting nostalgia, but I used to really love the Davis Cup. The Davis Cup was like the fifth grand slam of the year, or sixth if you included the season-ending World Tour Finals.
I remember in particular five successive years, from 1988-1992, a golden period for the competition. The finals in the first two were echoes of the day’s most fascinating individual rivalry, between Sweden’s Stefan Edberg and West Germany’s Boris Becker. That, I think, was vital.
Becker and country won both, first in Gothenburg and then in Stuttgart. Becker was not at all German, or not at least what people thought Germans to be like (that was Steffi Graf) but something in those contests between the two countries was elevated by the fire and ice of the individual rivalry.
But the most joy was provided by France’s triumph over the United States in 1991.
Especially now, thinking back, I have no idea why but suspect it was a combination of their being solid underdogs and the fact that they had not won the Davis Cup since 1932.
France were in a sporting period of producing gallant non-winners and just imagining Henri Leconte winning anything was a ludicrous enough idea to root for.
Leconte somehow carved out a professional tennis career when in reality he was a glorified exhibition player. And he beat Pete Sampras that year in the crucial second tie after Andre Agassi had earlier beaten Guy Forget – the straight man to Leconte’s clown.
Sampras had just broken through, only one slam title to his credit and still a season from really breaking out but Leconte had no business beating him. Not in straight sets.
The next year, the US produced their own little story to warm the heart. John McEnroe, the end of his career at hand, helped them beat Switzerland in the final, starring in an epic doubles win from two sets down with Sampras.
At some point since then, and I am not sure exactly when, the Davis Cup began to slip back from significance.
There were years when it managed to claw back some attention. Spain’s win in 2004, the first time Rafael Nadal played in the tournament, was an electric moment. Six years later, Novak Djokovic leading Serbia to their first triumph was another.
It is probably no coincidence that those two stick out. The whole idea of nationalism and nationhood in a sport as ruthlessly individual as tennis is an ambiguous one and it is something that has surrounded the tournament.
Often that ambiguity has sunk it into oblivion.
Sometimes, when it has clearly meant so much for a player to be doing so, representing and leading his country to triumph, it has lit up the finals.
Djokovic and Nadal are proud men of their country. As Nadal said in his autobiography, that is no “trite” emotion, not in a country where regional loyalty often trumps national identity.
That first Davis Cup and a subsequent win in 2011 was a big deal for him – and by default, the tournament – not least because it allowed him to compete in a team environment, which he had craved since abandoning football for tennis when he was 12.
It is lower down the rungs of established tennis countries where the competition’s significance heightens, which, for what is effectively the sport’s world cup, is no bad thing and makes sense.
India lost narrowly to Serbia this weekend, but their remarkable doubles triumph (from two sets and a break down) was one of their great recent moments on a tennis court.
In fact, the Davis Cup is where India’s otherwise ordinary tennis heritage shines. Three times they have been runners-up, the last in 1987.
In 1974 they lost only because they refused to travel to apartheid-era South Africa.
It was big for Romania, too, at the end of the 1960s, when Ilie Nastase and Ion Tiriac took them to the finals three years out of four, only to lose to the US every time.
Maybe, like so much else, the Davis Cup has become collateral damage in this time of men’s tennis.
We have invested so much into the individual rivalries of Roger Federer, Nadal, Djokovic and Andy Murray that anything else has, sadly, felt like excess baggage.
It would have helped if some of the greatness of their contests had spilt over to the Davis Cup, as it did with Becker and Edberg, and Ivan Lendl, and McEnroe and Mats Wilander.
But all told, the Davis Cup counts only two matches among the four: once when Nadal and Djokovic played in 2009 and once when Federer and Djokovic played in 2006. Federer's return this year, after years of skipping it in pursuit of individual titles, is intriguing. The talk is that he is back only to win the one major title that has eluded him: an individual pursuit garbed in collective duty.
The Davis Cup will not mind one bit.
osamiuddin@thenational.ae
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