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Davis Cup Journal: part 6
Final Thoughts
by John Yandell
I was on a plane from Madrid to London heading home
and reading my first English newspaper in a week, the London Daily Mail,
when I saw a small blurb in the sports that McEnroe might be fined $10,000
for skipping the press conference, after the Spanish finished their 5-0
Davis Cup sweep on Sunday.
Well, I wondered how the reverse singles had gone,
but like I said, after the U.S. lost the doubles, we’d decided to do
something else with our last day in Spain besides follow tennis.
So I got to the beach early at around 10am and took that Atlantic
swim. The Santender beaches are
beautiful, with very fine light brown, pinkish sand, and the water’s
perfectly clear, cold, and quite bracing. There’s something purifying
for me about swimming in the Atlantic. Sometimes I’m actually calm for
hours afterwards. (Just ask anyone who knows me, that’s unusual.)
I’ve also revised my view of Santender, somewhat.
We found some beautiful old houses, beach mansions really, and an
incredible 5 star hotel, a white chateau with about 5 acres of grounds,
set on a hill overlooking the sea. Actually we had tried to book it but they were sold out 3 months in
advance. It would have been nice. We
ended up in the USTA media hotel, which is a very ugly, soulless,
previously new and modern hotel, which is now merely very ugly and
soulless, but does have the advantage of being a 5 minute walk from the
stadium.
That contrast shows exactly what this town is like.
There’s this crust of crowded, ugly modern buildings growing like
barnacles over the beauty of the old city, clogging it up.
It’s not exactly a young people’s town either, I was hoping for
more beautiful young flesh on the beach, but it seemed like the average
age was about 50. That’s the same walking down the promenades. Then
again, maybe I just didn’t find the right beach.
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One thing I really grew to like though was the
“Royal Society of Tennis,” the club that hosted the event. It’s a club with grand old style: polished wood floors, real
Persian rugs, wood paneling, green lamp shades. A former Spanish monarch, whose name and number escapes me, founded
it. He had a royal summer palace out at the tip of the peninsula - another
of the great old buildings here - and apparently he was an avid player.
Despite the fact we weren’t members, we had no
problem hanging out and eating at the bar.
There’s a lovely veranda that runs the length of the club where
you can sit outside with a great view of
the 5 pristine red clay courts. They
treat those courts right - water them, drag them, and sweep them every
couple of hours - and it shows. They’re perfect.
The level of the club players was pretty high and
pretty intense. It really made me
want to get out there and demonstrate that someone could actually do
damage on clay with classical grips (contrary to what had been happening
to the attacking style American players next door at the stadium) even if
it was at the club level.
Anyway, after the beach we went over to the tennis
and picked up the rest of the Advanced Tennis equipment. The matches had started. There
was still a large crowd and they were surprisingly into it.
As promised, Vince Spadea was playing the first match for the U.S.
and the Spaniards had substituted John Carlos Ferrero.
I asked one of the TV techs - Spadea was down a break in the first.
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I had a little twinge and thought, well, you know I
could go in and shoot Ferrero for ProStrokes…
But we hadn’t been credentialed for that, and we had already
decided to head up to this incredible old Spanish town called Santillana,
so I grabbed the tripods and got back in the car.
The old towns in Spain are great, by the way.
We went to Toledo while we were in Madrid, an old walled city that
is pretty much in tact from the 16th and 17th
centuries. The stone
buildings and streets are incredibly beautiful. The cathedral is one of
the largest in Europe. And it’s
packed with religious art and sculpture. The
Spaniards were (are?) really into the crucifixion and the resurrection,
and just can’t seem to display enough depictions.
Santillana has a large number of intact actual family
residential houses built by various knights and nobles from that same
17th century period. The
simple stone construction with the flowers in the windows - it’s
timelessly beautiful.
I also paid a visit to one of the more bizarre
museums ever, devoted to the history of torture, with an emphasis on the
tools of the Inquisition. Compared
to being broken with the wheel, a favorite medieval public spectacle,
apparently, or being impaled by spikes when they close you up in the iron
maiden, well, I guess what happened to our Davis Cup team was, relatively,
not all that bad.
We had lunch in a café and they had the tennis on a
big screen TV. Vince had split the
first two sets and was battling it out in the third.
But I never did hear the scores, or even who played the last match.
I’m assuming Jan Michael Gambill played Juan Balcells, who was
supposedly rewarded for his doubles triumph with a singles spot, or maybe
it was Costa again.
During the matches I did watch, I just couldn’t
help but think what it would have been like, how much more intense, if
Pete or Andre, or better yet, both, had shown up.
Being in that stadium, I really understood, for the first time, one
of the things that attracted McEnroe to Davis Cup.
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In an early press conference he said something like,
“You see a crowd like that, 10,000 people, you want to get out there and
play.” He kept coming back
to the same point, mentioning how he explained to the players that you
rarely get to play in front of a crowd that is so partisan and into it. Interestingly, he didn’t seem to care too much who the crowd was
for, it was the energy he was after. Add Pete and/or Andre, and it would
have been too great.
After reading the story in the London paper, I
wondered why he skipped the press conference.
Maybe he had a plane to catch. Maybe
sitting there watching 5 losses, including two meaningless reverse singles
matches, was just too grim. Maybe
he wanted to get out of town so badly, the chance of a $10K fine seemed
like a small price to pay. Or
maybe he knew he was likely to be rather impolite to the press in
the face of the usual tiresome questions he’s heard a million times, and
decided to avoid a potential Mac “incident.”
Who knows?
Which brings me to the future of the Davis Cup in
American tennis. Pete and Andre
told him they were going to be with him this year.
Isn’t that ultimately why the USTA got rid of Tom Gullickson and
brought in John? Now, if he can’t
get them on the court, who can? McEnroe
seems to be withholding his own verdict on that question.
He said the other day he’s not sure if it’s bad luck or he just
doesn’t make a difference.
But maybe it’s something else. How about the out of control, insane, year round pro tennis
schedule? The top players have to
play the Slams and the SuperNines. That’s
13 events. To win a Slam is 7
matches. The others are either 5 or
6 matches each. If you add in Davis
Cup, that’s another 8 matches for singles alone, not to mention the
potential of some hellish travel destinations - remember Zimbabwe? So if you’re winning that could be 75 matches or more in a year.
Not to mention the other pro events below the SuperNine, many of
which have long established histories of attracting top players.
The Sybase Open and the Bank of the West, right in our own Bay Area
for example.
Maybe Pete and Andre were both too hurt to play or
maybe they felt they were risking serious injuries if they did play,
especially versus the Spaniards on clay. Or
maybe they just didn’t have the mental and emotional energy to want it,
regardless of some basically good intentions. That would be understandable
to me.
Just look at McEnroe’s career. He didn’t win a slam past the age of about 25.
Pete and Andre are
pushing 30. Both of them have
played significant Davis Cup matches. But neither was like John. I looked
it up and his singles record in Davis Cup was 41-8 (which by the way is
the record). That’s the equivalent of winning about 6 more Grand Slams. (Which,
interestingly, would have tied him with Pete at 13)
And he played doubles, remember, and since he won everything in
doubles that almost doubled the total matches.
Eventually all that tennis had to take a toll.
Perhaps if he hadn’t been so emotionally committed to Davis Cup
he might have stayed at the top longer.
Anyway, that’s all speculation. But one thing is for sure, a lot of interest groups own little
pieces of the pro tennis world that they would be very unlikely to give up
willingly. If it was decided that
eliminating the Sybase Open was best for tennis, how do you think that
would play in the Bay Area, or with Barry MacKay, or the San Jose Arena,
which now owns the event? People
talk all the time about how tough the schedule is, but they can’t even
reduce Davis Cup to once every 2 years like the Ryder Cup, which is a much
bigger world media event anyway. And the Ryder Cup takes only one week,
not four!
So I guess time will tell more of the story.
Will Mac keep going? Will
the top Americans play regularly, and if they do, with what results and at
what cost to themselves? I was
really hoping for some kind of high powered adrenaline ride all the way to
the finals in Australia, but that was just selfish on my part.
But, you know what? If it
really does ever happen the way Johnny Mac envisions, I hope I can be
there to see it.
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Yandell's article by emailing
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