Okay, now that you're all rockin' your old-school Fila Davis Cup warm-ups and settling in for the weekend, here's a little quarter-acre to go Off Topic on over the weekend. Your show.
The first thundering Davis Cup volley was fired by one Marco Chiudinelli of Switzerland - can it be? Is this the new Roger Federer? Well, that's unlikely (although Marco is a childhood friend of TMF's). What this result is, though, is a comment on the essence of Davis Cup. In a way, the competition is more like the Olympic Games than a typical tournament. If you look at the Olympics results, you'll see that it's like they throw out the pecking order in tennis, wipe out the validity of the seedings, cancel the comfort zone of the conventional H-2-Hs and rankings. It's every man or woman for himself (or, if you prefer, his country).
Reviewing the recent, sometimes heated back-and-forth on Davis Cup, my main feeling is that (we) Americans - Whoops! Gringos! - still don't get it. Some very knowledgeable people here are wedded to the idea that Davis Cup is dying, or unimportant, or in decline. I say, turn on your televisions on Sunday and check out the crowds and atmosphere at various locations where the Cup is being played. I'm surprised by how may posters here have expressed the same sentiments that so many of my countrymen embraced until recently when the subject of soccer came up. Oh, nobody cares about soccer!
I'm not going to throw an OT theme out there today, because we'll have plenty to talk about over the next few days. My own plan is to get back to the city on Sunday, after a quick trip to game-rich Andes this afternoon and Saturday. I'll be blogging the decisive day of Davis Cup, so stick around - we'll have a great time.