Deer+Headlights=Davis Cup

Howdy, Tribe. Luke and I made an abbreviated trip to the farm again, this time so I could get back to watch the critical, final day of Davis Cup and - hey, hey! - every single first-round tie is heading into Day Three undecided.  This is rockin' the Harda** Davis Cup Cabal's  clubhouse, for sure.

When you look at some of the on-paper mismatches here (Australia vs. Belgium, towering Spain (sans Rafael Nadal on Day One) vs. Switzerland (without Roger Federer and Stanislaus Wawrinka), Mighty Argentina matched against puny Austria), it's amazing that not a single tie is over. It underscores exactly what I meant last Friday, when I wrote that one of the compelling aspects of Davis Cup is that you can throw the form chart and rankings out the window.

Clearly, there is nothing resembling parity among these nations. But the operative word in Davis Cup is not form, it's inspiration (with a little boost from some key key elements like the alternating home-and-away format, and choice of surface for the host nation). But there's more to it than that, much more. And it explains why Davis Cup is not just great because it's "traditional" (long-running and still addicted to all that patriotic pageantry. . .Oh-that's-so-20th Century!), because most of the great players enjoy and revere it, or because it has unique elements that in this era really level the playing field for lesser tennis powers.

Davis Cup is great because doubles matters.

Hail, I couldn't care less about doubles, to be perfectly honest, except in Davis Cup - in which I care about it a great deal. This isn't just the matter of doubles potentially accounting for as much as a 33 per cent share in a win. It's also because doubles is treated with great respect, and it can have such a decisive impact on the outcome of a tie that all kinds of nuance and strategic thinking goes into selecting any give doubles teams.

Imagine that: in "regular" pro, tournament tennis, the game of doubles is completely overshadowed by singles, and it routinely gets death threats (most recently, from the ATP itself). In Davis Cup, it is nothing less than the "impact" match - the most important rubber, the rubber most likely to decide the outcome of the tie. Doubles has its own day (Saturday); how freakin' weird is that (especially if you're not really up on your Davis Cup, and you paid your own money for the tickets). But in larger terms, you have, say, Andre Agassi and Pete Sampras in your singles stable, and who do you throw at the opposition on the critical, middle day with the match tied? Those chest-bumping, Wilanders-scratching, couldn't buy a singles win with Roger Federer's money idiot savants, Bob and Mike Bryan! That's if you're lucky enough to have a Mike and Bob-grade combo on your squad, which most nations do not.

This, folks, is pure structural genius. For the pool of fine doubles players is very deep, doubles requires chemistry, and putting your top singles gun into the awkward position of playing doubles and therefore maybe having to clinch or keep a tie alive on the last day -  his third consecutive day of five-set, no tiebreaker in the fifth tennis -  has got "desperate gamble" written all over it.

Great, dynastic Davis Cup teams have not necessarily been built around doubles, but they have almost always been anchored by them. John Newcombe and Tony Roche, Ion Tirac and Ilie Nastase, Stefan Edberg and Anders Jarryd, John McEnroe and Peter Fleming, Ken Flach and Robert Seguso, Henri Le Conte and Guy Forget. . . the list goes on. When I was talking about this with Steggy before last year's Davis Cup final, she volunteered to do a bit of number crunching to see if we could quantify this. Here's what she came up with:

Since 2,000, 78 per cent of the teams that won ties won the doubles. Over the past 21 years, 50 per cent of the final-round ties went to five rubbers. Only two of the winning squads in all those years lost the doubles, meaning that teams that won the doubles won the Davis Cup 90 per cent of the time. Incidentally, the two exceptions were Spain in 2004 and Russia in 2002. Both of those teams lost the doubles but still won the Cup. In 2004, the Bryans lost just five games to Tommy Robredo and Juan Carlos Ferraro; in 2002 Nicholas Escude and Fabrice Santoro of France took out the heavyweight pairing of Yvgeny Kafelnikov and Marat Safin.

Among those 21 final-round ties (and excepting the 2004 and 2002 finals), 11 ended with a 3-2 score, and among those the team winning the double won 81 per cent of the time. Four finals ended 4-1, and four ended 3-1: the doubles teams won every one of those eight matches.

Now look at today's results.

Croatia is fighting for its life against Nicolas Kiefer-less Germany, even though Tommy Haas did his job dispatching Mario Ancic in the first match of the tie. That's because today, Michael Kohlmann and Alexandre Waske (see above photo)  took out Ancic and Ljubicic.

Now I'm not going to suggest that Kohlmann and Waske are a reincarnation of Ken Rosewall and Lew Hoad (the Glimmer Twins of their era for a certain crowd), but there is a reason why some individuals function better in doubles than singles; it's not just a different game, it's also played in a different psychic universe.

It's amazing what a man can - or cannot - do under the special demands of partnership.

How about the Switzerland vs. Spain mess? Feliciano Lopez (singles ranking, 97, but the dude has great hair and eyes to die for!) and Fernando Verdasco (No. 33) had to go 12-10 in the fifth to get a handle on the situation; they were playing two guys, Yves Allegro (singles ranking: off the charts)  and Marco Chiudinelli (No.137, with a bullet, should he contemplate doing something drastic to himself). And this is business as usual in Davis Cup.

Okay, the realist in me says that the spirited doubles victories put up by Belarus, Austria, Switzerland and even Romania are best described as stays-of-execution. But life suddenly becomes a lot more complicated - and not necessarily in a comfortable way -  for, oh, Richard Gasquet, who's first up tomorrow for France. Sure he's got the match on his racquet. And that's the problem.

Among the others, Ljubicic must be sweating it after blowing the doubs, with elimination (at the hands of Haas) on the line. And Lleyton Hewitt, successful in doubles, has to be thinking he could atone for that surprising opening day loss to Kristof Vliegen if he can send the tie into a decisive, fifth rubber by taking out Olivier Rochus. We know the deer-in-the-headlights look that so often comes over a Davis Cup player when a two-match-to-none lead suddenly morphs into a one-match, winner-take-all proposition.

If Hewitt wins, you can bet your bottom dollar that Vliegen will feel somewhat ambivalent going into an apparent gimme (but this is Davis Cup, there is no gimme!) against big-serving but largely harmless giant Chris Guccione. After all, all Vliegen really has to lose is the respect of a few million countrymen and what self-esteem he's built in his brief time on earth. So you know he'll  be thinking, Holy Anchovy! I beat Hewitt on Friday, what more do you want from me?

All this, because of doubles. Doubles? Who cares about doubles?  Davis Cup, what a bore. Does anybody care?