Mornin', everyone. All is finally quiet on the tennis front - for the moment. But remember, Rosangel's reports from the Blackrock Masters in London will be appearing as early as tomorrow. After that senior tour event, we'll have a few weeks to meander and allow the tennis conversation to take us where it will. I hope we can look at some people, issues and events that get lost in the hectic shuffle of the regular season.
Last night, I wrote a post for ESPN (it should be live soon) about how this Davis Cup belonged to Patrick McEnroe. Let me amplify some of the things I suggested there. Tennis is such an individualist's sport that the impact of coaching in most cases is minimal; about the best a coach can do, even in a team format like Davis Cup, is make sure the player or team has high morale and is well-prepared on two key fronts: the strategic (meaning game-based) and the emotional. The most striking thing to me about this Davis Cup tie is that it played out exactly as promoters of the best-case scenario for the US squad envisioned.
Oh, you can say that the Russians were a gimme final. The differences in the rankings between the singles players would bear out that the US squad was a serious, almost prohibitive favorite. But consider this: the Russian captain, Shamil Tarpischev, is an astute tactician and talent manager. He had world No. 4 Nikolay Davydenko available, but chose not to play him, even though his singles ranking is higher than that of either US player. This tells you two things: Tarpischev was keenly aware of Davydenko's poor H2H against the US singles players (a combined 0-11), but also this: Tarpischev had viable options in Trusunov and Youzhny.
To appreciate what this really meant, imagine that the US playing Switzerland in Davis Cup. Aware of Roddick's 1-15 head-to-head with Roger Federer, McEnroe decides to bench Andy and play - Vince Spadea. Laugh if you will, but Vindawg is 1-2 against Federer.Yet we know that would never happen, even on clay. You don't have to be a mad genius of a coach to see that Tursunov or Youzhny vs. Roddick is potentially a much closer match than Spadea vs. Federer. All of which is just saying that the talent gap going into this final was much narrower than the ranking numbers or head-to-head suggested (BTW, the US singles players were a combined 7-1 against their Russian opponents).
The US squad was under a fair amount of pressure in this last tie. After our 11-year Davis Cup drought (a dry spell that is an incisive comment on the way the geopolitics of tennis has changed), the team had come face-to-face with an ambition and dream that has been in the makings since McEnroe assumed the captaincy in 2001. And what is more daunting than being put in position - with no guarantee - to realize your deepest dream? Closing the deal was not the easiest assignment, although it beat hail out of having to win the danged Cup in Moscow on red mud. Still: despite the apparent overwhelming advantages of being the host team, the naked reality is that in the 10 previous Davis Cup finals, the hosts were a tepid 5-5.
All right. There's no need to position this win as a greater achievement than it actually was - you win the Davis Cup and nobody needs to apologize, rationalize, or add artifical sweetener. But the best part of this winning effort in my eyes was how we won - it was a tight, on-target, disciplined performance, which is a credit to McEnroe. The chemistry of any given team is demonstrated by how it functions as a unit, and how similarly the individual players meet the challenge and respond to the pressure of any given situation. And it is both a coach's responsibility and obligation to tease out the best possible chemistry in any given team. More than anything else, the team that won the Davis Cup this weekend showed the great chemical reaction you can get when you combine six or eight elements - even volatile elements like Ar, which is the symbol for AndyRoddick **- and allow them to stabilize and attain a balance over six years.
The USTA also deserves some credit for having produced this exemplary team, because it suppressed the institutional instinct for instant gratification and allowed McEnroe the time he needed to shape the team despite some painful setbacks and frustrations. When Pat took the job, the US Davis Cup team was dysfunctional. We still had stars, including Pete Sampras and Andre Agassi, but the Davis Cup captain's task had become one of trying to cajole either of those (or other) stars to agree to play in any given year. The following year, whatever the outcome, the captain went, hat in hand, to whatever star had sat out last time.
So a habit developed. The US tended to throw together a de facto all-star team, and the chemistry was always volatile. Nobody owned those pre-McEnroe teams like Roddick owns the present one, partly because the top stars were rivals who preferred to operate unilaterally. That approach worked to a limited degree - you couldn't NOT win Davis Cups with the talent on hand. But there was little continuity, only nominal camaraderie, and when our talent declined it became manifest that the all-star approach was, simply, unworkable.
So McEnroe set about building a team from the ground up, in an era when the US was no longer the 800-pound Davis Cup gorilla in Davis Cup room. He did it with the patience, attention to detail, and not-always-obvious toughness that are McEnroe's trademarks.
I've known Patrick McEnroe forever - in fact, I collaborated with him on the book, Tennis for Dummies and various other writing projects over the years. I got to know him when Pat's older brother, John (also a tennis player), knowing that I would be covering a tournament at Stratton, Vt., half-seriously suggested that I buy a meal for his kid brother, who along with his pal, Jim Grabb, was trying to scrape through qualifying. I did take the two youngsters (they were at Stanford at the time) out for dinner, and I left them that night impressed.
In contrast to his sharp-edged and twitchy brother, Pat seemed almost soft, and imperturbable. He was quiet, and he had developed a tennis game that, while it wasn't as inventive or effective as John's (whose was?), was noteworthy for how different it was. It was the ultimate testament to genetic diversity, and the power of nature over nurture. Most important, you could tell that Patrick didn't develop his game in some effort to escape the long shadow cast by his older brother; that solid, bread-and-butter baseline game was as organically Patrick as that slashing cubism was John.
People always said that it must have been horrible for Patrick (and the middle McEnroe son, Mark) to have to mature as "that McEnroe's" brother, but I don't think that's true at all. What probably was tough for Patrick was finding a niche in tennis (Mark chose law over tennis) in which he wasn't perceived as drafting behind John. That niche turns out to be the Davis Cup captaincy (their day jobs as television commentators are simply too similar), and this is satisfyingly ironic. For as great a Davis Cup player as John was, his tenure as a captain was spectacularly brief and controversial. If you want to see the difference between John and Patrick McEnroe, just look through the prism of the Davis Cup captaincy.
I recently read an article about Patrick (I think it was Doug Robson's excellent profile in USA today) in which some source cited McEnroe's adeptness at negotiating the "politics" of tennis. This was accurate insofar as it suggests that McEnroe is a realist, and a man willing and able to negotiate rather than demand or dictate. I often saw this quality at play when we worked together. He was great to work with; he never acted the star or prima donna, and he was always as sensitive to my needs as his own. Pat knows how to keep things in perspective, he never keeps people waiting, he'll buy a six-pack if you're coming over and he likes his eggs with a sliced tomato and oil-and-vinegar dressing on the side.
As Davis Captain, McEnroe's real genius lies in projecting his patient, focused nature onto the team. He knows how to get winning done, and he knows how to convince his players that the common good is guaranteed less by equal treatment than fair treatment. Pat is tough and appropriately thick-skinned. He's honest, modest, and in complete control of his emotions. I've never seen him go off on anyone in the manner of you-know-who.
I think he inculcated his Davis Cup team with some of those virtues, even if it wasn't in an obviously recognizable form. This is, after all, chemistry. And chemistry is about the the way things interact with each other.