Great, World Team Tennis On 'Roids

Call me skeptical, but this proposal to replace Davis Cup with a "tennis World Cup" just makes me roll my eyes.  

Here's the basics:

• 32 teams would play in one venue over 10 days (8 groups of four in round robin to determine 16 finalists)
• Teams would have 3 players and a captain, and in each five set match, at least two players would compete (each player has to play at least 6 games)
• Play would be no-ad 
• Strictly enforced (i.e., publicly displayed) 25 seconds between points 
• Tiebreaks are first to 5, no two point gap retuired 

I think this is an incredibly bad idea, and not just because I really love Davis Cup.  Obviously there are tons of problems with Davis Cup at the moment, mostly arising from scheduling.  The number of tournaments players have to play and the disparate places they play them in make commitment (especially for top players) to Davis Cup very difficult.

But this still seems intensely problematic.  I'm automatically suspicious of sea changes in sports made for business reasons, and it's not because I'm a sports purist (okay, it's not just because I'm a sports purist).  In my experience, big changes made to how a sport is played usually end up hurting the game in the end, years down the road, when it's almost impossible to backtrack.  In this case, as Matt Cronin pointed out, the major problem would be the deterioration of funding for smaller tennis federations.  An awful lot of smaller federations count on a couple of weekends a year of Davis Cup to bring in the bulk of their funds.  Kill those tournaments, kill that funding, kill the game's development in the non-major markets around the world.

For a sport that's trying for a broader global appeal, eliminating the possibility of international play and high level competition at home in smaller, developing markets seems like a distinctly counterintuiitve move.  And not in a clever way.

There are other problems, too.  Like, where in the schedule does an 10-day tournament go?  It seems unlikely that there's anywhere in the calendar for it-- which tournaments are supposed to give up their interests entirely to make room for a World Cup?  And with all the squawking about how long the season is, it seems even less likely that the players would be very enthusiastic about adding 10 days on after the WTF.  (Heh, still funny.)  And what about doubles?  To me, one of the great things about Davis Cup is that it's a high stakes situation where doubles really matters.  I haven't seen one word about it in the World Cup proposal.

I dunno, personally I hope this thing dies a quick death and never resurfaces again.