Sport loses its amateur ethic at its peril

Nominally it is still the Davis Cup, but the tournament now taking place in Madrid should really be re-named the Gerard Piqué Cup since it bears no more relation to the old Davis Cup than T20 does to Test cricket. The Davis Cup is being revamped by the Barcelona defender and his company Kosmos Tennis into a World Cup-style format with investment to the tune of $3 billion euro. This doesn’t mean it is necessarily a bad thing; merely that it is a very different thing.

It is being played over one week rather than over months with long intervals between ties. Instead of one team being at home and the other away, it’s a neutral venue. Instead of five matches in each tie, there are three (two singles and one doubles) and instead of being played over five sets, each match is over only three. So it’s a cut-down version.

There were objections to the format of the real Davis Cup. Matches were scattered over the year. The number of possible ties made demands on leading players which they were not always willing to meet. Their tournament year was already congested. The Davis Cup offered no ranking points and there wasn’t much money in it. So quite often top players declined to represent their country, and their absence was said to devalue the competition.

There was a certain craziness about it too. The question of home and away was decided a little strangely. You got a home tie if your last match against your next opponent had been away. Nothing odd about that, you may say – except that that previous encounter might have been ten, twenty, even thirty years previously, even before any of your team were born.

Then the dice were heavily loaded in favour of the home team. It would not only, as in most sports, have the backing of the crowd. It also selected the venue – fair enough – and the surface on which the match would be played – not, perhaps, quite so fair.

Finally – and, given the way the world is now, this was probably the clinching objection to the real Davis Cup – nobody made much money from it, certainly not nearly as much as the Gerard Piqué Cup may be expected to make from television, sponsors and advertisers. The Davis Cup was a relic of the amateur days of long ago. You couldn’t sell it profitably. So it was past its sell-by date. Now the Piqué Cup has been invented to make money, just as the ECB has invented its new hit-and-giggle tournament The Hundred because it will attract lots of lolly as the staid old County Championship doesn’t.

The real Davis Cup had its charm, just as the County Championship does. If the top players were sometimes missing, this gave others a chance to enjoy the limelight, if only briefly. Then it took keenly competitive, good quality tennis to places where such tennis was rarely seen, and to tennis fans who rarely got the chance to watch tennis like that except on television. Davis Cup ties attracted enthusiastic and committed crowds, often fiercely partisan and often young. The atmosphere was usually very different from that of an ordinary tournament, and wonderfully exciting.

In contrast, no matter how lavishly it is promoted, and no matter that players will be representing their country, and not only themselves, the Gerard Piqué Cup is much like another week on the regular tour.

One understands that things change and that sometimes change is both desirable and even necessary, but change always brings loss as well as gain. Professional Rugby Union has been a great, even remarkable success. The World Cup in Japan let us watch some wonderful rugby. The sport is more successful, at least in terms of the crowds and audience it can attract, than the amateur game ever was. Yet I suspect that there are few people who remember the amateur game who don’t regret its passing. Bill McLaren, who loved rugby as much as anyone could, never really reconciled himself to professionalism. He regretted the loss of the game’s rich variety.

Well, change happens and is often necessary. “The old order changeth, yielding place to new”. We can all recognize this, even if we sigh as we do so. Most people are conservative when it’s a question of something they really care about. We like cricket played with a red ball by players dressed in white. Some of us are even so steeped in tradition that we don’t like seeing cricketers with identifying numbers on their back, even if other sports offered that aid to spectators (and referees) long ago. The Scottish Rugby Union held out against such identification after other Unions had given way. King George V once asked the Secretary of the SRU, the magnificently obdurately conservative J Aikman Smith, why the Scottish players had no numbers on their backs. “This is a rugby match, Your Majesty,” came the reply, “not a cattle-show”.

Aikman Smith would not, I feel sure, have thought highly of the replacement of that last relic of the amateur era in tennis, the Davis Cup, by the Gerard Piqué Cup. O Tempora, O Mores, would surely have been his response.