With the Davis Cup’s 110 year history under its’ most serious threat from Australian entrepreneur James Hird’s much heralded plans to stage a World Cup of Tennis, International Tennis Federation president Francesco Ricci Bitti has finally come out and said what he truly feels.
Apart from the odd bland ITF statement, there was no real response to Hird’s blueprint during the Australian Open – Ricci Bitti clearly of the mind that it would be wrong to take any focus away from a Grand Slam tournament.
But with champions Roger Federer and Serena Williams crowned and the balls packed away at Melbourne Park, Ricci Bitti has come out and voiced his true feelings about the proposition of an every other year dollar-laden competition involving 32 nations played over 10 days and featuring shorter matches, an amended scoring system and mid-match substitutions.
First Ricci Bitti addressed the scheduling aspect and said: ''The calendar is annual. Every second year, in tennis, is a completely stupid idea, because the calendar of tennis is annual, and we know better than anybody that every four years just to play the Olympics is a headache.”
He then referred to the World Cup of Tennis as nothing more than a potential exhibition and continued: “What they are talking about is a completely different animal to Davis Cup, so we are not against it. We understand that any promoter could find that it is a good idea to have a team event. It has happened in the past, it will happen again in the future. They are two different products, two different concepts.
''And I have a lot of respect for promoters - I have been a businessman all my life. But if you miss one or two of the top players you are dead. If you do a competition concentrated in one venue, if you don't have all the top players, you are in bankruptcy, because we have experience that it is a failure when people do not have their own team to support.''
Contrary to wide spread belief amongst many knowledgeable people inside the game, Ricci Bitti is insistent the current Davis Cup formula does not need an overhaul. And he appears to have turned a blind eye to the growing list of top flight contestants who will not be turning out for the nations in upcoming rounds including Federer, Aussie Open runner up Andy Murray, Americans Andy Roddick and James Blake and the injured Rafael Nadal.
As the four Grand Slams are now effectively individual concerns, the ITF maintains vehemently the Davis Cup is the most important source of income to fund development of the sport around the world.
He said of the Davis Cup: We believe it's working. We are always listening to the players, but the model is this one because our mission is not to maximize the profit.
“My position is that we (the Davis Cup committee) are continuously, permanently thinking if it can improve, but we have some pillars that we cannot miss: annual competition, home-and-away ties, at least the majority, player nomination by the country. These are the roots of the competition.”
(c) Copyright 2010. No duplication is permitted without permission from Bob Larson Tennis
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