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In Laver Cup’s Debut, Europe Towers Over the World
PRAGUE — The first draw in the history of the Laver Cup was over, and Team World decided to have the first on-court huddle in the history of the Laver Cup.
Rafael Nadal, one of the main men on Team Europe, then became the first player in the history of the Laver Cup to try to sneak into an opponent’s huddle.
The history of the Laver Cup, of course, is short. The inaugural tournament, tennis’s latest novelty, just took a big step Thursday in its transition from Roger Federer’s brainchild to actual sporting event.
Plenty remains uncertain — how much the players will truly care about the result, and how vocal the sellout crowd in Prague’s O2 Arena will be — but there is no question as to which multinational squad will be the underdog in this three-day tournament.
Team Europe has Nadal, the world No. 1, and Federer, the No. 2, who have 35 Grand Slam singles title between them, including two each this season. Three of their teammates are also in the top 10: Alexander Zverev at No. 4, Marin Cilic at No. 5 and Dominic Thiem at No. 7.
Team World’s highest-ranked player is Sam Querrey, at No. 16, while the only man on its squad with a major singles title is its captain, John McEnroe, who at age 58 is not going to be playing much tennis this weekend.
So this is not quite the clash of the tennis titans that Federer and his agent Tony Godsick envisaged when they created this team tournament, drawing on golf’s biennial pressure cooker, the Ryder Cup.
As the project took shape over the last three years, Federer and Godsick considered many ways to divvy up the talent pool. But in light of Europe’s long-running domination of the men’s game, they decided that, in the interest of limiting the event to just three days, it was best not to have the Europeans face squads representing the Americas or Asia or other continental constructs. They decided on a single team comprising the best from everywhere outside Europe.
Enter Team World, which sounds much more imposing than it looks on paper this week.
“Right,” Querrey conceded on Thursday as two of his young teammates, Frances Tiafoe and Denis Shapovalov, traded bon mots and forehands behind him in practice. “But the short format here kind of helps out a little bit, and our whole team is guys with big serves and big forehands, and everyone for the most part has beaten one or some of the guys on the other team, so everyone knows they can do it.
“It’s not like we’re a combined 0-200 against those guys. We have wins against them, so I think that gives us a chance, too.”
The top two non-European players in this week’s rankings, Milos Raonic of Canada and Kei Nishikori of Japan, are injured, although Nishikori was not planning to play the Laver Cup anyway. Kevin Anderson, the South African who just lost to Nadal in the United States Open final, was unavailable on late notice after a slot opened up when the captain’s pick, Juan Martin del Potro of Argentina, withdrew, citing the need to recover after the U.S. Open.
Querrey, the 29-year-old American, now tops the list and beat Nadal for the first time in the Acapulco final just this season. Shapovalov, the flashy 18-year-old Canadian lefthander, beat Nadal in Montreal just this summer. Nick Kyrgios, the unpredictable Australian, beat Nadal the following week in Cincinnati and is 2-2 against the Spaniard overall and 1-1 against Federer.
The Laver Cup format is unusual and potentially volatile.
There are three singles matches and one doubles match each day over three days of competition. But the stakes rise: victories are worth one point on Day 1; two points on Day 2 and three points on Day 3. Each match is best-of-three sets but the third set will be a super-tiebreaker, which could lead to more upsets and could help a huge server like Querrey, or his teammates John Isner and Kyrgios.
The Day 1 lineup: Tiafoe vs. Cilic, Isner vs. Thiem, Shapovalov vs. Zverev; and Kyrgios and Jack Sock vs. Nadal and Tomas Berdych, in doubles — which came as quite a surprise to all those expecting Nadal to finally play alongside Federer (that should happen this weekend).
Kyrgios, who can blow white-hot or stone-cold depending on his state of mind, looked and sounded particularly fired up on Thursday. Team events are clearly his thing, even if he and his Australian teammates were beaten by Belgium on Sunday in the Davis Cup semifinals (tennis’s Cups runneth over).
“Obviously I had a lot of pressure trying to get my team to the finals,” Kyrgios said of Davis Cup. “But this as well has a lot of pressure in it. I think everyone is going to go 100 percent. I think everyone wants to win, and I certainly want to win.”
He is also the only man from his country playing in an event named for the Australian great Rod Laver, who was at the head table for the opening-night celebration on Thursday in Prague’s grandiose Municipal House, where players on both teams took turns introducing each other to the audience.
“I don’t think Rafa and Roger and those guys are just going to go out there and have fun,” Kyrgios said. “At the end of the day, if Team World ends up causing an upset and saying we’ve won, that’s a pretty amazing achievement.”
It would also be worth $250,000 to each member of the winning team. The losers get nothing, except their undisclosed but presumably generous qualification fees, which are based on ranking.
The longer-term challenge — and Federer and Godsick are definitely thinking long term with this project — is how to give Team World a true competitive identity. It is a similar challenge to the one faced by the International Team in another biennial team golfing event: The Presidents Cup, which will put on its 12th edition next week at Liberty National Golf Course in Jersey City, N.J.
The Internationals, comprising top golfers who do not come from Europe or the United States, is so heterogeneous that creating unity, even with a common cause, has been a challenge.
But for at least the inaugural Laver Cup, Team World is closer to a national team than an international team. Its captain is American, and so are four of its six players: Querrey, Isner, Sock and Tiafoe, who is 19.
“We’re all pretty friendly already,” Querrey said. “Most of us hang out at tournaments outside of this to begin with, especially the Americans. We all love football, baseball, basketball. We love team sports anyway, so everyone wishes we had more events like this.”
Tiafoe, ranked No. 72, was a very late addition to the team after del Potro withdrew. When Tiafoe got the call on Sunday, he was on his way to Las Vegas to prepare for a tournament next week in Chengdu, China.
He did not hesitate to change his plans.
“It’s good to be part of a start-up,” he said on Thursday. “I mean, of course I was going to say yes. It’s not even about the money. It’s being a part of this with these guys and playing against them. You’re going for sure to play a top-10 or top-20 guy.”
Team Europe, at least this year, cannot say the same.
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