Sports Book Review: In the court of a tennis pioneer

BOOK REVIEW DWIGHT DAVIS: THE MAN AND HIS CUP BY NANCY KRIPLEN

The Davis Cup, Tom Gullikson once said, was the place to look if "you wanted to see genuine smiles on the faces of multi- millionaires". Gullikson will lead his US team to Birmingham next weekend to play Great Britain in a neat replay of the Davis Cup's inaugural match, in Boston on 7 August, 1900, without the multi-million dollar smiles of Andre Agassi, Pete Sampras and Michael Chang, whose commitment to the oldest and most prestigious of international team competitions has always been lukewarm.

Kriplen (Ebury Press, pounds 16.99) glosses over her country's patchy support for the Davis Cup over the past 30 years - Jimmy Connors, for one, rarely played - and concentrates on the tall, debonair figure who commissioned the trophy and played doubles in that first challenge match. Dwight Davis died at the age of 66, having numbered assistant secretary of war in the Republican government of Calvin Coolidge and governor- general of the Philippines among his posts (as well as president of the US Lawn Tennis Association), but the format of his competition remains refreshingly unchanged 100 years on. The old-fashioned doubles remains the pivotal match of the tie, scheduled as the only match for the Saturday, to television's enduring frustration; more often than not, the final singles match is a dead rubber. Yet the Davis Cup survives because, to paraphrase Gullikson, it is the place to look if you want to see fear on the faces of multi-millionaires.

Strange things happen to selfish individuals in the face of team competition. It is not the money nor the patriotism, though the latter is a central element in all the great ties, it is the heavyweight sense of pride and history. How else can you explain the defeat of the US by underrated France in the 1991 final in Lyon? France had Henri Leconte, who had played three matches in four months because of back injury, and the frail left- hander Guy Forget. The US had the young Turks, Agassi and Sampras. Sampras had heard about the mystique of the Davis Cup, but not until he saw the French team leaping into each other's arms after Forget had sealed an extraordinary victory did the reality of its mystery dawn. All in pursuit of a massive silver bowl once described as "that darned bath" by the wife of an Australian player, whose mantelpiece it occupied for a year.

Davis was a man of many parts: international tennis player, politician, war hero, philanthropist and anti- prohibitionist. Yet tennis was his passion. Though born into a wealthy family in St Louis, he made the opening of parks for recreation in general - and tennis in particular - a lifetime crusade. Under Kriplen's skilled pen, Davis emerges as an attractive figure, "about as exciting as a plate of string beans" according to Ted Roosevelt Jnr, but gentle and well-meaning.

"The Davis Cup offered me more immediate pleasure than almost anything else I accomplished in my career," John McEnroe writes in the foreword of Richard Evans' excellently crafted The Davis Cup (Ebury Press, pounds 14.99). McEnroe singlehandedly rescued the Davis Cup in the 1970s and still cannot understand his countrymen's indifference. "It has achieved what Dwight Davis set out to achieve," McEnroe added. "It has brought countries together through sporting contact." Davis's descendants still gather for a sporting family weekend known as Tribal Rites. The prize is an 8oz Styrofoam cup known as, what else, the Davis Cup.