THE LAVER CUP

By Adam Hassan

The Laver Cup is an annual indoor hard court men’s tennis tournament named after the Australian tennis legend, Rod Laver. The tournament, which is intended to be the Ryder Cup of tennis, is played between two teams: Team Europe and Team World. It takes place two weeks after the US Open, with the location changing every year. The competition pits six top European players against six of their counterparts from the rest of the world. There are three singles matches and one doubles match on each of the three days. Each match victory is worth one point on Day 1, two points on Day 2 and three points on Day 3. The first team to gain 13 points wins the tournament.

This year’s edition of the Laver Cup certainly captured the public’s imagination. Tickets for the whole weekend sold out in 2 hours. It was won by Team Europe in a nail-biting finish, thanks, in part, to a scoring system which is successfully engineered for thrilling finishes. The beauty of this year’s Laver Cup was the off-court moments and interactions between the players, including Roger Federer turning the air blue; when Milos Raonic (World) levelled up at one set all against Alexander Zverev (Europe) in the final match. Zverev went to the toilet, chased by Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal who offered these seemingly strange yet encouraging words:

Nadal: No negative thinking at all.
Federer: I want a fist pump or a ‘let’s go’ every f***ing point you win. And every point you lose you f***ing take it like a man.
Nadal: Not one negative face.

The Laver Cup gave us a fascinating insight into why Federer and Nadal, have been so superior outside of their simple physical skills: they’re so much mentally stronger than everybody else. There is evidently a vast gap between them and the rest of the field in terms of knowledge of tennis. The Laver Cup was proof that they know exactly why the younger players on tour are not breaking through. They know Zverev gets negative, and they know it’s been a real danger to his game. The fact that they’ve now decided to give this glimpse into their coping mechanisms in tough moments suggests that they’re not threatened by Zverev, or the rest of the chasing pack.

The answer to why the competition doesn’t include women is an ambiguous one. The one thing the calendar doesn’t have anymore is a combined men’s and women’s event. We’ve seen through the Hopman Cup for the last 30 years how much the players and the fans love mixed events. It would also balance the teams out significantly, because 3 of the 4 female Grand Slam champions this year have been from outside Europe, whereas it’s been a decade since a male non-European won a Grand Slam. We’ve just seen the World Athletics Championships innovating the sport by introducing mixed relays, which was a fascinating breath of fresh air on the athletics track. Since the Hopman Cup ended, tennis has had nothing other than mixed doubles at Grand Slams. The Laver Cup is in its infancy, but at the moment it’s so heavily weighted towards Team Europe, who have won each of the first three editions, and adding women to the tournament seems like a glaringly obvious improvement, to which there is little credible justification against.

Being able to see the best players in the world not only competing in singles and doubles, but also coaching each other, really appeals to a wider audience, because it gives an unfiltered version of how they see the game. There’s certainly a place for it in tennis, but it needs to be given time, so that it can be allowed to grow into something truly special.