Eight years in, the Laver Cup tennis quandary solves itself

SAN FRANCISCO — On the eve of the Laver Cup, Yannick Noah, the French tennis legend in his first stint as the captain of Team Europe, spoke about how much tennis he watches these days.

“Not much,” Noah said in a news conference, adding he had never met three members of his team before this week.

A little while later, Pat Rafter, the Australian fixture of the late 1990s who is vice captain of Team World — the amalgam of players from Australia, the United States and South America who will take on the Europeans — was puzzling out who to match up against Carlos Alcaraz, the world No. 1 and star of Team Europe.

Rafter said that with Alcaraz slated for Saturday, Team World could not pick who to face him. Except, it could. This year’s edition of the team event is in San Francisco, so Team World gets dibs on first selection for either of the weekend days. It had to choose by Friday; Rafter was speaking Thursday, in public, giving the game away to his opposition.

“Do they know that, though?” Rafter, now a bit concerned, asks Team World captain Andre Agassi. “Have I blown it?”

“They do now,” Agassi said.

“That’s how much I know what’s going on,” Rafter said a few beats later.

Taylor Fritz, Team World’s top-ranked player and de facto on-court leader, knows exactly what is going on. He is one of the fiercest competitors on the ATP Tour, and he knows that Sunday, when each win is worth 3 points as opposed to 2 on Saturday and 1 Friday, is when to pick. The Laver Cup is designed such that it always comes down to the final day.

Agassi thought Saturday was better. Rafter didn’t even know.

“That’s like the most insane thing ever,” Fritz said of Agassi’s logic.

The captains had to submit their picks for the first round of matches simultaneously, before strategizing on Day 2 and Day 3. There was an odd moment of confusion during the Friday night doubles match that pitted Alcaraz and Jakub Mensik against Fritz and Alex Michelsen. The first game went to deuce, and after the next point, Alcaraz and Mensik started to walk to the sideline because the competition follows ATP rules, which means sudden-death deuce scoring for doubles. The chair umpire had to remind the players that the Laver Cup does it the old-fashioned way.

Fritz’s Team World kit from his sponsor, Boss, is a slightly different shade of red than the rest of the team’s.

These little details and exchanges represent the quandary at the heart of the Laver Cup. It has wrestled the tennis world over its identity ever since Roger Federer, his agent and business partner Tony Godsick, the ATP Tour, Tennis Australia and U.S. Tennis Association dreamt it up eight years ago.

Organizers argue that this ATP-sanctioned event is no hit-and-giggle “exhibition,” that single-word sporting death sentence of trick shots, players wearing headsets and artificial competition designed to stretch even the most one-sided matches to their longest possible conclusion.

“I can assure you this is no exhibition,” John McEnroe, the Team World captain for the first seven years, insisted during a chat with a few journalists Friday evening.

That said, the Laver Cup matches do not come with ranking points. There are also the occasional hijinks on the sidelines, the captains exaggerating their sporting personalities to play to the gallery on controversial calls and celebrations. Or maybe that’s just how they have wanted to act all along. Agassi has been doling out chest-bumps after every win that look borderline dangerous for the 55-year-old. They seem to be working.

Team World, who were big underdogs coming in, have a commanding 9-3 lead heading into the final day.

With their other winning-or-misery tournament lives off the line for once, even the players can be at odds over how important this is. In 2023, Félix Auger-Aliassime and Gaël Monfils made the two poles clear during a singles match. Auger-Aliassime of Team World was in competition mode; Monfils of Team Europe said he was there because people “called me, they told me, ‘Oh, the Laver Cup is so nice, you can be free.’”

The two philosophies clashed, with both players feeling that their idea of the tournament was being undermined by their opponent’s idea of it. Auger-Aliassime even said that “tanking in the Laver Cup is crazy,” which could be said with priestly sincerity or court-jester irony and lose none of its meaning either way.

Noah, who is succeeding Björn Borg as steward of Team Europe, sees his tennis consumption habits as no impediment to his role as the leader of Alcaraz, Casper Ruud, Alexander Zverev, et al.

“I just like to listen to them, you know, get to know them and get how they feel about the game, about their journey as tennis players, and then I can find the right words to tell them when they’re playing under pressure,” he said in an interview Thursday.

And there is pressure, however much of it is peer rather than points. No matter how irreverent and goofy they act in the lead-up, once the balls are flying, players and coaches get fired up. Not Grand-Slam fired up, or even life-or-death Ryder Cup fired up, but fired up nonetheless, and the highs can come without the dread and doom that follow losing in an ATP Tour event or Grand Slam. They are competitors and really can’t help themselves.

There was Alcaraz, Friday afternoon, trying to coach Mensik on opening up the court against Michelsen.

There was Noah Saturday afternoon, at Alexander Zverev’s knees during a changeover, urging him to step back on the second serve against Alex de Minaur, wait for a high ball and crush it with a forehand.

It is a mostly self-flagellation-free week, with bloopers that will be lost in time rather than replayed in players’ minds, even though there is a good bit of money on the line. Each participant receives an appearance fee based on their singles ranking, with some latitude for players with additional star power if the situation calls for that. Each player on the winning team receives $250,000. The losing team receives nothing beyond the appearance fees.

Half the team is selected based on ranking. The captains, with assistance from the organizers who need to sell tickets, make the other selections.

“You feel like you’re playing also for your teammates and your captains,” said Ruud, who is in his fifth Laver Cup. “I’ve been on the winning side of matches here and the losing side, and winning is a much better feeling, obviously.”

Ruud led off this year’s competition against Reilly Opelka. He had one of the best serving days of his life, blasting in about 80 percent of his first serves. Opelka said he wasn’t surprised, calling Ruud one of the best servers in the world.

“Is he always like that?” Rafter asked him during the news conference after the match.

“Yeah,” Opelka told Rafter, who is more of a surfer than a tennis expert these days.

Menšík and Michelsen played a cracker of a match, decided by a 10-point tiebreaker after a rise-from-the-dead comeback from Michelsen. Flavio Cobolli’s battle with João Fonseca, the 19-year-old Brazilian phenom, had Team World surrounding the teenager on the bench and chanting “Joaoaoooooo Fonseeeeeeca…Joaoaoooooo Fonseeeeeeca…..”

Federer has been courtside from nearly the first ball to the last at every session.

“I cannot lose with Roger cheering for me,” Cobolli said to Noah and vice-captain Tim Henman in the middle of the match.

No such luck for Cobolli, who lost in straight sets.

In a tight doubles that had the newly silver-haired Alcaraz thrilling the crowd with some nasty curling forehands into the seams of open space, Michelsen nailed Mensik in the back with an overhead from close range at the net.

By day’s end, the Europeans held a 3-1 lead. However, the scoring system, with increasing points for each match each day, allowed De Minaur to draw Team World even by mid-afternoon Saturday as he had his way with Zverev, 6-1, 6-4. Zverev tossed his racket across the court midway through. He said he has practiced little the past three weeks and had two injections to treat back pain.

On paper, the Alcaraz-led Europeans should cruise, but in best-of-three sets with the third set a 10-point tiebreak, anybody can beat anybody. Everybody knows that and wants to seize the opportunities for bragging rights.

The organizers have leaned in, too. There’s a black tie gala the night before the event. Rob Thomas of Matchbox Twenty was the featured entertainment at the Bill Graham Auditorium Thursday night. The Laver Cup itself is really a giant silver chalice.

It’s paying off. The Chase Center, home to the Golden State Warriors, is sold out and packed for all five sessions, with more than 17,000 people making lots of noise, trying to give the underdog Team World and its three Californians a home-ish court advantage.

Fonseca is soaking it all in, getting an up-close view of how his older teammates, who have all been ranked high above him, deal with a big match in a big stadium. Then there are all the tennis legends just hanging about the place, in captaincy roles or not.

“Meeting Roger, which is really fun,” was one of the highlights, he said, but seeing what Agassi and Rafter might be able to give him tips on isn’t a bad perk either.

“I’m an aggressive guy, and how do you put pressure when you’re returning?” he said in an interview Thursday. “How to understand that when to go for the shot, when to let the guy think. Those things are important coming from those guys that know a lot of tennis.”

Of course, Rafter would tell him to chip and charge. Agassi, arguably the greatest returner ever, would have some other ideas.

Rafter said he wants to be careful not to say too much — again — fearing that he might overcomplicate matters for players who have their own coaches the rest of the year. The two-time U.S. Open champ said he was a little skeptical about the competition ahead of the event. Then he arrived and found the process of getting to know players and doing a series of media appearances tense and draining. By the end of the night Friday, after sitting courtside and feeding off the players’ energy for roughly seven hours, he was a convert.

“I didn’t think I would be into it, to be honest,” he said. “I came here really open-minded, thinking, what is this event really all about? I’m sold. It’s awesome.”

(Photo of Francisco Cerundolo and Andre Agassi: Clive Brunskill / Getty Images for Laver Cup)

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