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| The Top Trophy |
With more than 100 years of tradition behind it, the Davis Cup by BNP Paribas is the premier team competition in tennis. The symbol of this prestigious competition is the beautiful silver Davis Cup trophy, donated by Harvard student Dwight Filley Davis in 1900. In 2002, the trophy gained a new plinth, adding 16 additional plaques and castings and raising the height of the trophy to 110 cm.
All things considered, it is amazing that it has survived. Given the fate of the original FA Cup, which was stolen -- never to be seen again -- from a jewellers window in Birmingham after Aston Villa had won it early in the century. Or the World Cup trophy that was recovered by a dog called Pickles just before England got their hands on it in 1966.
The world's only major sporting cup to have lasted the length of the century still sits proudly atop its ever-expanding plinth, a shining, beautifully crafted piece of silver with a wonderful tale to tell. The cup, commissioned by Dwight Davis and designed by an Englishman named Rowland Rhodes in New England in 1900, has twinkled in the sun of both hemispheres, eavesdropped on dinner conversations, been imprisoned in bank vaults and swirled the very best champagne around its broad rim.
It has also been to more Paris nightclubs than one of its minders, those august officials of the Lawn Tennis Association, ever knew about, which was probably just as well. Indeed, had any of the officials awoken early at their hotel the morning after the night before on that memorable weekend in Paris in 1933, their worst nightmare would have unfolded before their eyes. For, silhouetted against a pink dawn, they would have perceived a motley little group making its unsteady way towards the Crillon across a nearly deserted Place de la Concorde.
At its head would have been the unmistakable figures of Fred Perry and Henri Cochet. Behind them a small group of friends and hangers on and, bringing up the rear, no doubt into its twentieth rendition of La Vie en Rose, would be the band, or perhaps one should say the remnants, of the last band in the last night club the players had visited. Through bleary eyes the LTA official would have noticed something else, something round and silver and very familiar cradled in Perry's arms. To his horror, he would have recognised the Davis Cup.
"Oh, we can't do that!" Perry had exclaimed when Cochet had sidled up to him after the official dinner to celebrate Britain's famous victory over France at Roland Garros. "Why not? No one will know! Look at them! So full of champagne! Come, we will take it on a tour of Tout Paris!"
It wasn't often that someone had to persuade Perry to do something slightly naughty. Indeed he was usually the instigator of such japes but this time he allowed himself to be led by the defeated, but far from dispirited, Frenchman.
Surreptitiously, they lifted the bowl off its stand in the corner of the room and, hailing a cab, set off for a tour that no doubt encompassed everything from Le Lapin Agile in Montmartre to the Lido on the Champs Elysees. Practically everywhere they went, the band struck up the Marseillaise and God Save the King and even Fred, who rarely drank alcohol, was persuaded to have the tiniest sip as champagne was poured into the bowl. The next day, when officials coming down to breakfast found it resting with a slightly smug smile on its face, back on its plinth, the cup was to set off, officially this time, on a very different sort of journey. Lurching this way and that on its mooring as the channel steamer heaved its way across a turbulent channel, it looked on proudly from the quayside in Dover as the British captain H Roper Barrett read out a telegram from King George V. The cup then set off on a train journey to London.
Passed from hand to hand, it was shown off by the team as they stood in the corridor at open windows while, in those little back gardens that still border the railway line through Kent, people stood, waving Union Jacks and cheering their victorious team. It was all a very long way from Melbourne where, twenty five years before, the cup had sat on Mabel Brooke's sideboard in the dining room of the elegant home she shared with her husband, the great Australian star Norman Brookes. Dame Mabel, as she later became when her husband was knighted, thought the cup looked "very decorative when -- filled with loose-petalled red peonies -- it reflected the light of the candles." However, after a couple of years, it was considered too dominating a feature for the Brookes' other decorative ornaments and the poor cup was banished to a Melbourne bank vault. Blameless again, the cup found itself imprisoned in similar surroundings, this time in New York, during two World Wars.
This year the cup has been making a triumphant tour of the world's leading tennis nations, in the care of the International Tennis Federation whose minders have presumably kept its nocturnal activities to a minimum. The tour, of course, is to celebrate its centenary, and one man, in particular, must be watching from above with a particular sense of pride.
Rowland Rhodes was an Englishman from Newcastle-under-Lyme who was recruited by the well-known silversmiths, the William B. Durgin Company from Concord, New Hampshire. When Dwight Davis's commission came in from Shreve, Crump Low Co. in Boston, Rhodes was assigned the task of creating a suitable bowl for a new international tennis competition.
Happily, Rhodes opted for a timeless, classical style. In her meticulously researched biography of Dwight Davis, Nancy Kriplen describes Rhodes' design: "Instead of a smooth rim, the top edge would be gently scalloped by a dramatic Georgian border of clusters of primroses and acanthus leaves, that traditional bit of shrubbery favoured by English silver designers. The primrose motif would be repeated around the bottom third of the bowl, this time combined with tiny buds and tendrils, all descending into a seafoam effect around the foot."
When completed it stood 13 inches high and 18 inches across at the top -- an object as beautiful then as its is today. Rowland Rhodes was no doubt pleased with his creation although Durgins did not pick it out as anything special amongst its listings for that year of 1900. He would, no doubt, have been astonished to learn that nothing he or his company created before or since has gained half as much world wide acclaim or celebrity.
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