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 Photographer: Paul Zimmer
Date: 07 Dec 2000 |  Photographer: Paul Zimmer
Date: 08 Dec 2000 |  Photographer: Paul Zimmer
Date: 08 Dec 2000 |  Photographer: Paul Zimmer
Date: 09 Dec 2000 |  Photographer: Paul Zimmer
Date: 10 Dec 2000 |  Photographer: Paul Zimmer
Date: 10 Dec 2000 |  Photographer: Paul Zimmer
Date: 10 Dec 2000 |
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| 13 Nov 2009 - Chris Bowers | |
| Spain's domination begins |
The 2000 Davis Cup Final has to be one of the spiciest and most bristling in the 109-year history of tennis’s premier team competition. Chris Bowers reviews the background and the action from the other Final in Barcelona’s Palau Sant Jordi.
From the vantage point of the end of 2009, it’s almost impossible to imagine the build-up to the 2000 Final and the tension it generated. Spain has been the dominant team of the decade, reaching five Davis Cup by BNP Paribas Finals and winning three of the four that have so far been played.
But at the start of 2000 it had never won the Cup. In fact, the nation hadn’t even been in a Final since tennis went ‘open’ in 1968. Spain was the Davis Cup’s perennial underachiever.
With the good fortune of a draw that allowed for four home ties, Spain reached its first modern-day Final but, by a twist of irony, found itself up against Australia, the second-most successful team in the competition’s history and the reigning champions.
Santana - player and captain
The irony was that on its only two previous occasions in the Final, Spain had lost to Australia, both times on the grass down-under, both times with the father of Spanish tennis, Manolo Santana, unable to find sufficient back-up to bring the Cup to Spain.
To add poignancy to the irony, Santana had begun the year as Spain’s captain, only to be ousted by a coup orchestrated by his players. They loved him as a man, they were appreciative of what this child from a poor family, who had been a ballboy to the affluent tenistas in General Franco’s Spain of the 1950s, had done to put tennis on the map.
But they felt his captaincy was part of the reason for Spain’s underachievement, and in a move which lacked any sensitivity for the proud Santana, they asked RFET, the Spanish Federation, to replace him with a ‘technical committee’ of four, with Alex Corretja’s coach Javier Duarte as the nominal captain. It was one of the saddest aspects of the otherwise sizzling Final that Santana felt too hurt to attend Spain’s greatest moment.
Corretja leads Spanish challenge
Corretja was Spain’s talisman, its effective team leader. He and the buccaneering Juan Balcells had finally created a viable doubles team for Spain – its record in doubles up to 2000 was abysmal. Corretja was also the leading singles player.
But Australia’s top player Lleyton Hewitt had crushed him 60 60 61 at the Australian Open 10 months earlier, and Hewitt had been whipping up Corretja in a verbal onslaught at the Tennis Masters Cup in Lisbon two weeks earlier. Corretja had tried not to rise to the bait but couldn’t help saying he thought Hewitt had been acting ‘a little strange’.
There was another development that added a frisson to the Final. A few weeks earlier, the International Tennis Federation (ITF) had held a seminar on marketing the sport of tennis, and one of the things it identified was the need to bring new people into the game. Well, the 2000 Final certainly brought new people in – but the established tennis fans weren’t sure they wanted them.
Crowd whips up a storm
By 2000, Barcelona had an established ATP tournament, but its main court only held 8,000 spectators. Now, in the arena built for the gymnastics at the 1992 Olympics, the Catalan capital could welcome 15,000. And many who came were used to the etiquette of Barcelona’s Camp Nou football stadium, where opposition teams who have the ball are regularly booed. So when the Australian team was introduced, and even when their players hit winning shots, a large section of the crowd booed and jeered them.
It was a shock to the system of both tennis and the Australians, who were captained for the last time by one of the great names of Aussie tennis, John Newcombe. He made an official complaint about the crowd during the weekend, and even the ITF president Francesco Ricci Bitti said he felt ‘a little bit disturbed’ by the antagonism of some spectators.
Hewitt fights back
But the mistake the local fans made was to assume that they might intimidate Australia’s No. 1 player, Hewitt. The Australian, still only 19, thrived – indeed still thrives – on countering adversity, and his riposte in the opening rubber against Albert Costa was to change his racket at tactically critical moments.
The tactic infuriated Duarte, whose displeasure was taken by the Aussies as a form of whipping the crowd into an angry frenzy. To some it was all good fun; to some traditionalists it created an ugly, even threatening atmosphere. Either way it was great drama.
Hewitt, who probably thought he would be facing Spain’s rising prodigy Juan Carlos Ferrero on the first day, twice found himself a set down against Costa, but delivered one of his greatest-ever Davis Cup performances by coming back to win in five.
Spain takes control
When Patrick Rafter, the two-time US Open champion whose ranking had slipped back to No. 15 by December 2000, took the opening set off Ferrero, the Spanish technical committee’s gamble of saving Corretja for days two and three seemed to be backfiring. But Ferrero bounced back to leave Rafter cramping, the Australian eventually retiring in the fourth set to leave the opening day poised at 1-1.
In the afterglow of victory, any rubber must seem glorious, but Spain’s 64 64 64 win in the doubles was without question the worst match of the weekend, and one of the worst of the whole year. Corretja and Balcells were good, and they were no doubt lifted by the fact that on the opposite side of the net Mark Woodforde was teaming up with Sandon Stolle – not his usual partner Todd Woodbridge, who was at home awaiting the birth of his first child.
A new king is born
The home side went into the final day needing just one of the two reverse singles. Again, Corretja was held back for the fifth match against Rafter, but he wasn’t needed. Ferrero opened up a two-set lead against Hewitt after the Australian had missed a set point in the second. Hewitt, however, was threatening another comeback from two down when Ferrero struck the perfect down-the-line backhand on his fourth match point to send the stadium wild.
Legend has it that Ferrero was named after King Juan Carlos, who ushered in Spain’s post-Franco democratic era just three years before Ferrero was born. Whether that’s true or not, the king of Spain was there to embrace the new king of Spanish tennis, and even the sporting Australians were happy to put the untennislike antics of the crowd to one side and acknowledge what it meant to the Spaniards to have finally won tennis’s premier team tennis prize.
Having won the Cup once, the dam had been broken, and Spain’s true power as a team tennis nation was unleashed. Spain’s glorious decade has been characterised by many people, including the flag-carrier in the ceremony in Barcelona, a serious-looking 14-year-old Mallorcan boy called Rafael Nadal. Whatever happened to him?
Click the link below to listen to Chris Bowers' review of the 2000 Davis Cup Final.
Related Audio
 Davis Cup Radio - 13 November 2009 - Look back at 2000 Final
 
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