MADRID – The funniest thing happened Saturday night here, with the tennis world converged on Spain’s capital for the inaugural week-long Davis Cup showdown: a group of athletes told the truth.
“I never thought we’d do this,” said Canadian captain Frank Dancevic.
“This is totally unexpected,” said No. 1 seed Denis Shapovalov.
“I can’t believe this happened,” said Vasek Pospisil, who is writing another chapter of his Davis Cup odyssey.
On Sunday, Canada will play in the Davis Cup Finals. Why is it so farfetched for you and I to comprehend? Because not even the players saw it coming.
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If you understand the journey this national team has been on to reach the peak of the game’s team competition, it may make more sense.
March, 2011. Metepec, Mexico. It’s where this generation’s Davis Cup journey began, in the humidity and altitude of a small town more than 8,600 feet above sea level. The “stadium court” are some temporary bleachers at a community centre. The ride from the hotel to the venue takes five minutes, but a police escort is required. It seems the armed guards are more concerned over nobody stealing the stringing machine than anything else. It’s Americas Zone Group I tennis and it’s about as far away from the Davis Cup Finals as Kurt Warner was to the Super Bowl when he was bagging groceries for a living.
Frank Dancevic, seven years before becoming captain, is up two sets to none on someone named Daniel Garza, who reminds you of the guy carving up slices at your neighbourhood pizza joint. Then Frank loses the third set and gets screwed on an awful call in the fourth. The team howls in protest toward the referee of the competition. Almost immediately, four cops with machine guns surround Canada’s coaching box and escort Galo Blanco, then Milos Raonic’s coach, to the locker room. Blanco walks in, where Raonic was waiting to play the next match. “What are you doing here?” Milos asks. “The crooks kicked me out,” Blanco replies.
There might be a thousand people in the whole place. We are feeding our content back to Canada via this contraption that looks like a vehicle you would have seen in the parking lot during a Bills tailgate party. In the 70s. Cameraman Mario Fontana looks at me as we send back interviews after Canada’s win. “I have more technology in my basement than this truck has.”
Raonic wins both singles. He and Pospisil take Saturday’s doubles.
Canada wins 3-1. On to Ecuador.
July, 2011. Guayaquil, Ecuador. We didn’t travel to the second round because the folks at the International Tennis Federation, bless them, were told there would be no world feed produced to televise the event. Spoiler alert: there was. By the time anyone found out, matches had already started.
It might have been better that we weren’t there. During the weekend, a fight broke out between rival gangs in the seats. The facility was evacuated by the cops, and not until there were some arrests made did the tennis get started up again. Canada trailed 2-0 after Friday, Daniel Nestor and Vasek Pospisil took the doubles on Saturday and then after a Pospisil singles win to open Sunday, North Vancouver’s Philip Bester was called off the bench and delivered in the deciding match.
Canada wins 3-2. On to Tel Aviv.
September, 2011. Tel Aviv, Israel. The venue was “Canada Stadium,” and it remains the toughest scene this Davis Cup group has faced this decade. It was well over 40 degrees Celsius daily, with ridiculous humidity; the capacity crowd was hostile – not violent or dangerous, it’s just that the hosts had no interest in the visitors celebrating in their backyard. Pospisil had other ideas. Even as thousands chanted, “Dooo-deee Sayyy-lahhh” over and over again, the then-21-year-old, wide-eyed Pospisil took a two-sets-to-one lead over Israel’s No. 1 player, Dudi Sela. Wearing an ice vest on a changeover, Pospisil watched Sela get so heated in the fourth set, he climbed up the steps of the umpires’ chair and yelled at him, his index finger in the face of Cedric Mourier. No actual discipline, other than a warning. Said Canada’s then-captain Martin Laurendeau the next day: “The player is not supposed to talk to the umpire, let alone get in his face.”
In the fifth set, Pospisil was serving and mid-toss fans screamed “Double Fault!” from their seats. Mourier didn’t do a thing. When Pospisil broke Sela in the final set, he began blowing kisses to the crowd. Somehow Vasek won and fell to the ground, a five-hour marathon complete with a victory. Pospisil had moved up 200 ranking spots that year, but that one was just different.
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The next day, in the second career doubles match he and Nestor ever played, the Canadians stunned the established team of Jonathan Erlich and Andy Ram. Nestor still calls it one of the best wins of his Davis Cup career. A gruelling, 3 ½ hour battle in that heat. Pospisil is on fumes. And he has to play singles the next day, with it all on the line.
Sunday rolls around. Pospisil arrives at the stadium, double-fisting bottles of a red liquid and going for a massage. He looks like hell. We do a quick interview, and cameraman Mario and I look at each other and whisper, “No chance.” This was Canada’s great opportunity, but Raonic had showed up a few months after hip surgery and could barely move, losing to Amir Weintraub. “No chance he can go four or five sets,” expert Arash opines.
I was kind of right. Pospisil plays one of the most courageous matches on fumes. He crushes Weintraub in straights. When he crumples to the court, the team runs out and mobs him. They lift him into the air on his shoulders. Canada is finally headed to the World Group again.
February, 2013. Vancouver. Canada vs. Spain. After Tel Aviv, the team got smoked by France and got back into World Group in the fall of 2012 with a win over South Africa. The matchup with Spain looked to be another bloodbath. Until the birth of “Frank The Tank.”
Pospisil’s two brothers recruited 300 of their friends and tennis fans to dress in red and white and bring drums and trumpets and their voices. They had choreographed chants and songs. They turned the Doug Mitchell Sports Centre at UBC into a full home-court advantage. And then, against Marcel Granollers, Dancevic was unconscious, playing the match of his life.
The crowd was electric and euphoric. Chants of “Frank The Tank” echoed through the building over and over. Dancevic’s upset win remains one of the greatest in Canadian Davis Cup history.
Raonic finished off Spain to wrap a massive upset.
Canada to the quarterfinals. Italy next.
April, 2013. Vancouver. It was this summer that Fabio Fognini told me that he’s still not over it. If you were there that day, or watched it on television, you’ll never forget it. Nestor and Pospisil won Saturday’s doubles in an epic five-set show that was decided with a 15-13 win in the deciding set. “It made me crazy,” Fognini said, some eight years later. “Not really a good memory. But, you know, that’s the good thing of the Davis Cup.”
That weekend was Raonic’s finest moment for Canada in the event. He won in straights on Friday and clinched it with a four-set win on Sunday. The unthinkable had happened: from Mexico to the Davis Cup semis for only the second time in history. Raonic and Dancevic and Nestor and especially Laurendeau were so moved, they could barely make sense of what had happened.
Next up, Serbia, in Belgrade.
September, 2013. Belgrade. This felt like Hoosiers, complete with the measuring tape up to the rim. Novak Djokovic won the U.S. Open on Sunday, fulfilled obligations Monday, and showed up to Thursday’s draw in Serbia and declared, “My country needs me and I’m going to play.”
Nestor and Pospisil won another epic five-setter in doubles, 10-8 in the final frame, to give Canada a 2-1 lead going into Sunday, but then Novak was Novak and Pospisil couldn’t solve Janko Tipsarevic.
Back to the drawing board.
From there, Raonic began playing less, Canada had Nestor and Pospisil for doubles, but no breakthrough. The best shot at winning it all was in 2015, facing Belgium in the quarters, but Milos got hurt and Vasek’s wrist forced him to miss that one. The lasting image of that weekend on the beach in Ostend, Belgium was a rookie being welcomed to the team by running into the water with a Canadian flag and singing.
It wasn’t long before that kid, Denis Shapovalov, became the man for Canada. Got the nod as the No. 1 singles option in Edmonton for the 2017 clincher that put the team back into World Group. On the eve of Super Bowl Sunday this year, he and Felix Auger-Aliassime won the last two singles matches in Slovakia to punch Canada’s ticket into the Davis Cup year-end showdown.
That night in the team hotel, Shapovalov and the team celebrated with some Tennis Canada staff. Shapovalov had established himself as Canada’s top player and handled himself as such. He went over to every teammate and told them, “This is just the start.”
Then Saturday here inside Centre Court at Caja Magica, the same building Shapovalov and Auger-Aliassime won Junior Davis Cup four years ago – and vowed to one another they’d win it all as pros. Four years after Belgium and eight years after Mexico and six autumns after Novak was Novak, here was Canada’s chance.
Before play began and “O Canada” finished, long-time team doctor Nick Sauve showed colleagues his arms – the hair on them spiked. When the doubles ended in Canada’s favour, the unflappable Nestor, now on the coaching staff, grabbed anyone in sight in the players’ box. Auger-Aliassime, who was Wally Pipp’d for Pospisil, was so happy for his teammates that he was in tears. Shapovalov stood on the team bench and pointed to the 400-plus fans, who sang the anthem again. Pospisil, with his ear-to-ear grin, looked at Dancevic, whose hands were on his head and his mouth agape, in disbelief.
“On match point, my heart was beating so fast, I thought I was going to black out,” Dancevic said Saturday night.
And now, the unthinkable on Sunday: for the first time ever, Canada is in the Davis Cup Finals.
Pospisil is 29. He has a Wimbledon doubles title on his résumé. A little more than five years ago, he was ranked No. 25 in the world. He loves Davis Cup, is now the team’s veteran, leader and captain. His family escaped the former Czechoslovakia when Vasek was a young boy, his mother, Mila, and father, Milos, looking for a better life for their three sons. Milos was Vasek’s first tennis coach, growing up in Vernon, B.C. They hit balls on the public courts, which were concrete at the time and had weeds growing out of them.
This is what Pospisil, who has lost only one singles match this week, had to say when we spoke about an hour after Saturday’s semifinal win: “I’ve got to pinch myself – just against all the odds, coming from a small town, Vernon, tennis non-existent there, just working from the age of five and having this dream to be a professional tennis player. And then turning that into the career I’ve had. And when I put things into perspective, and how far I’ve come, with all the family sacrifice along the way? It’s pretty special.
“Winning Davis Cup would mean the world. It would be, you know, my greatest achievement on a tennis court. I really, really believe (that). OK, Wimbledon, winning Wimbledon was incredible. But Davis Cup is so special. I think this would surpass that. So, yeah, it would be the highlight of, I think, all of our careers to be honest… I think that’s how much Davis Cup means to us.”
They may never have believed this would happen, but it has. 2019 will go down as the year of tennis in Canadian sports. First, Bianca Andreescu lifting the U.S. Open trophy and now this.
Frank Dancevic took a moment to soak in what had happened on Saturday evening, after the matches and hoopla, after the press conference, after the players retreated to the locker room and to get ready for their nightly dinner of platters of sushi.
“You know what, man? Just think of what we’ve been through all these years,” Dancevic said. Then he paused. “It’s been an amazing ride.”
