By Michael Mewshaw
MikeMewshaw@aol.com
This weekend the US Davis Cup team will be competing in Uzbekistan in America’s most exotic Davis Cup encounter since John McEnroe led Andre Agassi and our team to Zimbabwe in 2000. In 2007, Inside Tennis published this classic report on Uzbekistan by the intrepid tennis reporter and novelist Michael Mewshaw.
In recent years tennis has experienced seismic shifts, and the pro tour has ventured into increasingly unlikely locales. But as the game goes global it’s worth wondering what’s driving this move to outsource tournaments from traditional venues to obscure bends and elbows of the world that appear to have only the most cursory interest in tennis. Indeed, some events now on the circuit take place in countries that have no ranked players and precious few amateur competitors.
To comprehend this curious phenomenon would, I suspect, require a Harvard MBA, the subpoena powers of the IRS and the sleuthing skills of the CIA. But my personal experience at one extraordinary event – the inaugural President’s Cup tournament in 1994 in Tashkent, Uzbekistan – might suggest a potential point of departure for discussing tennis’s penchant for pitching hospitality tents wherever some political strongman or consortium of business moguls ponies up a few million dollars.
Uzbekistan is one of the republics of the former USSR that declared its independence after the collapse of the Evil Empire. Located in Central Asia, bordering Afghanistan and Tajikistan, both of which were then experiencing low-grade civil insurrections, the country has a per capital income of a dollar a day and is ruled by Islam Karimov, originally a Communist dictator, afterward a self-proclaimed President. According to Amnesty International, Karimov was still jailing and torturing his political opponents. After 9/11 Uzbekistan became a US ally in the war against terror and put its air space and landing strips at our disposal. But this arrangement disintegrated when President Karimov suppressed a political demonstration by allowing his troops to open fire on civilians, killing several hundred men, women and children.
At least on the surface, the atmosphere was more convivial in May 1994 when Uzbekistan welcomed a few dozen foreign players, a handful of journalists and a clutch of business men to the first President’s Cup. True, there were hints when we left the consoling womb of Lufthansa Airlines that we were entering an altogether different world. The people-mover that trundled us from the plane to the baggage claim area was a peculiar vehicle – a broken-down driverless bus towed by a tractor.
The road into Tashkent cut through countryside that resembled desolate stretches of the American southwest. Scrubby vegetation sprouted from land that looked like it had been fired in a furnace. Streamers of trash fluttered from every thorny branch. In the city center, the streets widened into bombastic boulevards where a tank would have no trouble heeling around and having clears lines of fire in all directions. Entire blocks looked as if they’d come under recent bombardment. In monumental parks, statues of Soviet heroes lay broken beside their pedestals. Other statues made of sterner stuff were still standing, but had had their arms and heads blown off, and wires jutted out of their extremities like straw from a scarecrow.
At the dachas where we were put up, tournament officials thoughtfully provided Care packages containing bars of soap, rolls of toilet paper and bottles of insect repellent. Then off we went to the new tennis center, down a dual-lane highway where bony cattle and sheep grazed on the median strip. Several red clay courts had been freshly built for the event. A huge hospitality tent, with food flown in daily from Copenhagen, was pitched nearby, and the local Peace Corps director sampled the smoked salmon and champagne and declared that nothing so tasty could be bought between Istanbul and Beijing at any price.
Speaking of prices, those of us who had made the mistake of changing dollars into Uzbek currency discovered that nobody would accept sum coupons. Everyone demanded dollars. Even cab drivers and waiters rejected tips in their national currency.
Those of us who had packed plenty of bucks had problems too. Uzbeks operate under the delusion that bills more than five years old are illegal tender. They demand clean, crisp dollars. This resulted in a small cottage industry, a bizarre kind of money laundering, where women in the marketplace would for a fee clean and iron your rumpled bills.
Of course, like a good journalist I didn’t let myself get sidelined by minor frustrations. I was in Tashkent to cover tennis, and along with my fellow reporters, I lined up at the press gate, proceeded through a metal detector, submitted to a pat down – women had their purses searched and their hairspray and fingernail files confiscated – and climbed into the utterly empty bleachers on the sunny side of the stadium. Across the way, in the shade, sat Islam Karimov and several dozen bodyguards. The President decided that the first day of the President’s Cup should be a private party from which the paying public was excluded. As an added precaution, before the players warmed up, a couple of soldiers with minesweepers marched back and forth across the red clay, making sure that no one had planted an explosive surprise for Karimov. After that build-up, the match itself was anti-climactic.
At that first tournament, a challenger event, Vince Spadea, Chuck Adams and Filip de Wulf were the most prominent competitors. In subsequent years, the tournament graduated to full status on the ATP tour, and top ten players – Henman, Safin, Kafelnikov, etc. – made the long journey to Uzbekistan for what became a hard court indoor event. The men’s tournament folded in 2003. But the WTA has a tournament in Tashkent which continues to this day. I’m afraid that for me, however, nothing could compare with that inaugural President’s Cup.
While few Uzbeks attended the matches as the week progressed, many of them sought out Americans and Europeans who had come to Tashkent. Some begged for money. A few women offered marriage or something more short-term in exchange for a ticket to the West. An Uzbek filmmaker, a man who had recently been imprisoned and beaten, arranged at great danger to himself to show a few journalists a documentary he had shot during the civil war in Tajikistan.
By coincidence, Senator Arlen Spector of Pennsylvania happened to be in Tashkent during the tournament. Two dissident female poets passed him a letter pleading for help as Spector left the American Embassy. They were arrested on the spot, thrown into jail, and despite Sen. Spector’s pleas, they remained behind bars.
As is often the case at tournaments, various junkets were organized for the players and press. As usual no players availed themselves of the opportunity, but a number of journalists jumped on an air-conditioned bus bound for the fabled Silk Road city of Samarkand. We spent a day there traipsing in the footsteps of Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan and Tamerlane. Then that evening, serene as Venetian doges in gondolas on the Grand Canal, we sailed back toward Tashkent, privileged visitors, isolated from whatever unruliness rumpled the country around us.
Isolated, that is, until a man on the roadside picked up a brick and heaved it through a bus window. Thinking ourselves under attack, our illusions ruined, we hightailed it back to the tennis center where the daily allotment of smoked salmon and champagne had just arrived.
Because the United States Information Service had invited me to lecture at a couple of Uzbek universities, I met American Embassy officials, academics from various disciplines, and aid workers and advisors. They had decidedly different views of Central Asia’s first pro tennis tournament. Embassy officials saw it less as a sporting event than a business venture in which rival European airlines vied through sponsorship deals for governmental approval of their landing rights in Tashkent. The Embassy also pointed out that Uzbekistan is a major exporter of grain alcohol, and that representatives of a major American liquor producer were in town for the tournament.
Academics protested that the tournament diverted funds and attention from vital needs. The universities had libraries the size of a two-car garage. If it wasn’t bad enough that books were in short supply, they had no paper and no ink. They begged me to send them Bic pens.
A number of aid workers argued that in a nation that depended on Médecins sans Frontières and couldn’t provide basic care to much of its population, it hardly made sense to promote pro tennis. As for the food flown in from Copenhagen for the hospitality tent, a Peace Corps volunteer swore he had been at the airport and seen truckloads skimmed off the top of each day’s delivery by Uzbek ministers.
In the 70s and 80s, with the encouragement of Arthur Ashe and other insightful people on the tour, tennis took political stances on a number of issues, including apartheid in South Africa. John McEnroe still gets high marks for refusing to play a million dollar exhibition match in Sun City, one of the bogus black South African homelands. While there’s no use wishing for the good old days and the good old guys, perhaps it’s not out of order to make a modest suggestion that pro tennis take a closer look at its calendar so that it doesn’t showcase the game in sunny places for shady people.
