It is described by the organisers as the World Cup of Tennis, and the winners are referred to as the World Champion team.
The competition began in 1900 as a challenge between Great Britain and the United States. By 2016, 135 nations entered teams into the competition.
The most successful countries over the history of the tournament are the United States (winning 32 titles and finishing as runners-up 29 times) and Australia (winning 28 titles, including four with New Zealand as Australasia, and finishing as runners-up 19 times).
The women's equivalent of the Davis Cup is the Billie Jean King Cup, formerly known as the Fed Cup. Australia, Russia, the Czech Republic, and the United States are the only countries to have won both Davis Cup and Fed Cup titles in the same year.
The Davis Cup allowed only amateurs and national registered professional players (from 1968) to compete until 1973, five years after the start of the Open Era.
The idea for a tournament pitting the best British and Americans in competition against one another was probably first conceived by James Dwight, the first president of the U.S. National Lawn Tennis Association when it formed in 1881.
Desperate to assess the development of American players against the renowned British champions, he worked tirelessly to engage British officials in a properly sanctioned match, but failed to do so.
He
nevertheless tried to entice top international, particularly British,
talent to the U.S. and sanctioned semi-official tours of the top
American players to Great Britain.
More information: Davis Cup
Diplomatic relations between Great Britain and the United States on the tennis front had strengthened such that, by the mid 1890s, reciprocal tours were staged annually between players of the two nations, and an ensuing friendship between American William Larned and Irishman Harold Mahony spurred efforts to formalize an official team competition between the two nations.
International competitions had been staged for some time before the first Davis Cup match in 1900.
From 1892, England and Ireland had been competing in an annual national-team-based competition, similar to what would become the standard Davis Cup format, mixing single and doubles matches, and in 1895 England played against France in a national team competition.
During Larned's tour of the British Isles in 1896, where he competed in several tournaments including the Wimbledon Championships, he was also a spectator for the annual England vs. Ireland match.
It was at this juncture, in the summer of 1899, that four members of the Harvard University tennis team -Dwight Davis included- travelled across the States to challenge the best west-coast talent, and upon his return, it apparently occurred to Davis that if teams representing regions could arouse such great feelings, then why wouldn't a tennis event that pitted national teams in competition be just as successful. He approached James Dwight with the idea, which was tentatively agreed, and he ordered an appropriate sterling silver punchbowl trophy from Shreve, Crump & Low, purchasing it from his own funds for about $1,000. They in turn commissioned a classically styled design from William B. Durgin's of Concord, New Hampshire, crafted by the Englishman Rowland Rhodes.
Beyond donating a trophy for the competition, Davis's involvement in the incipient development of the tournament that came to bear his name was negligible, yet a persistent myth has emerged that Davis devised both the idea for an international tennis competition and its format of mixing singles and doubles matches. Research has shown this to be a myth, similar in its exaggeration of a single individual's efforts within a highly complex long-term development to the myths of William Webb Ellis and Abner Doubleday, who have both been wrongly credited with inventing rugby and baseball, respectively.
More information: Tennis Fame
Davis nevertheless went on to become a prominent politician in the United States in the 1920s, serving as US Secretary of War from 1925 to 1929 and as Governor-General of the Philippines from 1929 to 1932.
The first match, between the United States and Britain (competing as the British Isles), was held at the Longwood Cricket Club in Boston, Massachusetts in 1900. The American team, of which Dwight Davis was captain, surprised the British by winning the first three matches. The following year the two countries did not compete, but the US won the match in 1902 and Britain won the following four matches.
By 1905 the tournament expanded to include Belgium, Austria, France, and Australasia, a combined team from Australia and New Zealand that competed together until 1914.
The tournament was initially titled the International Lawn Tennis Challenge although it soon became known as the Davis Cup, after Dwight Davis' trophy.
The Davis Cup competition was initially played as a challenge cup. All teams competed against one another for the right to face the previous year's champion in the final round.
More information: LTA
Mardy Fish
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