FEDERER-DJOKOVIC DOUBLES PAIRING HEADLINES LAVER CUP TENNIS • CHICAGO

Written by: Staff on 21st September 2018

FEDERER-DJOKOVIC DOUBLES PAIRING HEADLINES LAVER CUP TENNIS • CHICAGO |

Photo by @federer.forever via Instagram

By Ricky Dimon

Mercifully, the games are about to begin in Chicago.

So far at the Laver Cup this week, it has just been a whole lot of photo opportunities—mostly of players in mismatched suits. Team Europe, which won the inaugural cup in 2017, had all kinds of shades covered: black, dark blue, grey…. And captain Bjorn Borg was in something close to white. Team World at least came close to consistency, aside from captain John McEnroe in a much lighter assembly than the rest of his squad.

The highlights of picture day, unsurprisingly, came any time John Isner and Team World teammate Diego Schwartzman stood next to each other. With a height difference of 1’3’’ (Isner is 6’10’’; Schwartzman is 5’7’’), the photos were predictably amusing.

Isner, though, insists that it will be all business the rest of the week as actual tennis gets underway.

“It’s 100 percent serious,” the United States’ top-ranked man said of the Laver Cup. “This is not an exhibition at all; at all.”

Year one suggested otherwise. Both teams clearly wanted to win in Prague, but Team World seemed at least as interested in staging epic celebrations as it did in getting the best of Team Europe. And let’s be honest: as fun as this competition is, it won’t be more than a glorified exhibition until its crazy point system is revamped (currently the matches on the second day are inexplicably worth twice as much as on Friday and Sunday’s finales are worth three times as much as Friday’s).

Even though matches are worth just one point on Friday, Team Europe is not wasting any time sending quite a doubles pairing to the court. It will be Roger Federer and Novak Djokovic, with 34 Grand Slam singles titles between them.

“We have had so many great battles in all the singles courts, and to finally team up together I think is going to be very special for both of us,” Federer commented. “I think we still have to talk over it a little bit exactly maybe either who’s going to take the lead or how do we play exactly.”

“This is what this competition is all about,” Djokovic added, “bringing us all together.”

“Yeah, [Federer and Djokovic] is obviously going to be a legendary team,” said Jack Sock, who will partner Kevin Anderson to face the former world No. 1s on Friday.