The Davis Cup came to party last night accompanied by its ever-present guardian.

International Tennis Federation President Francesco Ricci Bitti, USTA Chief Executive, Professional Tennis Arlen Kantarian, Tennis Channel CEO Ken Solomon and former top 10 player Jimmy Arias were among the notable names who attended last night’s Davis Cup BNP Paribas Final Media Party at Restaurant Bay 13, a converted warehouse in downtown Portland.

As a jazz band played, guests dined on a four-course meal, but it was the immense figure standing behind velvet ropes that commanded the most attention and generated the most activity. The Davis Cup trophy was on display as the centerpiece of the dining room, enabling admirers to spend the evening posing next to it for photos.

Where exactly does the Davis Cup go after a night on the town?

It goes home with Tara Murray.

The New Jersey native’s official title is trophy manager for www.synergyevents.com, an Ocean, New Jersey-based marketing company, but the 20-something Murray serves as a virtual round-the-clock guardian/baby sitter/designated driver for the Davis Cup.

“Wherever the Cup goes, I go,” Murray told us last night. “It stays in my hotel room. People are always surprised by how big it is when they see it the first time. It’s huge - a lot bigger than it looks on TV and it’s just so impressive to see it up close and see the history of tennis in all the names of the players on the Davis Cup.”

The silver Cup itself is mounted on three-tier wooden circular base giving its foundation the look of a wedding cake. The Davis Cup trophy - the Cup and the wooden base combined - weighs 231.5 pounds and stands 3-feet-7 inches tall.

Murray packs the Cup in four cases when traveling with it and carries a pair of soft gloves in her pocket to prevent the potential stain of fingerprints when she assembles and disassembles the Cup. Prior to arriving in Portland, the Cup and Murray took a promotional tour of the northeast.

“It’s interesting because Patrick McEnroe did some television interviews with the Cup and they spend so much time to get the lighting just right,” Murray said. “It’s polished and so shiny they had to put up backdrops behind so it would be clear on camera.”

Viewing the Cup up close is like taking a tour of tennis history as the names of every player and captain participating in Davis Cup finals appears on the Cup - except for the 2006 and 2007 finals.

“They engrave the names on the silver panels with two years on each panel,” Murray explained. “So after this weekend’s final ends they’ll add the panel from the 2006 and 2007 finals.”

If the USA wins the Davis Cup there are plans for another possible promotional trip before it is returned back to ITF headquarters in London.

“I don’t know yet exactly where the Cup will be appearing  if the United States wins,” Murray said. “But wherever it goes, I’ll be there. You really get attached to the Cup spending so much time with it. It’s a beautiful trophy.”

We’re three days removed from first shot of this weekend’s Davis Cup final between the host USA and defending Davis Cup champion Russia at Portland’s Memorial Coliseum.

 While Russian captain Shamil Tarpischev contemplates his starting lineup for the final, the Bryan brothers practice with the Trailblazers in reaching rare air for their first flying chest bump of Saturday’s doubles match and the Net Heads consult with George Clinton’s hair stylist in stitching together their red, white and blue hair extensions for the final, Tennis Week photo editors and devoted Davis Cup fans Rick, Relu and Dan (Rick’s captain of his 4.5 USTA team, Romanian natives Relu and Dan both voted for Ilie Nastase in his unsuccessful bid to become mayor of Bucharest) have been busy producing a Davis Cup Road to the Final photo gallery tracing the USA and Russia’s path to final. Check it out here.

RP 

The tennis season can sometimes resemble a runaway treadmill built without a pause button - the churning machinery demands ongoing motion from its participants trying to maintain their balance and forward motion. Tennis is all about comings and goings: whether they’re the familiar front runners or retrievers plagued by a chronic case of catch-up, players arrive at tournaments already plotting their exit strategies in setting schedules and flight plans often before they’ve even played a match.

Sometimes, the end is in sight at the start: Kim Clijsters launched the 20007 season already committed to a farewell tour that turned into an abbreviated good-bye as she subsequently shortened her season further by officially announcing her retirement in May. Two of the most accomplished British players of the Open Era - Tim Henman and Greg Rusedski - both pulled the curtain down on their pro careers in the past year.

Looking back at the 2007 season you might remember it as the year of the scandal — match-fixing and gambling allegations generated international headlines as characters ranging from Nikolay Davydenko to former mobster Michael Franzese to Scotland Yard detectives became particpants in the ongoing saga, Martina Hingis announced simultaneous stunners in revealing her positive test for cocaine at Wimbledon prompting her second retirement and allegations of Tommy Haas possibly being a victim of poisoning during the Davis Cup semifinals were subsequently refuted by blood tests — but it’s also been the year of the comeback.

Several players who pressed pause on their seasons or careers - either in willingly taking a break to recharge their competitive batteries, confined to the sidelines by injury-induced ir - made their mark to varying degrees this season.

Here’s a look at our picks for the top comebacks of the season:

1. Justine Henin - The dissolution of her marriage prompted Henin to skip the Australian Open. When she returned to the Tour in February, the strong-willed Belgian regained her resolve, repaired her relationship with her formerly estranged family and reinforced her reputation as the best player in the world in posting a 63-4 record and collecting 10 tournament titles, including winning the final five tournaments she played.
2. Serena Williams - Stumbled into Melbourne two years removed from her last tournament title and ranked No. 82. Confronting constant questionss surrounding her expanding frame and seemingly diminished desire, she silenced skeptics by surging through the field to claim her eighth major title before barely holding off Henin to win Miami. However after that sensational start that saw her win 15 of her first 16 matches and regain her place in the top 10, Williams concluded the season with more questions than answers in posting a 20-9 record with no tournament titles over the final eight months of the season. Clearly, Serena still has the ability to hit the high notes, but does she have determination and discipline to commit to playing a complete season at full strength? The answer, like all things Serena, can be variable.  
3. Lindsay Davenport - The former World No. 1 gave birth to son Jagger by Caesarian section on June 10 and showed little labor pains on court. Davenport returned to singles action in September, beat World No. 3 Jelena Jankovic and eventually won the Bali title. She closed out the season winning the Tier III Quebec City title, has raised her ranking to No. 72 and if the newly-installed courts in Melbourne are playing as fast as reported, she should be a threat to reach the second week at the Australian Open in January.
4. Guillermo Cañas was hit with the two-year suspension from professional tennis, fined $276,070 in prize money and forced to forfeit 525 singles and 95 doubles ranking points after testing positive for the banned diuretic hydrochlorothiazide at the Acapulco event in February 2005 . Cañas estimates he spent nearly $700,000 in attorney’s fees fighting the decision. His suspension was reduced to 15 months on appeal as he argued his positive test was due to prescribed medicine to treat flu symptoms by Acapulco tournament doctors. Completely off the rankings radar at the start of the season, the 30-year-old Argentine beat former French Open champ Juan Carlos Ferrero in the Costa Do Sauipe final to win his first title in nearly three years then knocked off top-ranked Roger Federer in back-to-back Masters Series events in Indian Wells and Miami and is now ranked 15th in the world.
5. Andy Murray - Sidelined for nearly three months with a wrist injury, the ornery one worked his way back to reach the Mets final, won St. Petersburg, narrowly missed qualifying for the season-ending Tennis Masters Cup and barely took time out to exhale before cutting the connective cord with coach Brad Gilbert.
6. Radek Stepanek - The most festive worm who doesn’t reside at the bottom of a bottle of Cuervo, he survived a career-threatening back injury that sidelined him for the final four months of the 2006 season as well as a failed engagement to Hingis, and restored his own brand of celebratory funk-factor to the tour with the distinctive worm dance he unveiled after defeating James Blake to win the L.A. title. The dance, remarked one fellow pro, looked like Steve Martin’s wild and crazy guy SNL character performing the limbo while suffering from full-body cramps. Stepanek engaged Novak Djokovic in a thrilling five-set duel that was arguably the best match of the 2007 U.S. Open then, playing his first Davis Cup match in three years, scored a straight-sets win over Stanislas Wawrinka to clinch the Czech Republic’s 3-2 World Group Playoff victoryover a Swiss-squad led by Federer.
7. Fabrice Santoro -  Perhaps the most entertaining player not ranked in the top 20, the spin doctor’s slick racquet work, tantalizing two-handed strokes, mesmerizing mastery of angles and trick shot artistry bamboozled opponents,  bewildered traditionalists and bedazzled many fans. Conceding he was contemplating retirement at one point earlier this season, Santoro revived his singles career in beating Nicolas Mahut to win his first title in five years at Newport.
8. Pete Sampras- The 14-time Grand Slam king made his senior circuit debut a success in going undefeated on the Outback Tour Of champions and showed there’s still sting in his serve-and-volley game when he surprised Federer in the final exhibition match of their three-match Asian series. The pair plan to play another exo in New Yokr’s Madison Square Garden on March 10.

Welcome to the new Tennis Week web site! It’s quite a contrast - and hopefully a dramatic improvement - over the old Tennis Week site, which remained virtually unchanged for seven years.

Honestly, we’re still getting used to navigating our way around the site ourselves. It’s not quite like someone rearranging the furniture in your apartment while you were out - it’s more like returning home after a long weekend and finding a brand-new home built where your studio apartment once stood. It’s the feeling you might have if you spent much of your life banging balls against the wall of your cramped living room wall with a dustpan and suddenly wake up one day to unwrap the gift of a racquet bag filled with the latest and greatest high-tech racquets, a plane ticket and player pass to your favorite court in the world and a world-class coach at your side: there is a nervous excitement inspired by a whole new world of possibility of where you can take your game.

We tried to incorporate the ideas many of you proposed in constructing the site. Special thanks to long-time TW message board posters Peggye, DMan1, Hey, UESNY, Iceman and Ace for your detailed suggestions and while we could not accommodate Iceman’s request to devote the entire home page to an Elena Dementieva photo retrospective, we’re sure she’d be honored by your request. We combined your suggestions with our own wish list of features we’ve always dreamed about and collaborated with the web wizards at IMG Media (they’re the people who created MariaSharapova.com and Tiger Woods.com) as well as our own designers, George and Valentine (George graciously took time out from his Romanian honeymoon to finish up final designs), to create a site that we believe is more visually vibrant, user-friendly and interactive than the old TW.com site.

Our aim is to surround the sport through daily news stories, feature articles, interviews, opinion, video, photos and a free newsletter we plan to launch at the start of the ‘08 season in an effort to engage our returning readers and new users in an ongoing dialogue and discussion centered around the sport we love.

This blog is called “Richard’s Court”, but we view it as a virtual web court without lines or limitations. It can be as much yours as ours. Tennis is often cast as a solo sport, but throughout its history Tennis Week has tried to establish a community among readers. We value your views and we hope those of you who have contributed to the original TW.com for several years will share our excitement and enthusiasm for the new site while welcoming visitors to our new Message Board.

We envision this blog an adaptable space where we can post our tournament previews and picks, write commentary on current issues in the game, highlight industry and tournament news, share announcements ranging from charity tennis events to player appearances and offer links to interesting tennis stories and video. On occasion, we plan to turn this court over to guest bloggers ranging from current and former players to writers covering tournaments to officials and administrators with a view point on the most compelling individuals and issues of the day.

Throughout the years, Tennis Week.com established an extensive archive of articles, features, interviews, match stories and columns authored by some of the most esteemed writers in the sport, including the late, great TW founder Gene Scott, TW Editor At Large Richard Evans, Bud Collins, Steve Flink and more recently Frank Deford and Gordon Forbes, author of the classic “A Handful Of Summers.” Many readers emailed us expressing concern that these articles would vaporize into the cyberspace void when we launched the new site.

The prospect of losing several years of TW history was as mind-numbing as receiving a series of celebratory head buts from the Bryan Brothers. Fortunately, our developers retrieved all of the written content from the original Tennis Week.com and added it to our new data base (imagine picking up every tennis ball stuck at the U.S. Open for the past few years and you begin to get an idea of that challenge). At last count we had more than 8,500 articles in the archives.

As you can imagine, editing those stories (revising some of the HTML, removing inactive links, adding new images when possible and cleaning up the content so it appears as clear copy on the new site) takes some time. We’re continuing to add new and archived content to the site on a daily basis and if there are any particular articles or interviews you don’t currently see in the news and features archives, please post on our Message Board or email me and we’ll be sure to try to post those as soon as possible.

Lastly, a sincere thank you to all of you who have visited and supported this web site throughout the years. We appreciate your contributions, support and constructive criticism (in measured doses of course and hope you enjoy the new site. This is not the final product - we have a lot more in store for 2008 so please watch this space for news and updates. Hope to see you on the message board and in Portland for the Davis Cup final - bring your racquet if you’re going and we’ll see you on court!

all the best,
RP