Band of Brothers
By Eleanor Preston

Take a Spanish clay court, two former French Open champions, and thousands of noisy, flag-waving Spaniards, and you have a recipe to put off even the hungriest of visiting Davis Cup captains.

Luckily, Patrick McEnroe has the stomach needed to take his young squad to Seville in December for the USA’s first Davis Cup final since 1997. More than that, he is actually excited at the prospect.

“We’d have loved to have played at home, but I really look forward to the challenge of going to Spain. When I looked ahead and saw the draw I was excited about going there for the final,” said McEnroe, whose team beat Belarus in the semifinals in Charleston this past September.

“We know that they’ve got a great team, one of the best teams in the world, if not the best team, but we’re going to prepare well and give it a shot. I think it will be a tremendous challenge and a tremendous chance to do something amazing. The Bryan brothers have won the French Open; Andy Roddick has won tournaments on clay. When we go there we know we’re going to have to play great clay court players, but it will be indoors and I think that will help us a little bit, because you can serve pretty big indoors too.”

Roddick can handle that end of things, and while his clay court record in Europe does not inspire optimism—a first-round loss at the French Open in May bore testimony to that—he has won two titles on American green clay and one in St. Poelten, Austria, in 2003.

The presence of Juan Carlos Ferrero, who will be looking to salvage a disappointing year, and Carlos Moya won’t make the USA’s job any easier; however, favoritism is worth little in Davis Cup.

McEnroe has built a squad bonded by friendship and a shared goal, which made a refreshing change from the years of individual superstars like Pete Sampras and Andre Agassi and their will-they-or-won’t-they attitude toward Davis Cup. Roddick, Mardy Fish, and the Bryan Brothers—the likely lineup for Spain—have all been stalwart in their devotion to playing for their country.

“Patrick came on board and right away made it known, okay, I want to go with the young guys, I kind of want to get something going,” Roddick ex-plained. “We were kind of at a standstill as far as Davis Cup was concerned. We had some guys who wanted to play, some guys who didn’t, some who wanted to play here and there, and he said, okay, I’ll go with the young guys who really want to play, and now it’s paying off a little bit.”

The USA’s last Davis Cup trophy came, courtesy of Sampras and Com-pany in 1995 against Russia on European clay. Roddick admitted he didn’t remember much about it, but he knows he and his band of brothers have the opportunity to match the achievements of that win and set a mark for the future.

“It’s a different era and a different generation, and I don’t think there are any ties that are still connected between this team and that team,” Roddick said. “But it would be nice to erase that one because we hear it a lot.”

McEnroe is likely to select Fish as Roddick’s cohort in singles, with the Bryans testing out their unbeaten Davis Cup record in the doubles. As ever in Davis Cup, that middle point could come in very handy, especially as Spain has plenty of depth in singles with Rafael Nadal and Tommy Robredo on the bench, but cannot boast a settled doubles pairing.

Little wonder McEnroe and his men are smacking their lips in anticipation.