I spent much of this weekend over at the Lawrence Joel Veterans Memorial Coliseum watching the Davis Cup quarterfinals between the US and Spain.  While there are a lot of things I could write about (and will) the one thing I really took away from the weekend is that the local folks who organized the Davis Cup experience did a great job.  The Joel holds about 14,500 people and the place was sold out for the entire weekend.  The picture above/to the left shows the crowd for the Saturday doubles match and I can attest that there were very few empty seats on Friday or Saturday.  Even more impressive is that the crowd on Easter Sunday for two matches that didn’t count (the US clinched the win on Saturday) was probably about 80% capacity.  The atmosphere was just amazing.

Throughout the tournament the winning players were interviewed after their matches and all of the US players went out of their way to thank the crowd and talk about how great it was to play in front of such a large, vocal and enthusiastic home crowd.  We were told on several occassions by the announcer that this crowd was the largest US Davis Cup crowd since 1990, and US team captain Patrick McEnroe told the crowd that he and the players were especially pleased because the last time they played Spain in the 04 Davis Cup in Seville the Spaniards had 25,000 fans and they really wanted to see what it was like to play on their home turf with their own large crowd.  In an interview after his singles match on Sunday Bob Bryan said that the players loved it here in Winston-Salem and if they make the finals and end up playing the finals at home then they would be pushing to come back here. 

I was a little critical of the USTA with how they handled the ticket
sales, but in retrospect it looks like they were thoroughly and
pleasantly surprised by the interest in tickets for the event.
Hopefully they’ll take some lessons from this experience and apply it
in the future, number one being that they should limit the number of
tickets per person so that more people get a shot at prime seats.  Given the short turnaround time they have for these things they did a
pretty good job.  And like I said the local folks, led by Don Flow, did a bang up job in drawing the Davis Cup here and then putting on a bang-up show.  Hopefully the Cup will be back in December and then you’ll see a really rowdy crowd.