“They’re playing Davis Cup again? Didn’t the Americans just win the thing?”

This was a common refrain among casual tennis fans last week as Davis Cup, that historic and historically stubborn team competition, began again, two months after it ended in December when the Americans defeated Russia in Portland, Ore. In recent weeks, Andy Roddick and company were critical of having to travel to Austria to begin their title defense. Roddick said the two finalists from the year before ought to receive a bye in the first round. James Blake agreed — at the Australian Open, he called the present format “insane” (among other things).

There was never a doubt that Roddick and Blake would join the team in Austria for last weekend’s first-round match, but I had my doubts about how they would perform. This meeting had all the ingredients for a disaster: a team coming off an extreme high (last year’s title was the first for the Americans since 1995); an away match on clay, a surface regarded as radioactive by our hard court players, and an underdog Austrian team with an awkward lefty (Jurgen Melzer), a speedy, defensive player in Stefan Koubek, and a top-notch doubles player in Julian Knowle. The surface was a particular concern, as it was not so much clay as clumps of dirt arranged in the shape of a tennis court in the weeks leading up to the match. Both Roddick and Blake lambasted the patchy, unpredictable court, describing it as dangerous and among the worst surfaces on which they had ever played.

How surprising, then, to see the Americans pull off a 4–1 victory. It wasn’t as easy as the score suggests, but once Roddick escaped a tricky five-setter against Melzer on Friday, one got the sense that things would break the Americans’ way. Blake followed with a four-set victory over Koubek and the twins Bob and Mike Bryan outdid themselves with an hour-and-a-half pasting of Melzer and Knowle on Saturday. The Bryans lost a total of seven games and expended so little energy that captain Patrick McEnroe trotted them out to play singles yesterday in two meaningless matches so Roddick could rest his knee, which he tweaked on Friday (Mike defaulted in the middle of his match and Bob won two sets to one). The Bryans are now 14–1 in Davis Cup play.

The Americans will host France, one of the most talented teams in the world, in Winston-Salem, N.C., in April. The French pummeled Romania 5–0 over the weekend, with Australian Open finalist Jo-Wilfried Tsonga and Richard Gasquet leading the way. If the Americans win that contest, the road to a second straight title will become more difficult, as they would likely face Spain on the road (and on clay) and probably Russia or Argentina in the final (also on the road and also on clay). But the final is months away. The larger question, for now, remains the one raised by Roddick and Blake: What should be done about the Davis Cup?

Offering the winner and the finalist a bye seems an easy thing to do, although it would force a reduction in the World Group (there are now 16 teams in the top group; that would have to be trimmed to 14 to allow for two byes). No doubt countries with weaker teams would complain about the potential loss of status and revenue associated with a less meaningful contest (reduced ticket sales, etc.).

The Davis Cup could also limit the number of World Group teams to eight, as the Federation Cup does for the women. Instead of playing the quarterfinals in February, as the women do, the men could avoid the Davis Cup in the winter and play their first matches in April, followed by semifinals in September and the final in December (this idea, of course, could present greater revenue concerns than the previous scenario).

Blake suggested holding the Davis Cup every two years, which would allow players to take a rest from it and build anticipation among fans. It could work. It could fail miserably, too. Jonas Bjorkman, who helped Sweden defeat a talented Israeli team 3–2 in Israel, once said that he would like to see Davis Cup matches played immediately after the tournaments that come before them, in this case, the Australian Open. He dislikes having a week at home and then getting on a plane again at the end of the week, rather than staying on the road — as one would from tournament to tournament — and then resting afterward. This seems sensible, but the International Tennis Federation hasn’t deemed it worthwhile (no doubt other players would disagree with Bjorkman on this point).

In Australia, Blake was charitable enough to suggest that all of the above ideas could be bad ones. Still, he doesn’t agree that doing nothing is the answer.

“It just doesn’t seem to be gaining any momentum,” he said. “I don’t know if we’re looking at the big picture, the fact that if we fix the system, maybe the small countries can benefit more from the whole system benefiting in the long run.”

Blake is right, but I’m not convinced that anything can be done for the long-term health of the Davis Cup until the rest of the tennis schedule is repaired. As it is, there are too many small tournaments, some of which attract marquee players with appearance fees despite offering little in the way of prize money. Many people complain that the Australian Open begins too soon; it’s just as easy to say that too little tennis is played in the weeks following the tournament, which results in too much tennis — Monte Carlo, Rome, the French Open, Wimbledon, and the American hard court season — from May through August (the men’s tour will soon pluck Madrid from the fall schedule and drop it into the grueling spring clay court stretch).

Ideally, I’d like to see three rounds of Davis Cup — quarterfinals, semifinals, and the final — played over three or four successive weeks, with no other tournaments in session anywhere else. The travel and home-surface choices would remain, but the Cup would build momentum over those weeks, more so since the players would concentrate on it and nothing else. This fantasy of mine will, of course, never happen in the next hundred thousand years, since several tournaments would have to lose too much status and money to make it a reality, even if the Davis Cup happened every two years rather than every year. Until we get to the point where the season’s other (and, to be honest, more important) flaws are on the mend, I’m resigned to leaving Davis Cup alone and hoping that some day there’s a chance to make it a lot better.

Mr. Perrotta is a senior editor at Tennis Magazine. He can be reached at tperrotta@tennismagazine.com.