This is a fool’s errand, perhaps. A futile exercise on the order of catching a fistful of smoke or looking for a reason to cloud the brightness of Carlos Alcaraz’s future. But let’s try something different this week and make an appeal, if not for peace in The Republic of Tennis, then for bringing the conversation in from the margins and the discourse from the sewer. Let’s try this and see how it goes….then we can resume debating who belongs in the Hall of Fame or whether the Laver Cup benefits from women and whether tennis balls are yellow or green.

So, on the Sunday morning of Laver Cup, I woke up to a text from a former player who is squarely in the Djokovic camp. He wrote: ”I see they [sic] making ND work for his $1M.”

What did he mean? That Nadal and Federer had played doubles together on Friday. They, quite rightly, got a lot of fanfare. They were the subject of unforgettable image.