I have been longing for the USTA to do something big and fantastic for the next Davis Cup home match, instead of recent choices of smallish venues in tired indoor arenas in second-tier cities like Winston-Salem, N.C., Portland, Ore., or Birmingham, Ala.  The call for proposals from prospective hosts for a quarterfinal match July 9-11 went out yesterday, and will happen only if the U.S. fill the tall order of beating the Novak Djokovic-led Serbian team in an away match in March.

Here are my two new suggestions for sites, to join the many I made last October:

– The Billie Jean King National Tennis Center in New York.  What more important could be happening there than Davis Cup in July?  New Yorkers and others could fill it up, and the surface is fast and to the team’s liking.   France hosted at Roland Garros when they beat the U.S. in 2002, and it made for a memorable scene.  Why can’t we do the same?

–The new billion-dollar palace in Dallas where the Dallas Cowboys play.  The knock on big stadiums and tennis is that fans in the cheap seats can’t see (not that it stopped the construction of the Ashe Stadium), but that wouldn’t be a problem under the world’s biggest video screen that measures at 159 feet wide and 71 feet high a total of 11,200 square feet  – almost four times larger than the surface of a doubles court.   This would be a spectacle that would make the sports news nationwide, and perhaps draw fans to Davis Cup who have never heard of it.

Andy Roddick’s brother Lawrence wanted to take Davis Cup to San Antonio, and set the record for the largest crowd ever to see a tennis match.  San Antonio is still a good idea too — but wouldn’t it be something to see tennis live and simultaneous video on the largest screen in history?

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