The story of Argentine tennis dates to the late 19th century, and what runs through this rich tale of overcoming long odds and longer distances is red clay.

The Argentines call it polvo de ladrillo (brick dust), and it is the only surface available at the Buenos Aires Lawn Tennis Club, a venerable institution that lies at the epicenter of the sport in a leafy quarter of the Argentine capital. On a breezy day this week, the dust swirled through the spring air at the club, leaving a gritty ocher coating on the grass and the table tops. The next morning, from an airplane flying low over the Buenos Aires outskirts, there were scores of red rectangles visible among the tile roofs and broad patches of desiccated plain.

But 250 miles to the south in the coastal resort of Mar del Plata, soon to be the site of the most significant tennis event ever staged in Argentina, the red rectangles and brick dust are suddenly nowhere to be seen. Inside the Estadio Polideportivo, the modest arena where, beginning Friday, David Nalbandian, Juan Martín del Potro and Argentina will host Spain in the Davis Cup final, the surface is a luminous blue indoor hardcourt.

This will be the first time since Argentina joined tennis’s premier team competition in 1923 that the country has staged a home event on anything but outdoor clay.

Since then, Argentine players have indeed become more complete. Nalbandian, the moody longtime leader of this team, and del Potro, the towering 20-year-old prodigy, profess to be more at ease on faster surfaces than the clay that has long defined their nation’s tennis landscape and still accounts for more than 90 percent of its courts.

... contd.