It was a good tennis year for traveling Spaniards

As the 2008 tennis season ended in this unlikely city with Fernando Verdasco buried under a pile of delirious teammates, the inescapable conclusion was that it had been a great year for Spaniards on the road.

Rafael Nadal left the island comforts of Majorca and hustled to his fourth straight French Open title, his first Wimbledon title and his first Olympic gold medal in Beijing.

Though the Davis Cup no longer carries the same weight in the United States, the country that launched it in 1900, La Copa Davis still means plenty in other parts of the world, including Argentina where it shared the front pages and home pages with Diego Maradona's debut as coach of the Argentine national soccer team.

But in the end, David Nalbandian and the Argentines did not get the kind of attention they were counting on as their bid to win tennis's premier team title unraveled once more. Instead of dissecting a historic sports triumph, their chroniclers were left to dissect fractured team unity, Nalbandian's prickly personality and the decision of captain Alberto Mancini to resign and let someone else attempt to inspire Argentina to its first Davis Cup.

"I think for all of us to pull in the same direction requires an effort; it happens but it demands a lot," Mancini said in a news conference whose questions and answers were full of emotion. "I'm not just talking about tennis players. I'm talking about the country as a whole."

Spanish teams, for the moment, do not have such problems after a year in which their men's soccer team won the European championships and their men's basketball team gave the American "Redeem Team" a scare in the Olympic final. Now, Spain's Davis Cup squad has managed to win in hostile, if Spanish-speaking, territory despite the absence of Nadal.

"I'm really proud to share this prize with these players," said outgoing Spanish captain Emilio Sánchez Vicario. "For me, it's the biggest prize of my life."

Spain has won its three Cups in 2000, 2004 and 2008, all Olympic years, which is probably no coincidence considering that overstuffed Olympic years put a major strain on tennis stars and inevitably favor the nations with the biggest reserves of able and willing talent.

Spain is not as deep as it was several seasons ago, when it had several Grand Slam champions and finalists on its roster, but it still had much better backups in Feliciano López and Fernando Verdasco than Argentina could muster when its new star Juan Martín Del Potro pulled up lame during his opening-day loss to López.

Spain, as it turned out, was not the only team that had to play in Mar del Plata without its number one player.

It is hardly a surprise that health problems were a major factor again in men's tennis this year.

Nadal barely played after September. Roger Federer, whose intelligent scheduling and attention to detail had kept him relatively injury free for years, labored through a challenging season. It began with him fighting through mononucleosis (then undiagnosed) and losing in the semifinals of the Australian Open to young rival Novak Djokovic and ended with him suffering from back problems and losing in the round-robin portion of the Tennis Masters Cup to young rival Andy Murray.

Along the way, he lost his 4½-year grip on the No. 1 ranking and nearly slipped past No. 2 as well , with Djokovic, who won the Australian Open and the season-ending Masters Cup, coming within 10 trifling computer points of nipping him at the tape.

But Federer still had a memorable season by a normal superstar's standards. He reached the semifinals of one Grand Slam and the finals of the other three. He won his first Olympic medal, a gold in the doubles in Beijing with Swiss teammate Stanislas Wawrinka. He then won his fifth straight U.S. Open: bringing him within one victory of Pete Sampras's all-time record of 14 Grand Slam singles titles.

He was also part of a match that will be parsed and reparsed for decades to come: the five-set joint masterwork of a Wimbledon final in which Nadal banished forever any lingering, misguided perceptions that he was, deep down, just another claycourt specialist while putting to an end to Federer's five-year reign at the All England Club and .

Nadal became the first Spanish man since Manuel Santana in 1966 to win a major on a surface other than clay, and the first man since Bjorn Borg in 1980 to complete the French Open-Wimbledon double. The Olympic gold, which came on an outdoor hardcourt, was an exclamation point as was his impressive performance back on clay in Madrid's Las Ventas bullring against the United States in the Davis Cup semifinals.

But the heroics would stop there, which was probably in the best long-term interests of Nadal and the game he plays with such intensity. Digging too deep this autumn would surely have had an impact on his performance in 2009, which looks like a particularly attractive year with Federer still in his prime, Djokovic and Murray becoming presumably even more dangerous and charismatic outsiders like Jo-Wilfried Tsonga of France and Andy Roddick of the United States still in the mix. There are also counterpunchers Gilles Simon of France and Nikolay Davydenko of Russia as well as Del Potro and perhaps Ernests Gulbis of Latvia.

The landscape of the women's game is less clearly defined as it struggles to recover from Justine Henin's shock retirement in May when she was ranked No. 1. Four different women won the Grand Slam singles titles this year: Maria Sharapova, Ana Ivanovic, Venus Williams and Serena Williams. A fifth, Elena Dementieva , won the Olympic singles.

Venus Williams, who won the first season-ending championships staged in Doha, was the only player who could make a claim to have won two important titles, and she ended up ranked just sixth: a dubious tribute to the fact that she reached only one other final in the 12 other tournaments she played.

There were other statistical oddities. Of the top four women in the final rankings, only Serena Williams has won a Grand Slam singles title. No. 1 Jelena Jankovic came close: pushing Serena hard in a highly entertaining, albeit straight-set U.S. Open final that was one of the best big matches of the year along with the all-Williams Wimbledon final and Dinara Safina's fourth-round exorcism of Maria Sharapova after saving a match point at the French Open.

Sharapova was still a global brand in 2008 but too rarely an athlete: playing only 11 tournaments because of ongoing problems in her right shoulder. Her career is clearly in harm's way. She is ranked No. 9 and could drop further in a hurry if she does not come back strongly at the Australian Open, where she is the reigning champion.

There will be other risky tennis business in 2009, including the ATP Tour' plastering its logo across the net at its events (Grand Slams thankfully not included) and the women's tour institutionalizing on-court coaching (Grand Slams thankfully not included).

Both tours will also have revamped schedules, increased prize money (global economy willing) and revised rule books, the hope of obliging the stars to play the top events more often. Larry Scott, the WTA Tour chairman, will be in his post to see how the tinkering turns out. The quotable, combustible ATP executive chairman, Etienne de Villiers, will not stand for another term after his management incurred the wrath of leading players, above all Nadal and Federer.

There can be no doubt where power truly lies.