BOISE, Idaho — Novak Djokovic is the top-ranked men's tennis player in the world. He is so intelligent, so engaging, so interested in current affairs that speculation about his post-playing days often touches on the possibility of a political career back home in Serbia.
But even a worldly and well-traveled athlete like Djokovic, who makes his home in Monte Carlo and his fortune in tennis tour stops like London, Paris and New York, was stumped when the United States Davis Cup team announced where it would play this weekend's quarterfinals.
"To be honest with you, I'd never heard of Boise before we were selected to play here," he said Thursday.
Djokovic had gamely joked before he alighted here that he was going to do a Web search of Boise to learn about this city of about 210,000 people. He probably would not have needed to if Serbia were playing in one of the other quarterfinals being contested this weekend — in Vancouver, British Columbia; Buenos Aires; or Astana, Kazakhstan.
He would not be the only one wondering if the United States Tennis Association, which picked the Taco Bell Arena on the Boise State University campus for the matches, had taken a wrong turn in the star-studded ski resort Sun Valley and kept going. Jeff Ryan, whose job as the U.S.T.A.'s senior director of team events is to pick the sites, said his children even asked him, "Dad, why are you going out there?"
The answer is, in part, a blend of geography and old friends. It is also about how much local interest is generated by the oddity of elite level tennis being played in an area best known in the sports world for the electric blue shade of Boise State's football field.
When the teams held a one-hour open workout for fans Wednesday afternoon, at least 250 people lined up before the doors opened, some of them carrying their own rackets. They took pictures of the mammoth silver and wood Davis Cup trophy, which is making a rare appearance at a nonfinal tie. The workout was the first story on the local evening news. Gov. C. L. Otter attended a dinner honoring the two teams, held in a skybox overlooking the football stadium.
Boise is known for outdoor sports like hiking and biking, but according to the U.S.T.A., it has one of the highest participation rates per capita for U.S.T.A. leagues and tournaments. There are 4,500 members of the U.S.T.A. in Idaho, and 6,000 played in U.S.T.A. leagues, meaning many people played in more than one league.
Heather Rice attended the open practice with her family, and she said everybody she and her husband, Ben, played tennis with planned to attend the Davis Cup matches.
"The No. 1 player in the world?" she said. "This opportunity in Boise is incredible."
Greg Patton, the coach of the Boise State tennis team, said: "It's so cool. It's like Jesus and the Virgin Mary are coming here for a concert and they're bringing the Beatles with them."
Patton, who said his job is to be something of a tennis pied piper, came to Boise State from U.C.-Irvine in 1993, left in 1998 and returned in 2003. As a coach with the national team, he worked with the United States team captain Jim Courier when he was a junior player, and has known the doubles team of Bob and Mike Bryan since they were children and the top-ranked American Sam Querrey since he was a teenager.
Patton said he spent the last 10 years dreaming and scheming to get Davis Cup here. He said he spent the last few weeks begging people to buy tickets — about 8,000 have been sold for each of the three days for an arena that seats 11,000.
"When people see tennis at this level, it's going to light a fire, they're going to go crazy," Patton said. "It helps me with my dream; one day my dream is to play in a football stadium in front of 30,000 people."
That works fine for the U.S.T.A., which, Ryan said, considers Davis Cup locations a marketing tool, designed to bring top-tier tennis to less traditional strongholds that have little chance of hosting an ATP World Tour event.
When Ryan is charged with finding a spot for a Davis Cup tie, he must consider the requests of the team for certain conditions and the availability of arenas that, in many major cities at this time of year, might already been booked with N.B.A. and N.H.L. games, ice skating shows and rock concerts. He said Boise and Tucson emerged as the strongest candidates for this event. But even Patton might not have been able to persuade anyone to put the Davis Cup here if not for a quirk of Boise's geography.
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