At this year’s Open, there were 64 teams entered in the men’s doubles, and two-thirds of them were comprised of players from different countries. In women’s doubles, more than half of the 64 teams were multinational. Look at the entourages of some of the game’s biggest stars: the Belorussian player Victoria Azarenka, who lost in the quarterfinals yesterday to Simona Halep of Romania, has a Belgian coach, a Serbian hitting partner, one Dutch agent and one American agent.

There are some international tennis competitions pitting country against country, but the rah-rah factor often seems contrived and forced. Tennis has been an Olympic sport since 1988, and while the biggest names participate, it’s clear the Summer Games are not the most important event on their calendars; winning Wimbledon matters a lot more to them than winning a gold medal.

Then there is the Davis Cup, an annual international team event that takes place over four weekends during the year. Although it has an illustrious history, the Davis Cup has become largely an afterthought in recent decades, owing mainly to the apathy of the top players, who now tend to take part only sporadically. Fans of the Davis Cup complain that today’s players are mercenaries who put self-interest over patriotism. Or it could just be that tennis has outgrown the nationalism that animates other sports. (The Fed Cup, an international women’s team competition, suffers from the same apathy.)

Tennis is certainly not immune to geopolitics, and international tensions occasionally spill onto the court. In 2013, Tunisia’s Malek Jaziri pulled out of a quarterfinal match at a tournament in Tashkent because his opponent was Israeli, and he had been ordered by Tunisia’s tennis federation not to play him. But perhaps because of its nature — an individual sport in which players from dozens of countries roam the world together like a traveling circus — these episodes are the exception rather than the rule. From 2003 until 2011, an Indian player named Rohan Bopanna and a Pakistani player named Aisam-ul-Haq Qureshi were frequent doubles partners. At Wimbledon one year, they wore matching jackets that read, “Stop War Start Tennis.”

It is fair to say, too, that tennis fans are more inclined to look past national identity than fans of many other sports. Sure, British spectators at Wimbledon pull harder for British players; ditto for French spectators at the French Open and so forth. But generally speaking, patriotic sentiment exerts a much weaker influence in tennis than it does elsewhere. Just consider the U.S. Open: Apart from the Williams sisters, the last decade has been the worst stretch for American tennis players since the late 1960s. Yet during this same period, the Open has grown ever more popular. Last year, it drew 713,642 spectators, the fourth-best attendance in the event’s history and the seventh time in eight years that the tournament has attracted more than 700,000 fans. Fans who buy tickets for the second week of the Open do so knowing there’s a good chance only one or two Americans will be left in the tournament by that point. It doesn’t seem to matter.