Tomic, Hewitt find accord in a new open era Pals: Bernard Tomic and Lleyton Hewitt celebrate a Davis Cup win. Bernard Tomic and Lleyton Hewitt spent part of a rainy Sunday in the games room at Qi Zhong Tennis Centre playing table tennis. Competitively. They share a practice court. Regularly. On Monday, as the pair hung out in the player lounge waiting - unsuccessfully - for the weather to break, it was clear that their own relationship, once fractured, is now healed. Hewitt, at 32, is one of the oldest men in the top 100. Tomic, at almost 21, is the youngest. Hewitt's travelling coach and playing contemporary, Peter Luczak, is an ally and friend to all. Tomic's coach, his father John, is serving a one-year ban from tournament sites. Before and since, significantly and perhaps a little surprisingly, an unlikely alliance has been formed. That famous Wimbledon practice snub happened more than four years ago when Tomic, then a junior, declined to hit with the former champion on the tournament's middle Sunday. The fallout was substantial, the reparation gradual, but the issues never really as personal as they seemed. Tomic has always respected Hewitt the champion, while Hewitt surely understood that other forces were at play. Left to their own devices, particularly in the team environment of Davis Cup, any lingering issues have been buried. They are a small group, the Australians on the elite men's tour, in contrast to the mass numbers circulating in the nation's long-ago heyday. But just as Pat Rafter was a mentor to Hewitt in his early years, there has lately been something of the wizened old stager about the father of three, who remains driven not just by the chance to play big matches at the majors, but a last shot at the Davis Cup glory to which Tomic's contribution is integral. Besides, Hewitt has always preferred the company of his countrymen and Tomic is likeable in a wayward-rascal-who-likes-a-party-and-should-work-a-bit-harder kind of way, as well as more popular in the locker room than his family file of toxic press clippings may suggest. There is much he can learn from Hewitt, who achieved more with less than virtually all his contemporaries, his weapons less obvious than his fanatical determination, his consistency phenomenal. Indeed, one thing the dual grand slam champion and next Davis Cup captain can teach Tomic it is that talent alone will take him only so far. At the moment, his position is 51st in the world, which is slightly below where he began in a season that started so promisingly. A brilliant Hopman Cup preceded a maiden first ATP title in Sydney, then third-round reappearance at Melbourne Park. Davis Cup aside, Tomic's tournament record since leaving Australia is 14-17. But also since then have come the Thomas Drouet affair, the court case, the ban, all of it. No wonder the Queenslander is treading water, no longer just wrestling in it on the rooftop in a Gold Coast spa. But that's Tomic. Good, bad, sometimes awful, can be great and still might be. Hewitt was already No. 1 at Tomic's age, but they are vastly different players and characters, albeit now sharing some welcome common ground. Linda Pearce is a guest of the Shanghai Rolex Masters.