Bud Collins, a tennis commentator and gadfly, once wrote that the Fed Cup was "a splendid idea with a lame name."
But it is not just the name that is lame this year as the Fed Cup prepares for the finals between Italy and Russia.
The Italians have a full-strength team — including Sara Errani, Roberta Vinci and Flavia Pennetta — and are playing host in a lovely spot: Cagliari on the island of Sardinia, where the 5,000-seat stadium is reportedly sold out.
The problem is the Russians. Once the dominant force in women's tennis, they have arrived without any of their top-ranked players. Their team will be Alexandra Panova (the 12th-ranked Russian and No. 136 in the world), Alisa Kleybanova (No. 16 and No. 183), Irina Khromacheva (No. 19 and No. 236) and Margarita Gasparyan (No. 26 and No. 315).
A lame lineup indeed for a nation that no longer reigns in the game but still has six players in the world's top 30.
The woefully underwhelming squad is a reflection of much that continues to plague tennis: alphabet-soup organizations working at cross purposes, a flawed calendar, tension among national federations and the individuals who represent — or choose not to represent — them.
But this is above all an embarrassment to an event that has too rarely felt like a main event. Women's tennis remains the premier sport and most reliable starmaker for female athletes worldwide — a sport in which Serena Williams earned more than $12 million in prize money in 2013.
But the premier team competition in women's tennis continues to punch below its weight.
"To have these stars for women's tennis that we have today, these global icons, and then when we look at the financial growth of women's professional tennis, when you put that up against the Fed Cup, I do believe it's undervalued," Stacey Allaster, the Women's Tennis Association's chairwoman and chief executive, said in a telephone interview.
The WTA is no bystander. Allaster was speaking from Sofia, Bulgaria, where the tour is staging the Tournament of Champions, its second-tier, year-end championships. This minor event is presumably good for the players involved and the tour's bottom line, but it tends to feel like a pale, anticlimactic copy of the first-tier WTA Championships that took place last week in Istanbul and featured the world's top eight players.
The Tournament of Champions, which features players from the next tranche who are eligible (and willing) to take part, was created in 2009 and was initially staged in Bali, Indonesia. For the last four years, it has conflicted on the calendar with the Fed Cup finals.
This is clearly less than ideal, and until now, the players who had the choice of playing in either event have opted to play for their country. But this year is different with three Russian women — Maria Kirilenko, Elena Vesnina and Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova — choosing Sofia and its guaranteed payday and potential ranking points over the Fed Cup.
In contrast, the 11th-ranked Vinci, who also would have been eligible to play in Sofia, has chosen to play singles and doubles for Italy in Cagliari.
The paradox is that Kirilenko, Vesnina, Pavlyuchenkova and Ekaterina Makarova were all willing and able to play on the Russian team that won its thrilling semifinal series against Slovakia, 3-2, in April in Moscow. But the finals, which are supposed to matter most, did not get their support, leaving the longtime Russian captain Shamil Tarpischev — the bushy-browed, era-crossing patriarch who once taught tennis to Boris N. Yeltsin — with the equivalent of a farm team.
Vesnina, ranked 25th and part of one of the world's top doubles teams with Makarova, said she chose Sofia long ago and informed Tarpischev and her teammates.
"For me, it was the first time that I get into this championship, and I really wanted to be there and for me it was the goal to finish the year in the top 20," she said in Istanbul. "I was thinking that I'm going to be the only one who was not going to play the final, but this is the situation now. And I think it's not actually a good idea to put Fed Cup final on the same week with a championship. It's not fair for the players."
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