It is another measure of how far the sport of tennis has fallen, at least in America, that the Davis Cup Finals will be contested in this country, starting tomorrow in Portland, Or., with all the secrecy of nuclear disarmament negotiations with North Korea. I have no doubt that Portland is excited and will fill the 12,000-seat arena with flag-waving fans and that the hard core will find their way to cable's Versus where it will be televised live. But the typical sports fan, even the sports fanatics I hang with, don't seem remotely aware that the United States and Russia are about to duel for a 107-year-old Cup, the climax of the biggest annual international team sports competition.

I confirmed that with an informal poll of my family--top tennis players all in their youth (and some continue to play a decent game today). I posed a simple question: What major sports championship is being contested this weekend? Among the answers I got were some that were correct--the ACC football championship, the Big 12 football championship--and other wild guesses--NASCAR, men's college soccer, figure skating--that were totally off base. "Not a clue," conceded my cousin Al, even misguessing after I gave a pretty good hint--"tennis". "Wasn't the Master's final held already?" he asked. 

Tennis has undergone a long steady descent here into newspaper agate type and the cable hinterlands. The U.S. Open remains the one glorious exception, having been marketed shrewdly as a New York City festival and celebrity happening. Pretty much everything else has conspired against the game. The lack of an American men's champion of the first rank--Andy Roddick has not proved to be a worthy heir to the Connnors, McEnroe, Sampras, Agassi legacy--is a blow to a sport that has always been boosted by national chauvinism. And the on-again, off-again careers of our top women stars--now I'm a tennis player, now I'm a clothes designer, now I'm an actress--has, despite the success of the Williams sisters (or possibly because of it) made the sport seem almost dilletantish. And this year the sport has been dogged by widespread gambling rumors related to match-fixing. That the top Russian player, Nikolai Davydenko, is a focus of these investigations, doesn't add luster to the weekend's festivities.

The Davis Cup is already a complex, extended and diffuse competition with the locale of its matches determined by a confusing formula. Why Russia, which defeated Argentina in Moscow for the Cup last year, should not get to defend at home eludes me. But the home-court advantage--which is, above all, a choice of surfaces--would certainly seem to be a break for the Yanks (although the home team and the visitors have split the last 10 finals). The Davis Cup, like the Ryder Cup and the America's Cup and Olympic basketball and baseball, is a competition that the United States once dominated--it has won 31 times, more than any other nation--but has struggled with of late. Over the past decade, the U.S. team made it to two finals and lost both, on the road in Sweden in 1997 and again in Spain in 2004.

The USA last hoisted the Cup in 1995, with Pete Sampras providing most of the heroics in Moscow to best the Russians. There is no Pete Sampras equivalent on this American squad. Its doubles team of Bob and Mike Bryan, however, is tops in the world and should guarantee the U.S. team one point. But questions remain as to whether Roddick and James Blake can rise to the occasion, as they have failed to do in critical Davis Cup encounters previously. And, of course, if they do, will anybody know about it?