MELBOURNE, Australia — There are plenty of reasons to travel to Melbourne for the Australian Open each January, especially from a winter climate.
It’s sunny, it’s warm and Aussies at Melbourne Park are good with beer at noon and banter all day. Roger Federer had it about right when he nicknamed this event the “happy slam”.
The Australian Open also doesn’t treat tennis like a fragile museum piece, never to be touched or tweaked because ‘that’s not the way it’s done’, or one of those other haughty phrases the guardians of the game use to rationalize their stodginess.
This is the signal Grand Slam: the event that starts each season and offers a window into where tennis is headed with remarkable and deliberate regularity, all on the north bank of the Yarra River. Retractable roofs; 10-point deciding tiebreaks; cameras in the player tunnels and glitching cartoon tennis stars: it all debuted here. What California is to America, Australia has often been for tennis — the lab where new stuff goes for a test drive before being pushed out in so many other places.
“We’ve always tried to keep pushing the business,” said Machar Reid, the head of innovation for Tennis Australia, in an interview in Melbourne.
This year’s innovations have been especially visible. Coaches are sitting in pods on the three main courts with tablet computers packed with live stats, rather than in a box above the court and in the stands, where they had to lean over to chat with players craning their necks and cupping their ears to hear a potential gem among the noise.
Carlos Alcaraz talks with his coaching team during his fourth-round match against Jack Draper. (Clive Brunskill / Getty Images)
Even players who were against allowing any coaching, who really hated having a rule against coaching when it was happening match in, match out, have got on board.
“I always thought tennis is an individual sport where you kind of have to figure things out on your own in a way,” said Alexander Zverev, world No. 2.
“If tennis is going that way, then it should go that way to 100 percent.”
Novak Djokovic and his coach Andy Murray are having a face-to-face chat between sets. Iga Swiatek and her coach Wim Fissette are trading words between points. That kind of closeness is natural for a tournament that turned its underbelly — the tunnels under Melbourne Park that house the player areas and allow the best in the world to move freely and privately between the gym, the lounge, and their matches, bumping fists and talking shop as they go — into one large Big Brother live feed.
It’s probably a safe bet this is all coming soon to a tournament near you. Maybe not the Big Brother.
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The AO, as it calls itself (a little less grand than Wimbledon’s “The Championships”) was the first Grand Slam to have one retractable roof, then two, then three. It was the first to bring cameras into the bowels of the stadium, following players as they walked to the court through that fancy tunnel with all the photos and names of past champions.
The net camera first became a main staple here, according to organizers. It had the first heat scale, and the first air quality scale.
The U.S. Open fashions itself as a food and style and tennis technology hotbed. Tennis Australia has gotten some heat for that this year, as the tournament, along with some other Grand Slams have done away with the electronic let sensor. The chair umpire makes the call based on whether they hear the ball tick the net, a system tournament officials insist is reliable.
Players don’t agree. Zverev called it “quite ridiculous”.
“Every single corner of everything has a camera. We have video review and all the high-end technologies that we can possibly have. But a simple let machine that we’ve been using for the past 25 years is not available at a Grand Slam.”
Chances are, most spectators don’t pay it any mind. At the Australian Open, fans come for the tennis, but stay for the music festival.
All afternoon and into the evening, there are guitarists and singers performing in the main plaza between the courts, where fans take a break from the matches — if they ever make it to them in the first place. Those couches and pillows strewn across the shaded, artificial grass where the music plays make for an awfully pleasant spot to spend an evening sipping lager and whiskey.
Tennis fans enjoy the ‘Finals Festival’ at the Australian Open in 2023. (Kim Landy / Getty Images)
Last year, the tournament introduced innovations — by tennis standards — that have been long overdue.
Ushers began letting people take their seats between every game, rather than having to wait for a changeover, the old rule penalizing fans for going to the toilet, making them potentially miss 20 minutes of action. Players were caught slightly off-guard on the first day, but quickly got used to it and the change has spread elsewhere, especially in the higher sections of stadiums.
“We have been a little bit behind the other sports with changes and trying to keep the pace with the evolution of society and the new generation that we all know doesn’t have that much of a great attention span, and they want the movement,” Djokovic said Thursday night, after his third-round win over Tomas Machac. “That’s one of the ways to really try to open up a bit more and not have strict rules.”
There was another change — a bar and cafe next to a court instead of a bank of stands, with music and no limitations on noise during play. Last year, there was one. This year there is another. And just like that, taking a child to a tennis match, or catching up with a friend a few feet away from the action, becomes doable. Watching tennis no longer feels like the punishment your parents hand down when you misbehave: sit still and be quiet for the next three hours!
On the afternoon of the first Saturday, Rachel and Miki Petrovic, who were on their annual trip to the Australian Open from their home in Serbia, took in an otherwise forgettable doubles match over a beer as their seven-week-old infant, Violetta, rested beside them in a stroller.
“I have a baby,” Rachel told The Athletic. “Here I don’t have to worry about being annoying.”
A few feet away, Andrew Matthews and Danny Sincic, longtime Melbournians and attendees but first-time party-court visitors were enjoying a ginger beer and an IPA.
“Never been to anything like this,” Sincic said. “Makes it feel a bit more social than having to sit in the stadium without talking.”
“I don’t know how the players feel, but it’s good for us,” Matthews said.
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The players are basically fine with it. At this point, they know that when they play tennis in Melbourne Park, it might feel like a rugby match — especially if they play an Aussie. Chair umpires and stadium officials will attempt to keep the hometown faithful in line, but they don’t try that hard.
After all, that would rob the tournament of its more moments, such as Danielle Collins’ second-round win over home favorite Destanee Aiava. After enduring more than two hours of harassment from the Australian fans, Collins blew kisses to the crowd and thanked them in her on-court interview for helping her land a “big fat pay check”.
Djokovic, who ends up trolling crowds more often than anyone, gave Collins his full backing.
“Big fan of Danielle Collins,” he said the Thursday night after Collins’ interview. “We should try to look to connect more with the younger people and bring them. I want to see a little bit more entertainment.”
He has thoughts, including on-court dancers during changeovers or some version of a Super Bowl half-time show mid-match. Coco Gauff points out that in a sport with one-minute changeovers, it doesn’t really work. Maybe, somewhere in Melbourne, it’s already been noted on a whiteboard.
(Top photo: Brett Price / VWPics via Associated Press)