After 11 years of attending the US Open, this will be my last US Open.
The ticket prices are so outrageous and they need to do something
about the bot buying—GREED!!
I will be spending my money on the Australian Open when the ticket
prices are at standard prices….just $35!!! because they cannot
resell the tickets for more than face value.
I am sure I am not the only one having this piss off greed issue
…USTA needs to do something about it and this is not good for Tennis
in the USA.
https://www.curbed.com/article/us-open-arthur-ashe-stadium.html?mc_cid=61125416cc&mc_eid=142172d3e7
When P.J. Simmons heard about the $800 million renovation of Arthur
Ashe Stadium, and the addition of over 2,000 premium courtside seats,
he was optimistic. “I thought maybe that would depress prices
slightly,” he said.
An environmental consultant by trade, Simmons might be the most
knowledgeable person about Ashe who has never worked there. For up to
eight hours on a given day, he monitors fluctuations in Ticketmaster
and StubHub and dispenses advice on his website, the Road to 4.5
Tennis, on the best way to score cheap Open seats. This has become
especially helpful as tickets for the tournament have spiked, largely
due to the resale market, which the Open can’t regulate like other
Grand Slams.
The average cost of cheap seats in Ashe, the marquee venue at the
Billie Jean King National Tennis Center in Flushing Meadows, have seen
an average markup of over 200 percent. At the other end of the
spectrum, a single courtside seat for the men’s finals was going for
$29,000 in August, and that’s despite rumors that the two top male
players, Jannik Sinner and Carlos Alcaraz, may withdraw because of
injuries. “The other day, I was like, ‘Oh man, there are front-row
tickets for this night, and that would be so fun to treat somebody to.
Ten minutes later, they were gone. And then ten minutes after that,
they were fucking on resale,” Simmons said.
It’s July, less than a month before Fan Week, the official start of
the Open, and normie fanatics like Simmons, the die-hards without
expense accounts or family offices, are stewing because they aren’t
finding the deals they expected at the updated Ashe. “It has almost
been the reverse,” he said. In fact, by the time the renovation
project is completed next year, the world’s largest tennis stadium
will have no added capacity. Already, it’s removed over half the seats
from a section known as loge, the balcony above courtside where
budget-conscious fans could hear the compressed explosion of a Naomi
Osaka return or study the footwork of dark-horse Filipina player
Alexandra Eala without paying to mingle with celebrities or receive
seatside service.
While Kirsten Corio, the chief commercial officer of the U.S. Tennis
Association, says that the renovation merely “takes a few thousand
seats from upstairs and moves them downstairs,” it would be clearer to
say that the stadium is shifting as much capacity as it can closer to
the court, where seats are more expensive. The new geometry of the
stadium provides easy access to new restaurants and bars exclusively
available to fans sitting courtside, including the Blue Room, which
the USTA calls “the pinnacle of luxury … with dedicated seated tables
for a plated multi-course dining experience.”
In remaking Ashe, the USTA is doing the same thing as every branch of
the hospitality industry by catering to those for whom money is no
object with the most luxurious, most exclusive, most over-the-top
experiences imaginable. At the Open, there has been a dramatic
expansion of bundles with expensive hospitality options. This year’s
priciest offerings, which range as high as $85,000, include a gifting
suite, locker-room access and private hitting clinics with tennis
royalty on practice courts. Next year, a subterranean,
London-social-club-style complex of lounges called the Bunker Suites
is expected to open. During the tournament, access to the space, which
is taking over a catacomb once used by players for warmups, has been
floated at $120,000 per person.
If there is a preview of where the Open is headed, it can be found in
Southern California. That’s where Larry Ellison, one of the richest
men in the world, who is also a tennis fanatic, bought the Indian
Wells Tennis Garden venue in 2009 and then loaded it with high-end
amenities, including outposts of both Nobu and Spago offering
tableside views of the courts. Ellison’s innovations were disruptive:
Fans who could afford “Tennis Paradise,” as Indian Wells came to be
known, began to expect similar offerings at other tournaments. The
difference is that Indian Wells wasn’t just operating like a private
club during the tournament. For most of the year, Indian Wells is a
privately-owned club.
The Open finds itself also competing with Wimbledon, the Henley Royal
Regatta, the races at Royal Ascot, and other elite sporting events for
the attention and patronage of rich rubberneckers. “They’re not
necessarily a tennis-playing fanatic or there for business. They’re
there for I want to go to the Super Bowl. I want to go to a World Cup
final. I want to go to the US Open and get as close as I can,” said
Corio. They’re people like the clients of Renee Falack, an adviser at
the travel and destination-events agency Embark Beyond. “They’re not
necessarily so into tennis, but more into the scene and wanting to be
there,” she says. They’re impulsive, too. “Luckily, we have great
contacts who are able to find tickets at the last minute.” Of course,
that means they’re paying a premium on top of the $10,000 or more
they’re likely paying for a seat, “but they’re okay with that.” And
they don’t want to sit in the loge.
“They want to be near the players, they want to be on TV — that’s
definitely a part of it, especially in New York,” Falack says. “It’s
not just about getting in the stadium or getting into the U.S. Open.
They want to be courtside.”
The U.S. Open has worked hard to attract younger fans, many of whom
would be startled by how much the tournament has changed. “Nobody
seems to remember,” said Adrian Benepe, the former New York City Parks
commissioner, who sat courtside during the 1979 women’s-singles final
between Chris Evert and Tracy Austin That was a year after the modern
Open was born. For the previous half-century, the private West Side
Tennis Club in Forest Hills, often described as “America’s Wimbledon,”
had hosted the tournament. If tennis then had an image as exclusive,
white, and stuffy, the West Side Tennis Club epitomized it. Players
and spectators tended to wear all white. Advertising was minimal, and
displays of enthusiasm were politely discouraged. “It was insular and,
outside of among tennis fans, not a very big deal,” recalled Richard
Farley, an attorney who’s been attending the Open since he was a
teenager, back when he sat in the bleachers. These days, the law firms
he works with invite him to their corporate boxes. “The National
Invitation Tournament at Madison Square Garden was a bigger event,”
Farley said. “You would never dream of going out to Forest Hills and
taking a client. They wouldn’t come with you.”
Tennis had long been a rich person’s sport: To play, you needed access
to a court, and most courts belonged to private clubs. But in the
1970s, a boom in public-tennis-court construction cultivated a new
generation of everyday fans and interest in the sport was spurred by
media spectacles like the 1973 “Battle of the Sexes” between Billie
Jean King and Bobby Riggs. The Open was evolving, too. One adjustment
that now seems quaint but at the time resulted in near riots: night
games. When a 1977 Guillermo Vilas match was shifted to the evening,
fans staged a sit-in and threw objects at the court. That same year, a
spectator was struck by a stray bullet during a night match, and Jimmy
Connors lunged at a photographer after losing in the final. The
tournament would be described as “sinister” and “psychotic,”
reflecting the overall mood that summer of New York, plagued as it was
by arson, blackouts, bankruptcy and a serial killer. “That was the era
of people acting like maniacs in stadiums,” said Farley.
The story goes that a flight into La Guardia inspired the move to
Flushing Meadows. William “Slew” Hester, a freewheeling Mississippi
oilman who had just become USTA president, was circling over Flushing
Meadows–Corona Park when he looked out the window and saw the future
of tennis in a rusting, weed-filled stadium called the Singer Bowl.
Hester envisioned a massive sports complex with the capacity for
larger crowds and modern facilities for players and would offer over
scores of tennis courts available to the public at modest hourly
rates.
“Moving to Flushing Meadows — to the borough of Queens — turned tennis
from a country-club sport into a people’s sport,” said Benepe, who
calls the old USTA “a fussy, patrician organization.” For the first
time, a Grand Slam was played on public courts. Other organizations
lease land from the city, including the Mets and Yankees. However, the
USTA bonded itself with Queens in a highly public and emotional way,
touting the Open as “The People’s Slam.”
In the 1980s, there were fears that the Open, which quickly outgrew
the Singer Bowl (renamed the Louis Armstrong Stadium), would leave the
city. The Dinkins administration kept it in New York with a deal
reached in 1993, during the mayor’s final weeks in office. “We could
have easily lost it,” said Claude Okin, the founder and CEO of
Sportime, which operates private tennis clubs throughout New York.
“But David Dinkins loved tennis.” The 99-year lease requires the USTA
to share revenue with the city and pay for its own infrastructure, an
unheard of arrangement today, when sports franchises routinely extort
the government for subsidies and tax breaks.
During the 2000s, the democratization of tennis seemed to stall. The
audience for the Open became “bifurcated,” says Caitlin Thompson,
founder and editor of Racquet magazine. “You’d have the warrior types
who’d be like, ‘I’m gonna go watch a Kiki Bertens–Elise Mertens
battle,’ one obscure Belgian player against another obscure Dutch
player, on court 17, because you knew they’d have it out and you’d get
your money’s worth.” The other segment became “guys in fleece vests.”
It was around the 2010s that it became obligatory for banks, law
firms, and luxury brands such as Mercedes and Rolex “to get a
well-placed box at the highest tier,” Farley said. “You want to
provide concierge service to your clients, who, if they’re local, you
get them car service to and from. And if they’re out of town, you fly
them in and you put them up at a nice hotel and do door-to-door
service. And you’ll do this over the course of two weeks with, if
you’re lucky, a different client every night.”
The pandemic was a gift to tennis. Public courts were full again, many
of them with new fans looking for safe outdoor activities. But the
2020 Open was played in empty stadiums, and in 2021 the tournament
fell short of capacity because of reduced international travel. It was
not long afterwards that the renovation now underway was conceived.
The USTA, uncertain if there would ever be a normal tournament again,
looked to the success of Ellison and Indian Wells and decided that a
lucrative future — in a world where it was easy to imagine no future
at all — lay in VIP suites. Hotels, airlines, and cruise ships also
bet big on the rich: not just because there was money in it, but also
because their backs were against the wall.
After 2022, the floodgates opened. “We just couldn’t offer enough
access to satisfy the demand,” said Corio. With lockdown over, the
demand for live events surged, and the tournament began blowing up
previous attendance numbers. In 2024, the Open recorded a million
guests for the first time. The exuberance of the scene was now part of
the draw, attracting influencers who discovered that posing for
selfies at Ashe made for great content. “The majority of them are
calling brands being like, ‘Hey, I’ll do this for free,’ making it
look like they have sponsorships, but they don’t,” said Walker Ward,
the creator of the Instagram meme account WalkSauce42_. The tournament
became a place to be seen and to make money by being seen.
“Social media changed everything, and the Open is completely different
because of it,” said Chris Widmaier, the former head of communications
for the USTA. “If you take a selfie at a Yankees game, great, you’re a
fan. If you take one at the Open, you’re making a statement, and it
says, ‘Look at me, ‘I’m rich.’” The USTA appears to have embraced the
opportunity to provide shareable experiences and photo ops — jumbo
tennis rackets, puppies, Ball Crew Karaoke — that annoyed the old
guard. “Last year, the USTA was bragging about how it had hit an
attendance record of 74,000, but it should be embarrassed,” says an
attorney who has attended nine Opens. The stadium is so packed, he
says, “that people are constantly walking around, and you can see some
of the players are irritated.” But the organizers aren’t complaining.
This year’s Amex presale sold out in under two hours.
The modern U.S. Open has always been about unruliness: fans talking
between points, car alarms interrupting serves, planes threatening to
land on top of Arthur Ashe. The only quiet thing about it is the
stealthy way that the tournament has advanced upon its rivals in the
global mega-event category. The tournament’s annual economic
contribution to the city exceeds $1.25 billion, said Danny Zausner,
the longtime chief operating officer of the USTA. That is roughly four
times the estimated impact of the Super Bowl when it was held in New
York in 2014. It is more than that of a full season of the Mets and
the Yankees combined, more than that of Fashion Week, more than those
of Pride Weekend and the New York City Marathon.
In light of the tournament’s growth, David Dinkins’s progressive deal
may appear lopsided when measured purely by the gap between organizer
profits and direct payments to the city. The USTA, predictably,
defends the arrangement. “We can all be angry about how the world’s
changed and how the rich get richer, how there’s more velvet ropes
than ever, but it’s a little bit of fake news about the U.S. Open,”
said Okin, who sits on the organization’s Eastern Board of Directors.
“The USTA is actually really concerned about underserved markets. It’s
a reverse charity. It’s Robin Hood. It is a super-liberal organization
compared to most [tennis] federations, and even though it has this
huge business, all that money is spent on low and no-cost tennis
programs.”
Among those programs is “Fan Week,” which was created a decade ago in
part to offer an affordable way to experience the tournament during
the quiet period when lower-ranked players compete for the final 16
spots in the men’s and women’s singles draws. Last year, the Open
moved its mixed-doubles competition, featuring top players, into Fan
Week; these matches are either free or ticketed at significantly lower
prices than what tennis featuring the likes of Coco Gauff and Jannik
Sinner would be normally. Meanwhile, it continues to offer grounds
passes, which grant first-come, first-served general-admission seating
everywhere but Arthur Ashe and the ability to wander freely among
courts, with prices varying between $65–$150 depending on the day.
“You can’t even get an Uber ride across town for $60 or $70, but you
can be here for 15 hours and be entertained,” says Zausner. (For those
driving in, a single parking spot on VividSeats was listed for $6,926
in August.)
The renovation, too, has been billed as a gift to the fans. The
stadium, it has been said, is “the worst sports venue in America.”
Built for capacity, it sacrificed intimacy in a sport that requires
it. Horrendously vertical, it positions cheap-seat, upper-deck viewers
at such a distance that it can be difficult to know which player is
which. The new configuration, of course, won’t help with that. A few
weeks ago, Simmons was watching Ticketmaster when suddenly there was a
drop of what are known as Blue Dot or Standard seats. Such tickets,
which are verified not to have been resold, are highly coveted and
tend to get purchased instantly.
Then he noticed the lowest price for a courtside seat: $9,100. “Every
single one of those tickets was a hospitality ticket,” bundled with
perks such as the “Premium Overlook Option,” which includes “Gourmet
Cuisine … from chef-attended food stations” and “elegant passed drinks
during cocktail hour.” “Die-hard fans don’t care about getting fed
amazing food and drinks and showing off. We just want to sit and watch
tennis.”
Just about the only constituency that’s not complaining about the new
Ashe are those sitting courtside and in the VIP suites, which have all
sold out, according to the USTA. Among them is Farley, who estimates
he has been to at least six Super Bowls, seven World Series, the
Kentucky Derby twice, half a dozen PGA majors and multiple NBA finals.
He’s already booked for several nights over in Flushing. “And I’m
taking clients,” he said. Of course, none of them is paying.
