US Open: Grand Slam

US Open: Grand Slam

There is a moment, somewhere around nine o'clock on a late-August night in Queens, when the whole thing tips over into something else. The sun is gone. The lights are up. Twenty-three thousand people are on their feet inside a stadium named for a man who changed a sport, and the roar comes down off the roof and lands on the court like weather. This is the US Open. It is loud. It is unruly. It is New York doing the one thing New York does better than anywhere on earth, which is refusing to be quiet.

Welcome to the last Grand Slam of the year. Bring an appetite.

The Beginning

Start at the beginning, which is not New York at all. It is Newport, Rhode Island, a Gilded Age playground of shingled mansions and salt air, where on August 31, 1881, the first US National Lawn Tennis Championship was contested at the Newport Casino. Twenty-five men. Grass courts. A string quartet playing while they hit. A 20-year-old Harvard student named Richard "Dick" Sears won it, then won it six more times and retired undefeated.

The word "casino," for what it is worth, has nothing to do with gambling. It comes from the Italian for "little house." This was a social club for the summer rich, commissioned by newspaper baron James Gordon Bennett Jr. after a friend of his rode a horse onto the porch of a rival club and got them both thrown out. That is the actual origin story. American tennis begins with a dare.

The women got their own championship in 1887 at the Philadelphia Cricket Club, where a 17-year-old named Ellen Hansell became the first champion. For decades the men's and women's events, the doubles, the mixed, were scattered across different clubs and cities. It was a patchwork, not a tournament.

By 1915 the game had outgrown Newport. A group of about 100 players signed a petition to move the championships to New York, where the clubs and the crowds were. The vote was close, 128 to 119, and the men's championship moved to the West Side Tennis Club in Forest Hills, Queens. In 1923 the club built the horseshoe-shaped Forest Hills Stadium, and that concrete bowl hosted the championships for decades. The Beatles played there. So did Jimi Hendrix and Bob Dylan. Forest Hills was where American tennis grew up.

1968: The Hinge

Then came the year that everything changed. For its entire history the championship had been an amateur affair. The best players in the world, the ones who actually played for money, were locked out entirely. In 1968 the walls came down. The Open Era began, professionals and amateurs competed together for the first time, and the tournament took the name it carries now: the US Open.

Arthur Ashe won that first one at Forest Hills, beating Tom Okker in a five-set final. Ashe was still classified as an amateur, so instead of prize money he collected 20 dollars a day in per diem. He became the first Black man to win a Grand Slam singles title, five months after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. He was, at the time, a soldier stationed at West Point.

In 1978 the Open left Forest Hills for good and moved a few miles north to the USTA National Tennis Center in Flushing Meadows. And here is where the name of the place gets strange and wonderful.

Why It's Called Flushing Meadows

The ground under Arthur Ashe Stadium was once a swamp, then a garbage dump. For real. In the early 20th century this stretch of Queens was the Corona Ash Dump, a mountain of coal cinders so bleak that F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote it directly into The Great Gatsby as the "Valley of Ashes." The man who transformed it was Robert Moses, who saw a park where everyone else saw trash, and built it to host the 1939 World's Fair, theme: "The World of Tomorrow." More than 44 million people came. The fair returned in 1964 under the theme "Peace Through Understanding," and left behind the Unisphere, that giant steel globe that still stands. The tennis center rose on the fairgrounds. The land that once held the future now holds the last Grand Slam of the year. There is poetry in that.

The Stadiums

Arthur Ashe Stadium opened in 1997, named for the man who won that first Open in 1968 and who had died four years earlier. It is the largest tennis stadium in the world, seating 23,771 people, with 90 luxury suites and five restaurants. For years it had a problem: no roof. Rain delayed the men's final for five straight years, 2008 through 2012. So the USTA built one. The retractable roof, finished for the 2016 Open, cost 150 million dollars as part of a 550 million dollar transformation of the National Tennis Center. It rides on eight columns sunk deep into that unreliable ash-dump soil, carries two 800-ton PTFE fabric panels, and closes in under seven minutes. It does not touch the original stadium. It is, in effect, an enormous umbrella held up over the building.

Louis Armstrong Stadium, the number-two court, is named for the jazz genius who lived nearby in Corona, Queens, until his death in 1971. The original was carved out of the old Singer Bowl from the 1964 World's Fair. The current version opened in 2018 after a rebuild, part of a 600 million dollar transformation of the grounds. It seats 14,000, has its own retractable roof, and is the first naturally ventilated tennis stadium in the world, cooled by air flowing through terra cotta louvers rather than air conditioning.

Equal Prize Money & the Woman Who Named the Place

Here is the part that matters most. In 1972 Billie Jean King won the US Open and took home 10,000 dollars. The men's champion, Ilie Nastase, got 25,000. King said, in effect, pay us the same or we don't come back, and no other woman will either. She went and found the sponsorship money to close the gap herself. In 1973 the US Open became the first Grand Slam, and the first major sporting event of any kind, to pay men and women equally. That year both singles champions, John Newcombe and Margaret Court, each took home 25,000 dollars.

Nineteen seventy-three was King's year in every way. She founded the WTA Tour that same year. And on September 20, 1973, she played 55-year-old Bobby Riggs in the "Battle of the Sexes" at the Houston Astrodome, in front of 30,472 spectators, the largest crowd for a tennis match in US history. An estimated 90 million viewers worldwide, and 50 million in the United States, tuned in, a record for the sport. King won it in straight sets, 6-4, 6-3, 6-3. "I thought it would set us back 50 years if I didn't win that match," she later said. "It would ruin the women's tour and affect the self-esteem of all women." It remains one of the most-watched tennis matches in history.

In 2006 the USTA rededicated the entire complex as the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center. King became the first woman in America to have a major sports venue named in her honor. "This is a show of faith and responsibility," she said at the time. "I don't think I'll ever comprehend this."

Why the US Open Is a Grand Slam

Four tournaments make up the Grand Slam: the Australian Open in January, the French Open on the clay of Roland Garros in spring, Wimbledon on the grass in early summer, and the US Open to close the year. Win all four and you have entered a very small room in the history of the sport.

The term itself is borrowed. It comes from the card game bridge, where a "grand slam" means winning every trick. A sportswriter first applied it to tennis in 1933, describing the Australian Jack Crawford, who had won three of the four majors that year and stood a chance at the fourth. Crawford lost the US final. The term stuck anyway.

Winning all four in a single calendar year is the rarest feat in the sport. Only five singles players have ever done it: Don Budge in 1938, Maureen Connolly in 1953, Rod Laver in 1962 and again in 1969, Margaret Court in 1970, and Steffi Graf in 1988. That is the entire list. Graf's 1988 was the greatest of all, because she added Olympic gold that same year, a feat called the Golden Slam that no one else has matched.

The US Open is the loud one of the four. It is played on fast hard courts under stadium lights, in the last gasp of a New York summer, in front of crowds that have been called the rowdiest in the sport. It is the most fan-accessible and, by most measures, the most commercially powerful of all four majors.

The Surface

The US Open plays on a fast hard court. Medium-fast, in the technical classification, with a high, true, predictable bounce. It rewards big serving and aggressive baseline hitting. Since 2005 the courts have been painted a signature blue inside the lines, trademarked "US Open Blue," to make the yellow ball easier to see against the background.

Here is what makes the Open unique among the four majors: it is the only one played on three different surfaces across its history. Grass from 1881 to 1974. Green Har-Tru clay for three strange years, 1975 to 1977, at Forest Hills, an experiment partly aimed at making the event more television-friendly. Then hard court from 1978 onward, when the tournament moved to Flushing Meadows. For decades the surface brand was DecoTurf. In 2020 it switched to Laykold.

Compare that to Wimbledon, which has never left grass at all. Grass is the fastest surface in tennis, low and skidding, and it favors the serve-and-volley player who wants points over in three shots. The Open's hard court sits in the middle: faster than clay, more consistent than grass, punishing to the body over two weeks because the joints absorb every single step. American tennis went hard court because hard court is cheap, durable, and low-maintenance, the surface of every public park from Long Beach to Queens. It is, in a sense, the democratic surface.

The Culture & the Style

Now the good part. The vibe.

Wimbledon makes its players dress in white. Head to toe, almost entirely white, a rule written in the 1880s when visible sweat was considered vulgar, and enforced to this day by officials who once made Roger Federer change his shoes courtside. Wimbledon is hushed reverence, strawberries and cream, a bow toward the Royal Box.

The US Open is the opposite of all that. There is no dress code for the crowd, and they know it. Over the past two decades the tournament has become a fixture of the New York social calendar, mentioned in the same breath as Fashion Week. Celebrities pack the boxes. There is a blue carpet. On any given night you might see actors, models, musicians, and athletes seated a few feet from the baseline, and a good chunk of the audience is there partly to watch them, not the tennis.

Then there is the food, because this is New York and the food is always the point. The grounds function as a genuine food festival. Red Hook Lobster Pound sells lobster rolls at close to 40 dollars a pop. Celebrity chefs run stands across the complex. But the true icon is the Honey Deuce, the tournament's signature cocktail, created in 2006 by bartender Nick Mautone for sponsor Grey Goose. It is simple: vodka, lemonade, a drizzle of Chambord raspberry liqueur, and three honeydew melon balls skewered on a pick so they float like tiny tennis balls. The name is a tennis pun on "deuce." It comes in a collectible cup. It costs 23 dollars. And people cannot get enough. In 2024 the tournament sold 556,782 of them, generating 12.8 million dollars, roughly a 23 percent jump over the year before. Fans line up for it. They photograph the melon balls. They keep the cups, which resell on eBay for actual money.

And then there are the night sessions. This is the Open's signature and, in a real sense, its soul. Each day splits into a day session and a separately ticketed night session, and the night session at Ashe is a different animal entirely. Nearly 24,000 people who came specifically to make noise, the Manhattan skyline glowing across the water, the roof trapping every decibel that gets thrown at it. It has been compared to a heavyweight fight more than a tennis match. When a young American underdog, or a legend on the way out, walks onto that court under those lights, the sound that greets them is physical.

One more thing worth knowing, especially if a trip is in the works: Fan Week. In the days before the main draw begins, the grounds open free to the public. You can watch qualifying matches, where the world's next stars fight for the last few spots in the draw, and you can stand at the practice courts close enough to hear the ball actually come off the strings. In 2021, an unseeded qualifier named Emma Raducanu, ranked world No. 150, walked through those early rounds and won the entire tournament without dropping a set, the first and only qualifier, male or female, to win a Grand Slam singles title in the Open Era. Fan Week is, without exaggeration, the best free ticket in world sport.

The Last Word

Play begins in the heat of a New York August and ends somewhere in the cooler edge of September, and the whole two weeks feels like the city compressed into a stadium: loud, fast, expensive, generous, a little chaotic, completely unwilling to apologize for any of it. Newport gave the sport its first champion in 1881. Flushing Meadows gave it its loudest home. Somewhere in between, the tournament decided that tennis did not have to be quiet to be taken seriously.

It just had to be honest about what kind of party it was throwing.

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