Photo: Mike Lawrence/USTA via Getty Images
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.
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