Australian Open: Only Craig Tiley could pull off a pandemic-riddled tournament

From bizarre quarantine requests and seething players to minute-by-minute pivots, Craig Tiley is serving up the impossible.

He hasn’t had much sleep, his phone’s been glued to his ear and he’s fielded demands from some of the world’s top sportspeople kept in hard hotel lockdown, but Craig Tiley says every 4am conference call over the past 11 months will be worth it when the first ball is served at the Australian Open on Monday.

But that “when” remains an “if”, as it has for most of the past year.

As tournament director of our Grand Slam event, and chief executive of Tennis Australia, Tiley has arguably become the most important man in Australian sport during these pandemic-affected times.

He can get excited about tennis now with the start line in sight — despite a late-night scare on Wednesday night that cancelled Thursday’s play and sent up to 600 players and support staff at the Grand Hyatt into isolation and testing — that the game will roll on.

“We are absolutely confident that the Australian Open is going to go ahead,” Tiley said on Thursday.

Australian Open director Craig Tiley has been on 5am phone calls, group zooms with tennis players and putting out constant spot fires to get the tournament off the ground. Picture: David Caird

He has had to chop and change schedules on a whim from the moment he started to plan for what he hoped was still going to be a January tournament. The calls started back in March last year and his phone has rarely left his palm.

“Having flexibility to constantly move things because it’s health, and then going day by day, that’s been the most difficult because we started planning for this in March/April and it changed and changed and changed,’’ Tiley says.

“When we locked in a position it was really late in the piece. The biggest thing is the adjustment to change and then the fact that every day is a new experience and a new day.

“That’s the reality so when you plan it can be very short term, so you’ve got to have the next plan, and the next plan.

“There’s been a lot of group calls (with players), a couple of times every week. With
the women and the men, just explaining what we’ve got planned and how we’re going to deliver on it. The opportunity to talk to the players and the access has been great.

“Now we’ve got a situation where we need to deliver on (our plans) and we’ve got two weeks to do it.”

It hasn’t been an easy road to get to the court.

Tiley finally had a start date, February 8, locked in just a week before Christmas and had to make arrangements for 1200 players, support staff and other officials to come to Melbourne from around the globe on 15 charter flights.

Then it was working with three different departments of government to sort the issues of hotel quarantine, testing and practise options.

There were the inevitable positive cases and the backlash began both from within the tennis ranks and the wider community of Melbourne.

“Leading in we spent a lot of time with the playing group. The perception and reality are two different things,’’ Tiley says.

“We would have calls at 4am and 5am and at night. We had a general group call for an hour and a half with all the players most days.

“It was really hard, a lot of the players complained and then there was community backlash.”

Tiley admits he had times of despair, doubt and disappointment. Some players were seething, others were content, others were unfazed and some were downright rude.

Serena Williams (pictured with Australia's Daria Gavrilova) was one of the major stars to back the hotel quarantine. Picture: AFP

Bizarre requests came through for a kitten and a dog to be in rooms, but ever the professional, Tiley isn’t spilling on more.

The spotlight quickly turned onto tennis when American Tennys Sandgren boarded his flight to Melbourne and tweeted that he had tested positive for COVID-19.

The headlines continued with Bernard Tomic’s girlfriend Vanessa Sierra causing a stir when she “joked” about having to wash her own hair; Spaniard Roberto Bautista-Agut likened quarantine to jail with Wi-Fi; Kazakhstan’s Yulia Putintseva posted videos of mice in her room, while Spaniard Paula Badosa, who tested positive for COVID-19 during quarantine, apologised for whinging after her diagnosis.

At one point 72 players were forced into hard lockdown and then Novak Djokovic’s list of suggestions to ease hardships was widely mocked.

“What the players didn’t understand was we’d been through four months of a very tough lockdown and they didn’t appreciate that,’’ Tiley says.

“The community very quickly made them realise they’ve got to be really careful because at the end of the day that’s who is going to pay for tickets to go watch them. Then things turned around after a while. But I also think in terms of the playing group, this was new to them. It was made clear there would be two weeks of quarantine but once you’re in the room and can’t get out and train, there’s a different realisation.

“There’s always moments where you think, ‘oh boy is this going to really happen?’

“But I’ve always been optimistic that we’ll get this done and just persistent in that it’s an environment that’s changing and you’ve got to keep pounding through to get the results you want. We want to be free of community transmission and if that’s the case it’ll be good. When are you going to have crowds watching tennis like we’re (hopefully) going to have? The last time we had that in tennis was over a year ago.”

Tiley was a professional tennis player himself and grew up playing the sport in South Africa before gaining more experience coaching and studying in the US.

He understands the needs of the players, and he has been criticised by some for favourable treatment to the star players given the likes of Serena Williams, Djokovic, Dominic Thiem, Rafael Nadal and Naomi Osaka were allowed to quarantine in the less strict environment of Adelaide over Melbourne.

Greek tennis star Stefanos Tsitsipas. Picture: Rob Leeson

But he is always going to make the drawcards a priority. His strong suit, according to Greek tennis world No. 6 Stefanos Tsitsipas, is that he listens to everyone.

“Craig Tiley is a very organised guy, he knows what he is doing,’’ Tsitsipas says.

“He’s one of my favourite tournament directors, he takes care of the players really well. He also wants to know players’ opinions and that’s the best thing to take feedback from the players in order to improve and make the tournament better year by year. The Australian Open is the happy slam, that’s how I call it and I can only think of good things.”

Australian tennis legend Todd Woodbridge has keenly observed the situation and knows what’s required to make the Open happen. He says Tiley’s efforts to pull off the “impossible” deserve recognition.

“It would be one of the great administrative feats in Australian sport, probably the greatest,’’ Woodbridge says.

“To pull together an international field and then to be able to work with the government and all the departments of government, to be able to find a way every time a roadblock was put in your place and to have the resilience to be able to work around that and get to where we’ve got is one of the most incredible efforts.

“I think it was near to impossible and I think everybody would have preferred we as Tennis Australia had said no and given up. But it’s shown as a city and a state what we’re capable of doing and we’re going to get the benefits of it economically.

“It was understandable some of the players were going to feel the way they did and that was because they really had no knowledge of what had been done to get to this point and what we had done as a city to get to where we are.

“I don’t think we can expect everything to be smooth but the aim is to get through one day at a time. If we take that attitude we’ll be fine.”

The Open isn’t hosting a legends event and the juniors has been postponed.

Tiley has manoeuvred the crowd factor by creating three ticketing zones that feature Rod Laver Arena, John Cain Arena and Margaret Court Arena and surrounding outside courts. He isn’t shying away from the issue of finance but he also believes it could have been a very real possibility that Australia may have lost the event despite a long-term hosting deal for the Open being in place.

“It’s going to be very difficult, we’re going to make a loss,’’ he says frankly. “There’s going to be a multimillion-dollar loss. We had $80 million in reserve and we’re taking a loan to cover some of the loss and we’re going to make some revenue and we’ll come out the other end still being able to support the sport in Australia and building on a platform for 2022.

“We’re putting on this event for the players and everyone else, and made the decision to do it and we wanted to keep the momentum going and we wanted to signal to the world that Melbourne is the sporting and entertainment capital of the world. This was the only option we had. We are trying to deliver an event in the middle of the pandemic.

“And it’s an unbelievable field considering we’re in the middle of COVID. No one has experienced what we’ve experienced the last few weeks so it’s a combination of managing emotions and managing expectations.”

And ever the optimist, after pulling off this year, Tiley is already making bold predictions for next year.

“Mark it in your diary, Roger Federer will be back — 2022.”

You wouldn’t want to bet against Tiley and his track record.

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