Australian Open, we love you. But you need to calm down

Build it and they will come.

So goes the mantra associated with Field of Dreams, and so sums up the philosophy of Tennis Australia – which has taken the dream-building advice given to baseball fantasist Kevin Costner and taken it perhaps too much to heart.

Illustration:Credit: Matt Davidson

At Melbourne Park, they have built it and built and built it – and they keep coming and coming and coming – to the point that it seems fair to ask: when is it time to put up the stop sign and call the dream a done deal?

There are queues, and queues, and then more queues. There are the food and drink prices. And there is the scheduling that, this week, left fans choosing between watching what they had paid for – a night match that, we had been promised, was more likely to finish on time – or trying to find a way home at 4am.

And the ticket prices? While the ground pass remains great value (if you can get a seat anywhere near a court, that is), there is some outrageous gouging going on by Tennis Australia and Ticketmaster. The latter’s “dynamic pricing” rules, which mean prices jump around by hundreds and even thousands of dollars according to present demand, amounts to legalised scalping at an event that’s partially funded by taxpayers.

Cop this example: Dynamically priced men’s finals tickets are presently going on Ticketmaster for $5999. Yes, that’s right. An ordinary seat, just the one, for six grand. And this is the legal pricing strategy that is supposed to stop scalping.

In short: Australian Open, we love you. But you need to take a deep breath and calm down.

I’ve been going to the Australian Open since the event was held on the grass at Kooyong. I was in the stands to see the very first ball hit in anger on Rod Laver Arena in 1988. More recently, I’ve had a tradition of going, at a minimum, on the opening two nights (for many years, that guaranteed you would see Roger Federer and I will always bless the Open for giving me that).

A beautiful view, if you can get a seat.Credit: Eddie JIm

But this year hit differently. Crowds were so large on the opening days and nights that the experience was often more jostle than joy. The crowds felt more vast and unrelenting and that vibe – that it might all be getting a bit much – is borne out by the hard numbers.

With the “innovation” of starting the tournament a day earlier on the Sunday, the first four days of the Open sent attendance records tumbling to the point where you wonder if the organisers gave much thought to how many people is a sensible number to cram into a finite space in hot weather.

On day one, 87,705 people attended, up by nearly 10,000 compared with last year. Days two and three saw an increase of almost 15,000 people per day, with 81,471 and 79,504 people turning out.

In total, that’s 250,000 people – or two-and-a-half MCGs, if you please – through the gates in three days. It’s also a whopping 40,000 more people than attended in the first three days last year. And boy, did it feel like it.

There are seemingly endless queues for everything, everywhere. Buying food and drink at the Open is never fun (the prices alone will give you indigestion), but this year it’s been a bun fight that went beyond the bread wrapped around overpriced burgers and hot dogs. And the Open’s single greatest gift to fans – the ground pass that proves access-almost-all-areas for a very decent price – starts to fade in value when there are too many people on site to access much at all.

On Monday, when the still-popular Andy Murray was scheduled on all-comers Kia Arena, a seating snafu meant many fans never saw a ball of it, despite lining up. This was made worse by the fact that the round one schedule is now spread across three days, meaning there were fewer matches to watch each day but many, many more people trying to watch them.

Even the practice sessions were jammed. You might wonder, say, what is that mob over by court 10 looking at? Not a tennis match. Just a huge crowd of people jostling to watch Felix Auger-Aliassime have a hit.

This is not meant to be a whinge. I know I will hear from you, the person who wants to tell me you had a great seat for Andy Murray and got your fries in record time. And good for you! But that is not what many have experienced so far this year, and it seems a good time to take a step back and accept that more is not always better.

Crowds pack the Australian Open on day one.Credit: Eddie Jim

You will get no argument that the modern iteration Australian Open is a wonder of entertainment and organisation and a thrilling experience that leaves all that came before it for dead. The last time the event was at Kooyong in 1987, it was a tired affair on its last legs, and that year the record crowd was 140,000 people for the entire tournament. In other words, the 2024 Open has drawn more fans in the first two days than the entire 1987 event.

That makes it an extraordinary success story, one that is studied worldwide for ideas on how to do these things right. But if we don’t pause for thought, it could also become a case study in how to do things poorly, when the appetite for expansion trumps good sense.

The reports this week of the debates and plans for the future of the Australian Open make it sound like Tennis Australia boss Craig Tiley has no intention of stopping until the event eats everything in its path – from nearby land to your own sense of sanity, as suggested by dreams of food delivered by drones and AI tracking your every move. It is said Tiley will not rest until the Open gets a million of us through the gates and there is talk of starting next year’s event on the Saturday to make it a three-weekend extravaganza.

This year’s tournament looks on track to achieve that attendance goal, and we will all be expected to genuflect in the direction of the mighty number if it is achieved. But there should be more to the Open than the balance-sheet bottom line. Especially when we, the fans and taxpayers, have thrown in tens of millions of dollars to keep the dream alive through good times and bad.

Let’s slow down and ask: why do we love this event so much, and why do we keep on going? A million is not always magic, and the golden goose needs time to catch its breath.

Neil MacMahon is a freelance writer.

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