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MELBOURNE, Australia — There are plenty of reasons to travel to Melbourne for the Australian Open each January, especially from a winter climate. It’s sunny, it’s warm and Aussies at Melbourne Park are good with beer at noon and banter all day. Roger Federer had it about right when he nicknamed this event the “happy slam”.
The Australian Open also doesn’t treat tennis like a fragile museum piece, never to be touched or tweaked because ‘that’s not the way it’s done’, or one of those other haughty phrases the guardians of the game use to rationalize their stodginess.
This is the signal Grand Slam: the event that starts each season and offers a window into where tennis is headed with remarkable and deliberate regularity, all on the north bank of the Yarra River. Retractable roofs; 10-point deciding tiebreaks; cameras in the player tunnels and glitching cartoon tennis stars: it all debuted here. What California is to America, Australia has often been for tennis — the lab where new stuff goes for a test drive before being pushed out in so many other places.
I always thought tennis is an individual sport where you kind of have to figure things out on your own in a way. If tennis is going that way, then it should go that way to 100 percent.
The AO, as it calls itself (a little less grand than Wimbledon’s “The Championships”) was the first Grand Slam to have one retractable roof, then two, then three. It was the first to bring cameras into the bowels of the stadium, following players as they walked to the court through that fancy tunnel with all the photos and names of past champions.
Chances are, most spectators don’t pay it any mind. At the Australian Open, fans come for the tennis, but stay for the music festival. All afternoon and into the evening, there are guitarists and singers performing in the main plaza between the courts, where fans take a break from the matches — if they ever make it to them in the first place. Those couches and pillows strewn across the shaded, artificial grass where the music plays make for an awfully pleasant spot to spend an evening sipping lager and whiskey.
On the afternoon of the first Saturday, Rachel and Miki Petrovic, who were on their annual trip to the Australian Open from their home in Serbia, took in an otherwise forgettable doubles match over a beer as their seven-week-old infant, Violetta, rested beside them in a stroller.
There was another change — a bar and cafe next to a court instead of a bank of stands, with music and no limitations on noise during play. Last year, there was one. This year there is another. And just like that, taking a child to a tennis match, or catching up with a friend a few feet away from the action, becomes doable. Watching tennis no longer feels like the punishment your parents hand down when you misbehave: sit still and be quiet for the next three hours!
The players are basically fine with it. At this point, they know that when they play tennis in Melbourne Park, it might feel like a rugby match — especially if they play an Aussie. Chair umpires and stadium officials will attempt to keep the hometown faithful in line, but they don’t try that hard.
After all, that would rob the tournament of its more moments, such as Danielle Collins’ second-round win over home favorite Destanee Aiava. After enduring more than two hours of harassment from the Australian fans, Collins blew kisses to the crowd and thanked them in her on-court interview for helping her land a “big fat pay check”.
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