Four times a year, one of the biggest and most important tennis tournaments in the world sends out an announcement full of dollar signs and zeroes with the words “record prize money” scattered liberally.
The four Grand Slams, the first of which begins Sunday in Melbourne, are the high points of the tennis calendar. Players at the 2025 Australian Open will compete for $59 million this year — over $6.2 million more than last year. In 2024, the four tournaments paid out over $250 million between them, while their leaders spent the year aligning themselves with the players who make their events unmissable, whose gravity pulls in the broadcast deals and sponsorships, with their own dollar signs and zeroes.
Led by Australian Open chief Craig Tiley, the Grand Slams led the movement for a so-called premium tour which would pare down the overloaded tennis calendar and guarantee top players always being in the same events, let alone time zones. It would also lock swaths of the globe out of the worldwide spectacle that tennis represents.
The great irony is that despite the largesse and the cozy relationship, the players get a smaller cut of the money at the Grand Slams than they do in most of the rest of the rest of that hectic, endless season — and a fraction of what the best athletes in other sports collect from their events.
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