The wind of change is finally blowing through Flushing Meadows.
New York may be the glitziest and swishiest stop on the grand slam annual tour, yet the Billie Jean King Tennis Center has been in need of a facelift for years.
While Wimbledon have subtly yet classily continued to innovate with a new roof and gradual improvements to their already classical looking venue , the USTA have tinkered over the last couple of years without really addressing the main problems.
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As the stadia began to look tired and worn, new venues all over the country and across the globe were springing up and putting everyone else to shame.
In Paris, the old fashioned mystique of Roland Garros remains just about acceptable from a purely nostalgic point of view. With the French Tennis Federation still fighting a seemingly never-ending battle to expand the site in the adjacent botanical gardens, it could stay like that for some time.
Melbourne Park, home of the Australian Open, dubbed the ‘Happy Slam’ by players and fans alike, now has three covered courts. The first major of the year is regularly voted the most popular. The facilities, the way the players are looked after and the whole general experience ticks all the boxes.
New York isn’t a city which can afford to sit still. Not content with a few adjustments, the USTA have gone for it in 2015. Big time.
The scale of development here is quite something. In true American style, it’s pretty much all or nothing. It had to happen though.
With Citi Field, the home of the NY Mets just a walk away from Flushing Meadows recently renovated, the Brooklyn Nets taking residence in the excellent $1 billion
Barclays Center, and Meadowlands, home of the NY Giants and Jets, a supremely solid performing 82,000-capacity arena, the USTA had a desperate need to keep pace with their sporting cousins.
This huge overhaul – a new Grandstand stadium which will be ready for 2016 while the roof over the Arthur Ashe center court will also be fully operational by then as well – is no knee-jerk reaction.
When it came to putting a roof on Ashe, there were a myriad of problems to solve.
With the whole site built on a landfill, it has taken over a decade to conceive a design which would be able to completely shield the largest tennis court on earth from the rains which tend to batter this part of the world at the end of a sultry, sticky summer.
The space-age structure has been built around the current stadium and, despite it not being finished, has already given the court a totally different feel. It already looks phenomenal – like a huge indoor arena.
The playing conditions have notably changed. The winds which used to whip around and cause havoc – Andy Murray’s semi-final victory over Thomas Berdych in 2012 was played in winds so severe the Czech angrily insisted afterwards the match should have been abandoned – have been neutralised. The acoustics have also been altered – the buzz of the crowd resonates, as does the rumbling of passing subway trains.
It is enormous – 1,700 beams composed from 5,000 tons of steel – and it’s not cheap. The roof is costing around $150m while the total expansion runs into a cool $500m.
The results however, both aesthetically and economically, outweigh the outlay.
With the newly-renovated show courts – the Louis Armstrong stadium gets a facelift in time for 2018 – as well as new boulevard built inside the grounds linking everything together, an additional 10,000 fans a day will be able to enjoy the action, while keeping out the rain was a hit for host broadcasters ESPN who signed an 11-year deal knowing they will be guaranteed play no matter the weather.
USTA official Chris Widmaier has worked for the organisation for over a decade and lived through all the trials and tribulations involved in getting to this point.
“There are a lot of driving factors about doing so much at the same time,” he told Sport360°. “Tennis is a global sport and you see some of the advancements some other tournaments are making.
“At the French, everyone knows how keen they are to do things. Look at places like China, Madrid – if you’re competing in that global marketplace. Here, 45 per cent of the fans are from outside the New York area, and 15 per cent are overseas, international fans.
“They are seeing what is happening in the rest of the world so expectation levels begin to rise. Added to that, New York is one of the most hyper competitive sports market in the world. Look at the number of professional franchises and the kind of developments which have occurred in the city.
Djokovic fell down and drew blood in three separate places. What are the courts made of at Flushing Meadows – broken glass and syringes?
— Chris Hewitt (@ChrisHewitt) September 13, 2015
“There was a time when the US Open, the Billie Jean King Tennis Center was the premier sports facility in NYC. We still may be, but the gap is certainly declining.
There is a level of expectation among fans, players and your partners that you need to continue to elevate the presentation of the event.
“We did a long range forecast and tried to figure out exactly what that would require from a financing point of view, from a design point of view and from a political standpoint. With the roof, we had wanted to do it for a long time but no one had cracked the code. Until now.”
Corona Park, the fourth biggest park in New York which has housed the tennis since 1978, had been targeted by Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan as a potential site for his MLS venture NYCFC.
He wanted to have a 25,000 capacity soccer-specific stadium built in the grounds, with aim of tapping into the multi-national community living in Queens.
Yet local consternation killed the project before it gained legs.
The US Open however, is a bel-oved institution – the largest tennis tournament in North America – which rakes in over $750 million every year (the SuperBowl staged in NYC in 2014 brought in an estimated $500m). That helps establish an astonishing total purse for the tournament of $42.3m – the largest in professional tennis.
It’s huge business, creating over 7,000 jobs, while ticket prices have increased 30 per cent in the last eight years with the average price now coming in at $142 per seat.
Total revenue for the two weeks of competition is approaching $100 million – a severe increase from $76m in 2007. The USTA , who pay the city of New York $2.5m to host the event every year, still needed to fight their corner.
“In order to fulfill our vision we needed to ask the city for additional parkland. We are based in a public park, which is open 11 months of the year,” added Widmaier.
“The remaining month it’s turned over to the US Open and it’s a good deal for the city. We pay rent and because so many visitors are from outside the NY metropolitan area we have a big impact – $750m per tournament. So we worked with the community and the authorities and were granted an additional 0.6 acres.
“It was a very difficult process – in terms of design, engineering, financial . You couldn’t put additional weight on the stadium as it’s built on a land fill site. It’s a standalone, steel super structure that is built around the stadium itself. It’s not complete because following this tournament we need to add the retractable roof, all the mechanisation, the system to get air movement.
“There is external and internal pressure on us to keep on improving. You can’t stand still or be complacent in this day and age. Everything is moving faster. If you aren’t adding to the experience, you are falling behind.
“With so much competition here, it’s even more important to do that. Why are we doing so much at once? Because we can. We don’t ask for public money, it is all publically funded and our desire is that we set up a very aggressive timeline. Its nerve-wracking at times but we are hitting it as of now.”
