Tuesday night’s quarter-final match between Ben Shelton and Carlos Alcaraz had everything a US Open spectacle could ask for: huge stakes, knife-edge drama, top-shelf competition and an American hero who comes through in the end. The only fault to find was really the matter of time. The first ball wasn’t struck until 11.05 in the evening, and Shelton’s clinching ace didn’t come until 3.33 in the morning – marking, after a total of 4hr 28min on court, the latest-ending US Open match by a whopping 43 minutes.
Somewhat predictably, the discourse among media and fans following the late-night match has swiftly moved on from the USTA’s misadventures in scheduling to a referendum on the five-set match and whether it should be put out to pasture. For the record: that would be a colossal unforced error.
Five-setters aren’t just intrinsic to the grand slam canon. They are a badge of honor in the men’s game, confirmation that a player can and did indeed hack it in the big leagues. John Isner may not have won a major during his time on tour. But his capacity for grinding out marathon matches – not least the three-day, 11-hour epic he played against Nicholas Mahut at Wimbledon in 2010 – is why he remains highly respected by peers and fans alike.
Best-of-five is the exclusive framing device for the best matches in history and an imprimatur of the sport’s most revered champions. (See, The Greatest Match Ever Played or last year’s French Open final.) Even the losers are celebrated merely for having survived and played on to become part of the tale. “People still remember this match but he didn’t know if I was the winner,” Mahut said in 2015. “So, maybe, in 10 years people will think I won the match.”
Five-setters are the mother of sporting crucibles – a test of will, nerve and focus. That holds true as much for the men who play as their spectators. Much of what makes the experience of following tennis so affirming is the global group-watch sessions that take over social media anytime an Australian Open match goes the distance.
Viewers who can’t babysit the full marathon into the night – lest they risk sleeping through their morning alarms or, worse, cheering the exciting points too boisterously and rousing their house and neighbors – get to wake up and find the fifth set still raging as they’re getting ready for work the next day. A skeptic might point to the Australian Open, perhaps more so than any other slam, as a prime reason to abolish the five-setter. But true tennis nerds see the Happy Slam for what it is: a rite of passage. In fact, if they don’t seem surprised by the US Open’s Melbourne hours, it’s because Craig Tiley, formerly the CEO of Tennis Australia, is now running the USTA.
Still, for all the honor and valor there is to be extracted from five-setters, especially as they pile up, there’s no denying the matches exact a physical toll from players that has become harder to ignore as the pressure to maintain a hectic touring calendar puts them at increasing risk of missing tournaments from wear and tear. That tension between tradition and evolution has animated an existential debate around five-setters that has been simmering for years.
Last month, incoming Tennis Australia CEO Andrew Abdo tossed out ideas for a shorter-form game. “Maybe we’re not playing best of five all the way through,” Abdo said at a Melbourne sports conference. “Maybe the point scoring system changes. Maybe there are different permutations to how we engage and entertain audiences without losing the fabric, and what really makes the sport special.”
Abdo’s remarks – which come after Tiley, his predecessor, suggested women play five-set matches – might not have resonated if Novak Djokovic, the slam king who built his reputation on five-set matches, hadn’t first proposed changes to the scoring system that would keep the five sets but dilute the number of games to “keep the matches within a two-hour window”. And even though the 24-time major champion was being somewhat facetious – he was specifically asked for an opinion that would inflame fans – it didn’t stop John McEnroe, tennis’ self-righteous conscience, from breaking out his gas canister. “People’s attention spans are shorter than ever,” said McEnroe – famously, the five-set loser of an epic 1980 Wimbledon final canonized as the War of 18-16.
But those voices, however prominent, have yet to reach a volume that drowns out five-set traditionalists. “Do I love five setters? Absolutely not,” Frances Tiafoe said after hanging on to beat fellow American Alex Michelsen in a five-set quarterfinal he surely would’ve lost if the scoring revolutionists had their way. “When I’m up two sets to love I would love to shake hands and go home. But it’s tennis, man. I grew up watching incredible tennis, incredible five setters. Novak vs Rafa, Federer vs Rafa. Incredible five setters which go on for hours and hours. That is the history of the game.”
The quarter-final between Shelton and Alcaraz wrote another chapter, one that gave Arthur Ashe Stadium the feel of a Queens dive after last call. Shelton, still woozy from outlasting the US Open’s defending champion, beseeched his sister’s employer, Morgan Stanley, to give her the day off from work. (She was due back by 6am.) As he and Alcaraz contested the final points, with Tuesday having turned into Wednesday, custodial workers could be seen and heard tidying up the stadium and grounds for the horde to come after sunrise. On social media, US Open patrons who hung on til the bitter end shared the outrageous surge pricing they encountered for rideshares back home (“I could get a hotel, bro”) and posted videos of exhausted ballkids hustling back into the city before school starts “in three hours”.
No one’s suggesting the US Open needs a curfew. (That’s Wimbledon’s turf, after all.) There’s a simple fix to the late-night match problem that doesn’t involve fundamentally restructuring the way the men’s game is played. The USTA could just move one of its primetime features to the world’s 13th-largest tennis show court – Louis Armstrong Stadium, right next door to Ashe – and move the start times up to ensure play didn’t extend much past midnight. The start of Shelton-Alcaraz was delayed by Jessica Pegula and Emma Navarro taking three sets to wrap up their quarter-final, which was itself delayed by the afternoon matches ahead of them going long. But that might mean missing out on the filthy lucre that Ashe generates from its doubled capacity and extravagant suites – and god forbid the USTA make slightly less money.
The funny thing about all this panting to change tennis for its own good is that tennis has changed so much already. Electronic line calls, 10-point tiebreaks, on-court coaching, the serve clock – the hidebound sport has proven it can be tweaked for pace and entertainment without a cost to its core integrity.
But what truly makes the talk about abolishing the five-setter so hard to hear, particularly from veterans of those wars, is the fundamental misunderstanding. In other sports, time has a negative correlation. Who among us hasn’t been held hostage by the football game that lumbers on because the coach can’t be bothered to take their timeouts home? Who among us hasn’t been prisoner to a basketball game that would have ended in 30 seconds if it hadn’t been for all the fouling?
In tennis, a match that stretches on for hours and hours isn’t a drag. It’s an obvious marker of quality, an implied reason to tune in. And if engagement is the name of the game, the drama of a fifth act that holds the potential to maintain an audience, capture a new one and – in the case of the Shelton-Alcaraz quarter – extend the primetime viewing window on the West Coast – should be an incentive for those committed to growing the game to embrace the five-setter even tighter, not abolish it.
One can just imagine the lines that would be drawn if the five-set format ever changed: the players who come after having to put up with cranky veterans of those five-set marathons of yesteryear prattling on about how the real legends were forged in my day. That’s no kind of ending for a sport that has a great ending already.
