Australian Open

Australian Open
Grand Slam
Location	Melbourne  Australia
Venue	Melbourne Park
Surface	Hard / Outdoors
Men's Draw	128S / 128Q / 64D
Women's Draw	128S / 96Q / 64D
Prize Money	AU$20,000,000
Official website
Grand Slam tournaments
Australian Open French Open (Roland Garros) Wimbledon US Open

The Australian Open is the first of the four Grand Slam tennis tournaments to be held each year. It is held each January at Melbourne Park. The tournament was held for the first time in 1905. Like the other three Grand Slam events, it was contested by top-ranked amateur players and known as the Australian Championships until the advent of open era in 1968. Originally based at the grass courts at Kooyong in the city of Melbourne's inner south-east, the tournament was in danger of fading into irrelevance before being revived in 1988 with a shift to Melbourne Park (then called Flinders Park), a new (Rebound Ace) hardcourt venue next to the Melbourne Cricket Ground on the southern fringe of the central business district. Mats Wilander was the only player to win the tournament both on grass and on Rebound Ace.

Like all the Grand Slam tournaments, there are men's and women's singles competitions, men's, women's, and mixed doubles, as well as junior and master's competitions.

The Australian Open was held in December from 1977 through to 1985, returning to its original January date in 1987. In 1986, because of the return to January, no tournament was held.

Margaret Court Arena at the Australian Open. Rod Laver Arena, the centre court, in the background.

The two main courts used in the tournament are Rod Laver Arena and Vodafone Arena and feature retractable roofs, which can be shut in case of rain or extreme heat. It is the only Grand Slam tournament that features indoor play. However, work has already commenced on a retractable roof for Wimbledon's Centre Court, which is expected to be completed by 2009.

Held in the middle of the Australian summer, the Australian Open is famous for its notoriously hot days. An extreme-heat policy is often put into play when temperatures (and humidity) reach dangerous levels.

In 2008, the Rebound Ace surface which has been in place for the past 20 years at Melbourne Park, will be replaced by a cushioned acrylic surface known as Plexicushion.^[1] The main benefits of the new surface: better consistency and less retention of heat (due to a thinner top layer). This change will be accompanied by changes in the surfaces of all lead-up tournaments to the Australian Open. Work began on the removal of the old surface on 4 June 2007. The decision has been met with much controversy, primarily due to the new surface's similarity to DecoTurf, the surface already being utilised by the US Open.

Awards

Names of the winners are inscribed on the perpetual trophy Cups.

• The Women's Singles winner is presented with the Daphne Akhurst Memorial Cup.
• The Men's Singles winner is presented with the Norman Brookes Challenge Cup.

History

The Australian Open is now managed by Tennis Australia, formerly the Lawn Tennis Association of Australia (LTAA), and was first played at the Warehouseman's Cricket Ground in St Kilda Road, Melbourne. 2007 was the 95th staging of the event (over a 101 year period due to interruption of the War years), with the tournament celebrating its Centenary in 2005.

The tournament was first played in 1905 as The Australasian Championships, became the Australian Championships in 1927 and the Australian Open in 1969. Since 1905, the Championships have been staged in five different cities as follows: Melbourne (50 times), Sydney (17 times), Adelaide (14 times), Brisbane (8 times), Perth (3 times), as well as in New Zealand, (2 times) in 1906 Christchurch and 1912 Hastings.

New Zealand and the states of Australia are the direct descendants of the British colonies in Australasia (Australia, New Zealand, and the neighbouring islands in the Pacific Ocean), this is why before the first Australasian Championships were held it was decided to stage the tournament alternatively in each state capital in Australia and in New Zealand too.

Then the LTAA decided that from the 1972 tournament (held from 26 December 1971 to 2 January 1972) to stage the tournament in the same city each year, the Kooyong Lawn Tennis Club was selected due to Melbourne attracting the biggest patronage.

Melbourne Park (formerly Flinders Park) was constructed in time for the 1988 Open to meet the demands of the evolving tournament that had outgrown Kooyong's capacity. The move to Melbourne Park was an immediate success, with a 90 per cent increase in attendance in 1988 (266,436) on the previous year at Kooyong (140,000).

Because of its geographic remoteness very few foreign players entered this tournament at the beginning (in the twenties it took about 45 days to make the trip by ship from the Europe to Australia and the first tennis players who came by plane was the US Davis Cup team in November 1946 competing for the Challenge Round in the following month. Even inside the country many players couldn't easily travel; when the Championships were held in Perth, no Victorians or New South Welshers crossed by train, a distance of approximately 3,000 kilometres between the east and west coasts. And even a Melburnian often didn't play the Championships when held in Sydney. In 1906, in Christchurch New Zealand, of a small field of ten players, only two Australians attended.

The first tournaments of the Australasian Championships suffered from the competition of the other Australasian tournaments, and before 1905 all the Australian states had their own championships, the first being organised in 1880 in Melbourne and called the Championship of the Colony of Victoria (later become the Championship of Victoria). This tournament stayed the most important in Australia, including the Australasian Championships, until at least World War I, in those years the best two players by far, from "Down Under" the Australian Norman Brookes (whose name is now written on the gentlemen's singles cup) and the New Zealander Anthony Wilding, almost didn't play this tournament. Brookes came once and won in 1911 and Wilding entered and won the competition twice (1906 and 1909). Their meetings in the Victorian Championships (or at Wimbledon) were the summits which helped to determine who was the best Australasian players. Even when the Australasian Championships were held in Hastings, New Zealand, in 1912, Wilding, though three times Wimbledon champion, didn't come back to his home country. It was a recurrent problem for all the players of the era, Brookes only went to Europe three times, where he reached the Wimbledon Challenge Round once and then won Wimbledon twice. Thus many players had never played the Austral(as)ian amateur or open championships: the Renshaws, the Dohertys, William Larned, Maurice McLoughlin, Beals Wright, Bill Johnston, Bill Tilden, René Lacoste, Henri Cochet, Bobby Riggs, Jack Kramer, Ted Schroeder, Pancho Gonzales, Budge Patty, Manuel Santana, Jan Kodes and others while Brookes, Ellsworth Vines, Donald Budge, Jaroslav Drobny, Manuel Orantes, Ilie Năstase at 35 years old, and Bjorn Borg just came once.

From 1969, when the first Australian Open was held, on the Milton Courts at Brisbane, the tournament was open to all players including the professionals, the latter being banished from the traditional circuit. Nevertheless if we except the 1969 and 1971 tournaments many of the best players missed this championship until 1982 (that year the best player in the field was Johan Kriek, only ranked No. 12 at the ATP computer ranking), because of the remoteness, the wrong dates (Christmas and New Year's Day), and the low prize money — in 1970 the National Tennis League (NTL) which employed Rod Laver, Ken Rosewall, Andres Gimeno, Pancho Gonzales, Roy Emerson and Fred Stolle prevented its players to enter the tournament because the guarantees were insufficient.

In 1983, Ivan Lendl and John McEnroe came Down Under and Mats Wilander, having to play the Davis Cup final in the same site as the Australian Open's (Kooyong stadium in Melbourne) a few days after the tournament, decided at the last moment to enter the Australian championship in order to be ready and fit for the Cup (it succeeded beyond all hope because the Swede won the tournament and his two Davis Cup singles). From that year the Australian Open began to deserve its 'Grand Slam' label. Nevertheless the International Tennis Federation prompted the Lawn Tennis Association of Australia to change the site of the tournament, because the Kooyong stadium was then inappropriate to serve such a big event, and in 1988 the tournament was first held at Flinders Park (later renamed Melbourne Park) on Rebound Ace a low carpet surface. From 1995, the year when Andre Agassi entered the competition for the first time, no great players have missed this tournament unless he/she was injured or suspended. The Australian Open has therefore become one of the four biggest tennis competitions.

Before the Melbourne Park stadium era not only the site of the tournament changed but also the date in particuliar at the first years because of the climate of each site or exceptional events, for instance just after World War I, the 1919 tournament was held in January 1920 (the 1920 tournament was played in march); the 1923 tournament in Brisbane took place in August when the weather is not too hot and wet. After a first 1977 tournament held in December 1976 – January 1977, the organisers chose to put forward a few days the next tournament, then a second 1977 tournament was played (ended on 31 December) but this mini-measure didn't attract the best players. From 1982 to 1985 the tournament was played in mid-December, that last year it was decided to put back one month (mid-January) the next tournament which was therefore only held in January 1987, thus there was no tournament in 1986. Since 1987 the Australian Open date has not changed.

Recent attendances

• 2007 - 554,858 [1]
• 2006 - 550,550 [2]
• 2005 - 543,873 [3]
• 2004 - 521,691 [4]

Records

Record	Open Era	Player(s)	Count	Years
Gentlemen's Singles since 1905
Winner of most Gentlemen's Singles titles	Before 1968:	Roy Emerson	6	1961, 1963-67
		Jack Crawford Ken Rosewall	4	1931-33, 1935 1953, 1955, 1971-72
	After 1968:	Andre Agassi	4	1995, 2000-01, 2003
		Mats Wilander Roger Federer	3	1983-84, 1988 2004, 2006-07
Winner of most consecutive Gentlemen's Singles titles	Before 1968:	Roy Emerson	5	1963-67
	After 1968:	Ken Rosewall Guillermo Vilas Johan Kriek Mats Wilander Stefan Edberg Ivan Lendl Jim Courier Andre Agassi Roger Federer	2	1971-72 1978-79 1981-82 1983-84 1985-87[2] 1989-90 1992-93 2000-01 2006-07
Winner of most Gentlemen's Doubles titles	Before 1968:	Adrian Quist & John Bromwich	8	1938-40, 1946-50
		John Newcombe & Tony Roche	5	1965, 1967, 1971, 1976 - 1973 John Newcombe with Mal Anderson, 1976 (December) Tony Roche with Arthur Ashe
	After 1968:	Mark Edmondson	4	1980-81 (with Kim Warwick), 1983 (with Paul McNamee) 1984 (with Sherwood Stewart)
		John Newcombe & Tony Roche Kim Warwick Todd Woodbridge Jonas Björkman	3	see above 1978 (with Wojtek Fibak), 1980-81 1992, 1996 (with Mark Woodforde, 2001 (with Jonas Björkman) 1998 (with Jacco Eltingh), 1999 (with Patrick Rafter), 2001
Winner of most consecutive Gentlemen's Doubles titles	Before 1968:	Adrian Quist & John Bromwich	8	1938-40, 1946-50[3]
	After 1968:	Mark Edmondson & Kim Warwick Mark Edmondson Rick Leach & Jim Pugh Fabrice Santoro & Michael Llodra Bob Bryan & Mike Bryan	2	1980-81 1983 (with Paul McNamee), 1984 (with Sherwood Stewart), 1988-89 2003-04 2006-07
Winner of most Mixed Doubles titles - Gentlemen	Before 1968:	Colin Long	4	1963, 1965-66, 1968 (with Nancye Wynne Bolton)
	After 1968:	Owen Davidson	4	1940, 1946-1948 (with Billie Jean King)
Winner of most Championships (total: singles, doubles, mixed) - Gentlemen	Before 1968:	Jack Crawford	11	1929-1935 (4 singles, 4 doubles, 3 mixed)
	After 1968:	Jim Pugh	5	1988-90 (2 doubles, 3 mixed)
Ladies's Singles since 1922
Winner of most Ladies' Singles titles	Before 1968:	Margaret Smith Court	11	1960-66, 1969-71, 1973
		Nancye Wynne Bolton	6	1937, 1940, 1946-48, 1951
	After 1968:	Margaret Smith Court Evonne Goolagong-Cawley Steffi Graf // Monica Seles	4	1969-71, 1973 1974-76, 1977 1988-90, 1994 1991-93, 1996
Winner of most consecutive Ladies' Singles titles	Before 1968:	Margaret Smith Court	7	1960-66
	After 1968:	Margaret Smith Court Evonne Goolagong-Cawley Steffi Graf // Monica Seles Martina Hingis	3	1969-71 1974-76 1988-90 1991-93 1997-99
Winner of most Ladies' Doubles titles	Before 1968:	Thelma Coyne Long	13	1936-40, 1947-49, 1951-52 (with Nancye Wynne Bolton), 1954, 1956, 1958 (with Mary Bevis Hawton)
		Nancye Wynne Bolton	10	1936-40, 1947-49, 1951-52
	After 1968:	/ Martina Navrátilová	8	1980 (with Betsy Nagelsen), 1982-85, 1987-89 (with Pam Shriver)
Winner of most consecutive Ladies' Doubles titles	Before 1968:	Thelma Coyne Long Nancye Wynne Bolton	5	1936-40
	After 1968:	/ Martina Navrátilová & Pam Shriver	7	1982-85, 1987-89
Winner of most Mixed Doubles titles - ladies	Before 1968:	Daphne Akhurst Cozens Nancye Wynne Bolton Thelma Coyne Long Margaret Smith Court	4	1924-25 (with John Willard), 1928 (with Jean Borotra), 1929 (with Gar Moon) 1940, 1946-48 (with Colin Long) 1951-51, 1955 (with George Worthington), 1954 (with Rex Hartwig) 1963-64 (with Ken Fletcher), 1965 (with John Newcombe), 1969 (with Marty Riessen)
	After 1968:	Jana Novotná Larisa Neiland	2	1988-89 (with Jim Pugh) 1994 (with Andrei Olhovskiy), 1996 (with Mark Woodforde)
Winner of most Championships (total: singles, doubles, mixed) - ladies	Before 1968:	Margaret Smith Court	22	1960-1973 (11 singles, 7 doubles, 4 mixed)
	After 1968:	/ Martina Navrátilová	12	1981-2003 (3 singles, 8 doubles, 1 mixed)

Champions

Main article: (List of Australian Open champions)

• Men's Singles
• Women's Singles
• Men's Doubles
• Women's Doubles
• Mixed Doubles

See also

• Tennis
• Extreme heat policy

External links

• Official Site
• Tennis Australia website
• Satellite image of the venue (Google Maps)

References

Coordinates: 37°49′18″S, 144°58′42″E

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