U.S. Open Increases Payout to Players
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Version 0 of 1. In response to players’ complaints about prize money and the tournament schedule, United States Open officials announced a huge increase in the overall payout to players and will permanently give the men’s players a Sunday final and a day of rest after the semifinals, starting in 2015. The news came after a series of meetings between the United States Tennis Association, which runs the Open, and many of the top players, who for the past year have been pressuring the Grand Slam tournaments over prize money. The tournament had announced in December its biggest one-year increase in prize money, a $4 million jump to $29.5 million for 2013, and in this announcement added another $4.1 million to raise the 2013 total to $33.6 million. By 2017, the U.S.T.A. said, the prize money pool will nearly double, reaching $50 million. “The players mean everything to the Open,” Dave Haggerty, the U.S.T.A.’s chief executive, said in a conference call Wednesday. “They bring value to the sport. They bring value to the Open. And we wanted to recognize their value accordingly.” Haggerty said that the allocation of the prize money had not yet been determined, but that the players had asked for, and were granted, input into that decision. Haggerty said the players were concerned about the lower-ranked players, who can face a financial burden from the costs of a trip to New York and an extended stay in the city. The other long-running area of complaint stems from the traditional Open format in which the men’s semifinals are played on Saturday and the final on Sunday. That was part of the Open’s so-called Super Saturday, in which the men’s semifinals and the women’s final were played on the same day. The Open was the only one of the four Grand Slam tournaments that did not give the men’s finalists a day of rest. That format was scrapped in December, when the U.S.T.A. announced that in 2013 the men’s final would be played on Monday, where it has landed for five years running anyway because of rain delays. At the time, U.S.T.A. officials said they had not made a decision on the permanent schedule change, and some top men’s players complained about a planned Monday final. The women’s semifinals will be moved to Thursday from Friday, giving the players a day off before their final as well. The tournament will make the new format work by playing the men’s first round over two days instead of the current three, the tournament director David Brewer said. The increase in prize money will become the biggest burden for the U.S.T.A., which vowed it would not increase ticket prices to pay for the boost. “We are not going to put this on our fans,” Haggerty said. Haggerty said the tournament would be looking for new sources of revenue because, in addition to the prize money, the organization is planning an expensive renovation of the National Tennis Center and continuing support of grass-roots tennis programs to increase participation in the United States. The U.S.T.A.’s revenue for 2012 was $302 million, with $223 million coming from the Open. What the U.S.T.A. got in return for its bigger payout was a five-year deal with the players, which Haggerty said gave the organization cost certainty over that span. “Now we can go about planning for the significant things we still have to do,” Haggerty said. Last summer, the U.S.T.A. announced a proposed renovation of the National Tennis Center that includes replacing the 10,000-seat Louis Armstrong Stadium and moving the Grandstand court. The plan to expand the tennis center into Flushing Meadows-Corona Park recently encountered well-organized opposition at public hearings. Officials have also promised to continue exploring ways to cover Arthur Ashe Stadium to address the rain delays that have plagued the tournament, but a feasible plan has not yet emerged. |