Australian Open Tennis Information and History
The Australian Open is one of the four Grand Slam tennis tournaments held each year. It is held each January at Melbourne Park. The tournament was held for the first time in 1905 and was contested on grass through 1987. Since 1988, the tournament has been held on hard courts. Mats Wilander is the only male player to have won the tournament on both grass and hard courts.
Like all other Grand Slam tournaments, there are men's and women's singles competitions; men's, women's, and mixed doubles; and junior's and master's competitions.
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 was completed for their 2009.
Held in the middle of the Australian summer, the Australian Open is famous for its notoriously hot days. An extreme-heat policy is put into play when temperatures (and humidity) reach dangerous levels.
The Australian Open typically has very high attendance, with the 2008 Australian Open achieving the highest ever day/night attendance record for any Grand Slam tournament of 62,885.
In 2008, the Rebound Ace surface, which had been in place for the past 20 years at Melbourne Park, was replaced by a cushioned acrylic surface known as Plexicushion. The main benefits of the new surface are better consistency and less retention of heat (because of a thinner top layer). This change was accompanied by changes in the surfaces of all lead-up tournaments to the Australian Open. The change was controversial, primarily because of the new surface's similarity to DecoTurf, the surface already being used by the US Open.
History of the Australian Open
The Australian Open is 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 in 1905.
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 Australian Open has 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. In 1972, it was decided 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 tournament 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 1920s it took about 45 days to make the trip by ship from Europe to Australia.) The first tennis players who came by aircraft were the US Davis Cup players in November 1946. Even inside the country many players could not travel easily. When the Championships were held in Perth, no persons from Victoria or New South Wales crossed by train, a distance of approximately 3,000 kilometres between the east and west coasts. In Christchurch in 1906, of a small field of 10 players, only two Australians attended, and the tournament was won by a New Zealander.
The first tournaments of the Australasian Championships suffered from the competition of the other Australasian tournaments, and before 1905 all of the Australian states and New Zealand 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). In those years, the best two players by far, from "Down Under" the Australian Norman Brookes (whose name is now written on the men's singles cup) and the New Zealander Anthony Wilding, almost did not 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 that helped to determine 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 of the players of the era; Brookes went to Europe only 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, Jaroslav Drobny, Manuel Orantes, Ilie Năstase at 35 years old, and Bjorn Borg just came once. Due to this former lack of top player participation, the Australian Open has often been seen as the least prestigious of the four tennis grand slam open tournaments.
From 1969, when the first Australian Open was held, on the Milton Courts at Brisbane, the tournament was open to all players—including professionals, who were not allowed to play the traditional circuit. Nevertheless, except for the 1969 and 1971 tournaments, many of the best players missed this championship until 1982, because of the remoteness, the inconvenient dates (around 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 from entering the tournament because the guarantees were insufficient, and the tournament was ultimately won by Arthur Ashe.
In 1983, Ivan Lendl, John McEnroe and Mats Wilander all entered the tournament, with Wilander having to play the Davis Cup at Kooyong a few days after the tournament. He won both the Australian Open and the Davis Cup. Following the 1983 Australian Open, 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.
Before the Melbourne Park stadium era, tournament dates fluctuated as well, in particular in the early years because of the climate of each site or exceptional events. For example, 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 was held in December 1976 – January 1977, the organisers chose to move the next tournament forward a few days, then a second 1977 tournament was played (ended on 31 December) but this failed to attract the best players. From 1982 to 1985 the tournament was played in mid-December, then it was decided to move the next tournament to mid-January (January 1987), thus there was no tournament in 1986. Since 1987 the Australian Open date has not changed.
Australian Open Trophies and Prize Money
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. The prize money awarded in the Men's and Women's singles tournaments was equal and distributed as follows: 1st Round: A$19,040
2nd Round: A$300,250
3rd Round: A$500,000
4th Round: A$850,625
Quarter finalist: A$1,710,250
Semi finalist: A$3,420,500
Runners-up: A$6,850,000
Winners: A$10,370,000 (US$10,197,739.20)
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