The Australian Open’s radical idea is right: Ticket-holders should be allowed to watch as much tennis as possible

If you’ve ever attended a professional tennis tournament, you know this feeling.

You’re eager to see a match on a certain court. You power-walk across the grounds to get there. When you arrive, you take your place in line at one of the gates and join the other fans sipping beers and staring up at the TV screen above you. You hope that the changeover comes quickly so you can go inside and take the seat you paid for.

But the changeover doesn’t come quickly. Instead, the two players go back and forth—deuce, ad, deuce, ad, deuce, ad. Ad infinitum. You whisper, “hurry up, hurry up,” to the screen as the server strolls behind the baseline inspecting the fuzz on each ball. Every time the score reaches game point, and you get ready to walk in, the player with the advantage finds a way to muff an easy shot. The score resets to deuce, and you join in the collective groan that goes up around you.

Finally, it seems, someone in a position of power has heard that groan. That would be Craig Tiley, the tournament director at the Australian Open. This year the event is breaking new ground by allowing fans to enter stadiums after each game, rather than having to wait until the changeover.

As far as innovations go, that may not sound like the most radical of all time. It’s not like fans are now allowed to come and go completely as they please; they still have to wait for a game to end, and they have to move quickly to their seats lest they risk being on the receiving end of a death stare from Novak Djokovic or Iga Swiatek.

“We’ve been doing it in the upper bowl of the stadiums now for years, and we just want to bring it down to the lower bowls,” Tiley said this week. “Obviously you’ve got to use discretion, you don’t want to just be running into the stands.”

Most players “will be fine with it,” Tiley believes, though he admits that the process of accustoming them to the change will be “a bit of a journey.”

“There will be some that it will be distracting, but we’ll work with that.”

Anyone who knows tennis players, and their famously finicky ways, might wonder if Tiley is being a tad overly optimistic. More movement in the stadium means more distraction for the player, and not all of them are fine with it so far.

“I understand the motive behind it is to enhance and improve the experience for fans, right?” Djokovic said.

But he also noted, after his first-round match, “Today we lost quite a bit of time when they were letting people in to come to their seats, even though it was not a changeover. My opponent would wait for them to sit down; it dragged a lot.”

Daniil Medvedev said the increased movement bothered him. Victoria Azarenka wondered why the sport would add an element that can slow down play, when it has tried so hard to speed it up. Grigor Dimitrov complained that, like other players, he only found about the change the day before he played his first-round match. For Iga Swiatek, it was one more thing she had to consult with her sports psychologist about. Jordan Thompson went ahead and turned it into the latest front in the culture wars. This is “wokest tournament ever,” the Aussie exclaimed when he was informed about the change.

We can agree that the players should have been consulted about this earlier, and that the tennis powers-that-be have a bad habit of springing these types of things on the pros without warning. We may also agree that the change should have been tried out at a less-important tournament first.

Beyond that, I’ve never bought into the idea that tennis should copy other, more mainstream sports, most of which allow noise and movement during play, in a bid to be more popular. Tennis has its own history, its own traditions, its own trademark, hushed atmosphere that its fans expect and enjoy. Unlike, say, baseball, tennis is part sporting event, part theater. Pin-drop silence can create as much drama as the most rousing crowd roar.

At the same time, tennis players, like anyone else, can adjust to new expectations. On outer courts, they already play with people milling around and creating a buzz of conversation in their ears. I’ve played and watched college tennis on campuses where there are stands directly behind the courts, but because no one makes the spectators stay still, the players never notice them moving around. As Stefanos Tsitsipas said this week, tennis players have to focus on a small, moving sphere, which requires them to eliminate any distractions around it. But I’m not sure if that’s much different from a pitcher in baseball who has to concentrate on a small plate 60 feet away, even as fans come and go and order up hot dogs within his line of sight.

As someone who wants people to like tennis, I’ve always cringed at the sight of long lines at arena gates, as fans wait for extended periods to take their seats. The change I had advocated was to let people in after the first game of each set, rather than making them stand outside for three games and a changeover—which can be half a set. Tiley, who has a history of making bold moves, has gone past that, and I hope his experiment works and the players can accept it.

There’s also a third, equally important, and vastly larger constituency at play here: The fans watching the tournament on TV. I’ve seen a lot of tennis from Australia at home in New York this week; other than a brief complaint from Holger Rune, and the sight of a few spectators sheepishly bolting out of a stadium between games, I wouldn’t have known anything had changed if I hadn’t been informed of it.

That’s how it should be: If you don’t buy a ticket, you watch on TV; if you do, you should be allowed to take your seat, and the leave the television sets behind, for as long as possible.