The Australian Open is tough to follow in the U.S.—but there's a reward

The Break: Aussie Open Outfits

By any conventional measure, the Australian Open happens at the worst possible time for a U.S. audience. That goes double for the 100 million or so of us who live on its East Coast. The earliest matches start at 7:00 P.M.; the headline matches don’t get going until 10 or so; and the night session, which is when the big stars come out to play, begins at 3:00 A.M. “Sleep is for the weak,” hardcore fans tell us during the tournament’s two weeks. But for the non-insomniacs of the world, tennis’s first Grand Slam of the year is mostly invisible. It’s something they read about online, or hear about the following day, rather than actually watch.

Somehow, though, the absurd inconvenience of being a U.S. tennis fan in late January makes this one of my favorite times of the year. Before the advent of DVRs and streaming channels, when recording multiple hours of sports on a VCR was not really feasible, I looked forward to settling in to watch the Aussie Open well into the early morning hours. Even with the work day looming, there was something irresistible about glimpsing that blazing Southern Hemisphere sun in the middle of a dark and snowy winter night in New York.

There were no other sounds—and no social media in those days—to break the spell that a lengthy one-on-one duel can cast. A hard-fought early-morning match between Younes El Aynaoui and Lleyton Hewitt, accompanied only by the hiss and steam of a too-hot Brooklyn radiator, still rates near the top of my tennis-spectating experiences. A decade ago, when I began to make the trip to Melbourne and feel its summer sun firsthand, part of me missed the chance to watch the tournament on TV, hunkered down in the middle of the night, 10,000 miles away.

More recently, in the years when I haven’t traveled Down Under, my Australian Open viewing hasn’t gone on quite as late. The older you get, the tougher it is to recover from an all-night tennis bender. These days, with every match streamed and available for replay the next day, it’s easier to catch up with what you’ve missed.

Now a big part of the Australian Open experience happens in a nerve-wracking flash: You wake up in the morning, grab the phone, and find out everything that went on overnight, all at once, in one long scroll, before you’ve even left your bed. The upsets give you a shock, the predictable results make you nod your head, the disappointing ones punch you in the gut. The hoped-for ones may make you shout out loud and wake up the person next to you. I know one Roger Federer fan who screamed so loud when she found out that Federer had beaten Rafael Nadal in the 2017 Aussie Open final that her husband thought “something terrible” must have happened. “It’s just Roger,” she said. “Don’t worry, he won.”

Still, if you can hold off, it pays to skip the phone and head straight to the TV. Only the Australian Open gives you a chance to turn on the television and find yourself knee deep in an epic that has been going on for hours. You can hear the drama in the crowd’s reactions and the commentator’s voice, but it takes a few seconds to orient yourself to what’s happening. “Which match is this? Why is it still going on? How did we get here? What else happened last night?” There’s nothing quite like starting your day at the peak dramatic moment of a sporting event.

In the wake of Andy Murray’s 4:00 A.M. victory over Thanasi Kokkinakis last week, there was some talk about finding ways to avoid those wee-hour finishes in the future. If the players want to eliminate them, I’m not going to argue; it’s tough for the winner to recover, and even tougher for a local viewer to stay up and watch. But I also found myself agreeing with Stefanos Tsitsipas when he said that those types of matches, as ridiculous as they may be from a practical perspective, also create special, memorable moments in the sport’s history, and for fans to talk about years later.

So far, Murray’s win over Kokkinakis was probably the most well-publicized and memorable moment of this year’s Australian Open. And it was perfect for viewing back in the States. Tennis fans here spent the morning gathered around their TVs, tweeting their amazed reactions to Murray’s heroics. By 4:00 A.M. Melbourne time, the stadium was only half full, but the match had gone viral everywhere else. Every so often, it pays to be 10,000 miles away.