The Australian Open Is Happy And Hot

MELBOURNE – Envy sabotaged my plans for watching the first day of the 2025 Australian Open. I was going to take in Day One on a projector at Federation Square, a public area surrounded by angular buildings that look like they’ve been shattered and pieced back together for effect. There would be other people to help simulate a crowd, the city serves as a pretty backdrop, and I could save my money for later in the tournament. Unfortunately, Fed Square is between the city center and the Australian Open, and the endless stream of people walking past me on their way to the tournament obliterated my resistance. A quick tussle with Ticketmaster, a grounds pass purchase, and I was in. 

The walkways were choked with fans. The air smelled like sunscreen and sweat and perfectly matched the temperature of my skin. Then, as I observed last year’s finalist Qinwen Zheng hit devastating backhands on the big screen, raindrops splattered on my skin. Blinks of lightning disrupted the pleasant equilibrium. The band playing quietly in the background fired off an errant thrum of bass that rattled the ground. The rain paced itself at a reasonable patter at first, so I sought refuge in a crowd under some stilted, overhanging structures resembling giant lily pads, which I knew were for shade but hoped would block light rain. Then God’s gentle weeping turned into crocodile tears, soaking those of us underneath as if we were standing out in the open. I made for inside, laughing, and others were laughing too. 

Roger Federer offhandedly dubbed the Australian Open the “Happy Slam” in 2007, and ever since it feels like the tournament has engineered itself to live up to that descriptor. If you come in through the Yarra River entrance, you’re greeted with a children’s playground, a stage on which staff members play games with kids, a dessert stand (try the Tennis Ball Tart), a large seating area with a screen, and a two-story inflatable waterslide all before you see a tennis court. Neutral colors exist in spots to complement bright primary colors, but are otherwise banished. Inside the Melbourne Park arenas themselves, the courts are a piercing blue that presents as visible a contrast with the tennis ball as any surface on tour. 

Of the four cities that host tennis majors—Melbourne, Paris, London, New York—Melbourne could be considered the little sibling, a bit undersized but fiercely committed. Every other conversation I overheard while in the city concerned tennis, from somebody telling a story about an acquaintance’s disturbing obsession with Novak Djokovic to an explanation of the kind of spin on a kick serve. At an authentic focaccia shop called No22 Cafe, whose sandwiches were the culinary highlight of my trip, the friendly, attentive owners mount Italian newspaper clippings from all of Jannik Sinner’s biggest triumphs after each trophy is won. Tennis balls and rackets sat in store displays that otherwise have nothing to do with the game. Adidas ads displayed Stefanos Tsitsipas’s pensive mug on the sides of buildings, even after he lost in the first round. Coco Gauff’s New Balance commercial played before every YouTube video. Before the tournament started, I met with a longtime tennis writer at the Italian restaurant Brunetti. Midway through our conversation, the writer nodded at the entryway —”Matteo”—and in walked tall, tattooed 2022 semifinalist Matteo Berrettini, who is, apparently, a man of the people. 

The tennis itself matches the hoopla. The sport’s nearly invisible December offseason is as long a break as players enjoy all year, so your best bet to see the platonic, rested ideal of any given star at a big tournament is the Australian Open. And at the Happy Slam, I wanted to see the happiest player, so I bought a ticket to watch Carlos Alcaraz on Day Four, knowing full well that he was going to annihilate Yoshihito Nishioka, a skilled technician who lacks the speed and power to match the human Mario Super Star on any level. 

From row O, I could tell that Alcaraz gave the chair umpire a firm handshake based on the different muscles that flexed in his cartoonishly jacked right arm. He lost all of four points in the opening set. Through two, he led 6-0, 6-1 with 25 winners to six unforced errors. Nishioka was marginally more competitive in the third, but Alcaraz still coasted past him in a comfy 6-4. Even in a blowout, he remained luminously entertaining, far more than men’s tennis could ask for or deserve following the retirements of old crowd favorites Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal. I giggled several times and mentally recorded the causes of my mirth: forehand winner down the line, out of nowhere; drop shot winner off a short overhand backhand volley; back-to-back aces; a sliding, straining backhand onto the baseline. More than once I thought the stadium, the second-biggest on the grounds, was too small for him. After Nishioka won his first game, both players grinned, and again in a jovial post-match exchange at the net. Happy, happy, happy, even on the sharp end of 6-0, 6-1, 6-4. 

Unless you are sitting right behind the TV camera, in-person tennis is harder to follow than a screen presentation. My seats were off-center, distorting the rectangular court into a wonky parallelogram. From there, the fatal bite on an inside-out forehand is not instantly recognizable, and what first looks like an overcooked lob lands plumb on the baseline. You learn to watch on a one-second delay, waiting for the shot to sail safely between the lines and past the opponent before murmuring in appreciation. What you do notice is the way Iga Swiatek spreads an entire towel out over her lower half on the changeover, like a napkin at a restaurant, before crinkling the top part to wipe the sweat off her face. Novak Djokovic’s yelling voice is rough and throaty. Players crouch into their return positions like apex predators, swaying slightly back and forth in preparation to pounce. 

In person, the crowd becomes a disjointed conglomerate of people rather than the singular mass you see on TV. The silence during a point is an illusion. Some idiot’s ringer goes off every few seconds. People cough a lot. A man to my left ate dark, dewy cherries out of a plastic bag. A woman in front of me zoomed in on her phone camera to take a picture of some other guy’s phone filming the court; that guy in turn had an apparatus on his arm to augment his phone’s capabilities. The modern tennis fan experience: Attend a match, then voluntarily impose three degrees of separation. 

I applied for media accreditation with Defector back in early December. Australian Open Media Services informed me a few days later that my attempt was not successful. It seems I wasn’t alone: The tennis writer I went to Brunetti with, a 15-year veteran of the trade, told me that the media room had been downsized by 100 desks. The writer had a credential but not a workspace. 

Without a credential, I watched several matches from the Hilltop, a free viewing area atop a grassy mound with a bar and the coziest beanbag chairs I’ve had the pleasure of sitting in. Trimmed blue-and-white awnings lined the seating areas, the blue matching the piercing sea shade of the courts on the screens. Broadcasters regularly interrupted singular match coverage to give summaries of action on the outer courts, finding ways to mispronounce every single player’s name. Still, it’s a charming place, with more average space per person than a stadium without the cost of a communal fan experience. “I feel like the world has more colors here,” Swiatek said in her on-court interview after eviscerating Emma Raducanu in the third round. Looking around at the entrance to the tournament in front of the Hilltop, I thought the same thing. 

In the fourth round, Aryna Sabalenka hit a backhand winner against Mirra Andreeva at an extreme angle, which would have been a perfect passing shot, except Andreeva was standing on the baseline. The shot would have seemed like an accident if you hadn’t seen her hit the same shot before. Her demolition job of Andreeva was arguably the only match Sabalenka played all tournament in which she enjoyed her best form. Her rivals, Swiatek and Gauff, looked far sharper—until each of them lost, one match short of a meeting with Sabalenka.

She made the final at the cost of just one set. Once there, she lost to Madison Keys, the only player on tour who can time a ball as sweetly as her. Keys won 7-5 in the third set, punctuating a remarkably brave performance with a violent inside-out forehand winner. Sabalenka was furious. She was gunning for a third straight Australian Open title, which would have put her in truly elite company with Martina Hingis and Monica Seles, and I suspect that mattered to her more than she let on. After hugging Keys, she demolished her racket, cried into a towel, and left the court before the trophy ceremony. She later returned to give a hilarious, gracious speech that had the couple hundred of us watching from Fed Square in stitches. 

A running theme on the men’s side was teenagers taking out seeded 1990s-born players. The spookiest example came when American teenager Learner Tien disposed of fifth seed and 2024 finalist Daniil Medvedev in a fifth-set tiebreak in round two. Contemporary tennis is composed of increasingly fast, heavy, and deep groundstrokes flying back and forth until one player misses or sets up an easy winner. Tien and Medvedev posed an alternative philosophy, of tennis as Stephen King’s The Long Walk: mesmerizingly slow groundstrokes back and forth, deep and down the middle of the court, without sufficient force to disturb still water. Rallies ended when a body part gave out rather than a forehand or backhand. One point went 45 shots. Medvedev is typically the king of this cerebral, torturous style, but Tien outfoxed and outlasted him, and I think Medvedev will struggle just as much with having his identity stolen by a 19-year-old as he has with losing major finals.

Midway through the tournament, the weather spiked. Cloudless skies obliterated any meaningful slices of shade. All my life I’d been taught to fear heat, but here the lack of cloud cover was most terrifying. On Day Seven, it felt like the sun was shining from the top of a nearby skyscraper. Looking anywhere in the vicinity of the sun was impossible; looking anywhere at all made me squint or close an eye after a few seconds. A cluster of chairs in the middle of Fed Square, arranged in a rectangular pattern for people to watch the tennis, was completely empty during prime viewing hours, save for a solitary, shirtless guy who must have had a personal beef with the sun.

Sitting in relative shelter myself, the sun glared at the right half of my face with such venom that I tried to block it with my hands. My skin felt tingly and overheated within minutes, even underneath a generous shield of 50 SPF I replenished constantly. I bailed from the city center to the blessedly air-conditioned living room of the friend I was staying with. “You got this,” a row of Adidas flags informed me as I left Fed Square. Evidently they were referring to sunburn. 

“Can you imagine playing in this weather?” somebody on the Hilltop asked me as we watched Jannik Sinner and Holger Rune both take medical time-outs in the third set of their excruciating fourth-round grind. As it happened, I played a set with my host earlier that day, which reduced me to lying down on a nearby patch of grass for 10 minutes afterwards. (Insult to injury, I lost the set in a tiebreak.) After stumbling into a cold shower, I packed to move to a family friend’s for the next week and wondered why my forehead was still sweating profusely.

What I cannot imagine is playing in such conditions for much longer than an hour, or why players should have to put up with the accompanying deleterious effects on their health if it can be at all helped. As if to send a final warning, the day after the tournament ended brought with it a hellacious high of 102 degrees. By then I was on a plane and relieved to be headed back into the Bostonian winter.

On Day Two, I went to the Hilltop with an old hostel friend and his buddy. The screen showed semi-disgraced Aussie Nick Kyrgios instead of Alcaraz or Djokovic, who were both playing at the same time. It was as crowded as I had seen the site all tournament. My friend’s friend is not a tennis fan, but was aware of Kyrgios, and admiringly talked about Nick’s rejection of tennis’s white-collar customs. Kyrgios was out of shape and carrying an ab injury, so Jacob Fearnley tuned him up. Instead of watching, my friend’s friend pulled up old Kyrgios highlights on YouTube to revel in a lost version of the man as his broken shadow proceeded to lose in real time. 

“Can’t buy a second serve!” he cackled, watching a clip of Kyrgios at Wimbledon in 2019. In 2025, Fearnley took a 7-6, 3-0 lead. The nationalistic tilt at this tournament can feel like a bit much, like when former professional player John Millman interviewed top-ranked Aussie Alex de Minaur on court and eschewed questions in favor of a stream of compliments, or when the big screen cut away from the dying, dramatic moments of a Tien–Moutet tiebreak to show de Minaur cruising in a fourth set. De Minaur is the country’s best hope for a champion: He’s phenomenally quick and has made drastic improvements to his game to compensate for a glaring lack of easy power. He was also clearly destined to exit the tournament via a blowout loss to Jannik Sinner. 

I bought a grounds pass for the Alcaraz–Djokovic quarterfinal, the most anticipated match of the tournament. When it started, the atmosphere was like what you’d find at a soccer match. People consumed alcohol at alarming rates, draped themselves in Serbian and Spanish flags, and generally filled the grounds so completely that my best bet to find a decent viewing angle on the big screen was to stand directly in front of the trash bins and step aside whenever someone approached with garbage.

After the second set, which Djokovic won to tie the match and more or less guarantee an epic, what seemed like 70 percent of the fans had left. It was late on a weeknight and work loomed the next day, but some people had also clearly come to drink and talk rather than watch tennis. This sport can never tell you exactly how much time any given match will take because of the same demented, delightful scoring system that makes it so dramatic to watch. Tennis as spectacle over substance is not a new idea, best evidenced by the canceled Netflix series Break Point attempting to tell the story of the tour without showing a single rally from a recognizable angle. To see the phenomenon up close was the end of any delusions I once had that tennis could ever capture all the attention it deserves.

When a match is as good as Djokovic–Alcaraz, that realization is a shame. After dropping the first set and retreating off court for a leg issue, Djokovic elevated himself to a level he may never have reached before. He has already rewritten the physical code of tennis, and in this match Djokovic rewrote the mental code, too. He went for big second serves at every opportunity, a high-risk strategy, and always one that catches up with the player reckless enough to try it. Djokovic went a solid hour without missing once. Why is the second serve usually hit slower than the first? his game asked, winning him a staggering 89 percent of second-serve points in set two. It doesn’t have to be. Injuries are typically thought to hinder someone’s physical activity; Djokovic used his to take pressure off himself and swing even more freely, admitting after the match that the ailment probably raised his level and lowered Alcaraz’s. He obliterated conventional tennis wisdom throughout the last three sets and came away with a significant footnote to his legacy.

At the beginning of the fourth set, I felt a tap on my shoulder. “Are you here by yourself?” a fan asked me. I said I was. She was leaving and handed me a ticket to Rod Laver Arena, which had been selling for upwards of $1,500 that morning. I stared at it like Charlie Bucket did his golden ticket, thanked her profusely, and ran up the concrete ramp to the stadium and halfway around it to the correct door. At the next changeover, I was in the seat. 

The court looked less brilliantly blue in person than on TV, but no less stunning as more of a deep teal than the color of the ocean. Djokovic stood to my left, flesh and bone standing on a court built by human hands. This was real. He and Alcaraz rallied fiercely, and Alcaraz attacked first with a backhand drop shot. I saw immediately that it wasn’t good enough and shook my head vigorously. Djokovic somehow sliced it into the net anyway and OHH! The crowd burst into noise. 

I’ll most clearly remember the last great point they played. Alcaraz had fallen down a break point, down 2-4 in a must-win fourth set already, and looked ready to go. Djokovic shook his racket head back and forth affirmatively, the way he does when he is about to kill his prey. Novak did much of his work this match with his serve, but he is still a baseliner to the bone, and decided he wanted to bury Alcaraz from the back of the court. Alcaraz cocked and loaded his mightiest forehand onslaught and Djokovic got everything back. Djokovic ripped his best backhands, fierce two-handed drives down the line and crosscourt. Alcaraz deposited the ball back onto the baseline—directly onto the baseline, close enough that the whole stadium expected an out call and none came. They kept trading groundstrokes to the point of agony. “Stop!” cried a nearby fan, overcome with the secondhand strain.

Louisa Thomas began a 2014 Grantland story by writing that the brutal Djokovic–Rafael Nadal rivalry sometimes made her want to say just that. Here that line played out in front of me, over a decade later, thanks to the same Serb and a different Spaniard. Alcaraz, the impatient genius, kept trading backhands crosscourt like someone had programmed him to. Djokovic, the man who would be content hitting crosscourt backhands until the sun exploded, pulled one up the middle. It gave Alcaraz the opportunity to initiate a forehand exchange and Djokovic yanked his long and wide immediately. 

OHHHHHH! I screamed involuntarily for five full seconds. Both men bent forward, hands on knees, desperate to pump oxygen back into their lungs. Djokovic was hit harder; for the next five minutes, it looked like Alcaraz had finally cracked him like an egg. Then Alcaraz shanked a forehand, Djokovic recovered, and he saw out the match. But those moments after the point were the best of the match. I exchanged mad grins with strangers. “He’s just a bubba!” somebody next to me said of Alcaraz. Novak hollered at his box, god knows why. Alcaraz walked over to his coach, Juan Carlos Ferrero, and simply received a hard, congratulatory high-five. I looked at the Jumbotron and saw that Alcaraz was beaming right through the sweat, then looked down and saw that I was too.