At the US Open’s Arthur Ashe and Louis Armstrong stadiums, there’s a hum that never goes away. It sort of sounds like the murmur cicadas make. The closer you listen, though, you realize that instead of insects erupting from the ground to breed and scream in the woods, it’s actually thousands of people spending hundreds of dollars to descend upon a tennis tournament to…chat.
It’s a problem for tennis fans because tennis, generally, is a beautifully acoustic experience.
The low din muffles the sound of the ball coming off a player’s strings. It mutes the line calls. It deadens the squeaks and squeals of sneakers sprinting across the hardcourt. The dull, inescapable mumble turns the sport into a frictionless, pressure-free exercise.
So what’s going on with the crowd? Why won’t they stop yapping and let tennis tennis?
“We’re talking about people who are not at all interested in the tennis,” says Caitlin Thompson, the founder of Racquet, a media company that focuses on tennis and culture.
“This is by far the most chaotic, unhinged, oversaturated and non-tennis-inclined audience I’ve ever experienced at the US Open,” adds Thompson, who has been attending the tourney since the mid-2000s.
On the surface, the US Open hum is the obnoxious chorus of people not respecting the rules that come with watching tennis collectively in some of the biggest stadiums in the world. But if you look a bit deeper, the undulating murmur is a result of both the deliberate effort to woo the kind of attendee who’s there just to gab, and a breakdown in the larger social contract when it comes to how we act in public.
Year over year, the real secret to the Open’s success is that organizers have figured out how to cater to fans who don’t watch tennis. Those fans, it turns out, have other priorities when they’re seated courtside.
The gourmet chicken nuggets topped with bumps of green caviar that cost $100, the $40 blue hat that everyone wants, the social media-famous $23 Honey Deuce, served in a cup you can take home; the photo opportunities, giveaways, and interactive games in sponsored activation booths from big brands like Chase, Cadillac, and Emirates; the box seats saved for Anna Wintour, Jeremy Allen White, and Christine Baranski — it’s all part of what makes the US Open an event that transcends sports, and the greatest grand slam in the world.
They’re also part of what makes it one of the worst places to watch actual tennis.
The US Open has long had a reputation for its electric atmosphere — for being a tournament that embodies the brash, chaotic, rugged attitude of New York City. It’s never been a particularly silent experience; its history is punctuated by the crowd reacting (groans, oohs, aahs, etc.) to spectacular plays and players appealing to an audience (causing boos, cheers, heckling, etc.).
That’s all to say, one singular conversation in the nosebleeds isn’t going to ruin an entire match, but that’s not what’s happening. This year, Open-goers are treated to a multitude of concurrent conversations about what everyone had for lunch or which player is which, a nonstop cacophony of whispers about how people’s days were, and an endless onslaught of how everyone got out to Queens (either the 7 train or the Long Island Railroad) and what time they’re going to leave.
The experts I spoke to outlined two reasons why the US Open’s racket (no pun intended) feels so inescapable in this and recent years. The first reason is structural: the roofs. David Kane, a producer at Tennis Channel, explained to me that while the roofs on Ashe (completed/renovated in 2016) and Armstrong (completed in 2018) have saved matches from rainouts, they’ve also created an acoustic problem where the sound is trapped. He also notes that the clamor of people buying concessions and drinks nearby, as well as those milling about to their seats, add to the hum.
“On Ashe and Armstrong, the sound sort of cyclones down to the bottom of the bowl,” Kane tells me. “But it feels like this year it’s back, and it’s louder than ever.”
The other half of this equation is that the US Open has crossed over from a typical sporting event into a social celebration. Tennis journalists and fans I spoke to compared the crowd to the Kentucky Derby or the Met Gala. Coachella, specifically, kept coming up again and again.
The gist: The US Open has become a place to be seen first, and watch tennis second.
“People are having a night out in New York and chatting away, oblivious to the fact there’s a grand slam tennis match happening in front of them that they have ostensibly bought tickets to go see,” says Ben Rothenberg, a tennis journalist and podcast host, tells Vox. Tickets for matches originally start at around $100 for the upper deck, but quickly end up on the resale market for double the price. Courtside seats can go for $5,000 and higher.
Rothenberg cited Travis Kelce and Taylor Swift’s appearance last year, as well as Timothée Chalamet and Kylie Jenner’s soft launch in 2023, as evidence of the US Open achieving new levels of celebrity attendance and using glitz to court a bigger fan base. Tennis isn’t the only sport, and the US Open isn’t the only sporting event to use fame and luxury to whip up a fan base (see also: F1), but it might be the most successful.
Rothenberg notes the spike in influencers in the last few years, musing that it might now be more of a place to spot celebs than an event for die-hard tennis fans.
Adding to the Open’s mystique is the extremely photogenic Honey Deuce, a $23 fancy lemonade made with Grey Goose vodka. Never mind that the drink tastes neither like honey or honeydew melon, last year the event sold roughly $13 million worth of sweetened alcohol in the form of 550,000 Honey Ds. Somehow, it seems like even more were posted on social media. Also available this year are the $21 Ace Paloma, and the equally Instagrammable Watermelon Slice, a $39 Moët & Chandon champagne cocktail.
“You’d think, with the crazy amount of money that people are actually spending on tickets, that I’d be surrounded by die-hard tennis fans,” says Jon Guerrica, the host of the Fantastic Tennis podcast. “Instead, I really felt like I was surrounded by like, a sea of influencers talking over points and just waiting for changeovers to take selfies with their Honey Deuces.”
Coupled with stunt food like the aforementioned caviar-topped chicken nuggets and exclusive restaurants on site (only available to courtside and suite guests), it’s easy to have a US Open experience that doesn’t necessarily prioritize tennis. It can’t be a surprise that some fans don’t necessarily prioritize tennis either.
At the US Open, the tennis players aren’t the main characters
Even if the stands aren’t full of the sport’s most devoted observers, however, this chatty, self-interested behavior seems more than a little, well, rude. Why aren’t people behaving themselves?
It all comes back to the post-2020 problem of not quite knowing how to act like grown-ups in the real world. One TikToker called the Open an “adult Disney World,” which he ostensibly meant as a compliment.
The US Open’s armada of fancy drinks are probably a little bit to blame for that inevitable murmur. Even though Americans are drinking less overall, the US Open might be one of those liminal spaces — the aforementioned adult Disneyworld — where they don’t feel tethered to rules of polite society. There are reports that Broadway is experiencing something similar, and some people’s chattiness is directly proportional to the number of drinks they’re consuming. Journalists and fans I spoke to mentioned fans collecting multiple Honey Deuce souvenir cups and greedily stacking them into towering plastic spires, prompting observers to both do the math on how much money they spent and how much alcohol is in their bloodstream.
But there’s another way to look at all those pictures of the Honey Deuce glass, with the three melon balls and Ashe or Armstrong in the background. That is this behavior and content are just symptoms of a bigger cultural shift where everyone sees themselves as the main character.
For many, the allure of the US Open isn’t the tennis; it’s signaling to everyone else that you’re at the US Open. They’re not watching tennis, so much as everyone’s watching them watch tennis. In this configuration, these spectators become the main attraction, and players like Coco Gauff, Carlos Alcaraz, Jannik Sinner, and Naomi Osaka are their supporting co-stars.
Once an attendee sees themselves as the main character and the tennis as secondary, adhering to the best practices for watching and listening to extraordinarily talented people play the sport is completely lost. Nothing on the tennis court will ever become more important than the conversation, the photos, the Honey Deuces that person is having.
I heard the infamous US Open hum at a Taylor Fritz match this past week.
During a second round match a group of girlfriends dressed as if they were going to be called to the court themselves, piled in a row behind me. They talked through points. They talked as players lined up to serve. They talked during rallies and through a tiebreaker. They never stopped talking, even as the usher asked them to keep it down. They talked and talked and talked as if they’d never even gotten to talk to each other before.
“These are great seats!”
“Those guys we were talking to — they were so hilarious!”
“So hilarious! They should have stayed!”
“I need to go to the bathroom.”
“Oh, wow, that’s a great shot.”
“Should I go to the bathroom now?”
Fritz, the top-ranked American men’s player, couldn’t compete with the will-she-won’t-she restroom saga. Involuntarily, I was plunged into their back and forth rather than the one happening on court.
“I would love it if people were seemingly the slightest bit interested in the actual sport that they’re watching,” Thompson, the Racquet founder, tells me. Her disappointment with the hum doesn’t lie with the chatterboxes, though; she says it’s the organizer who dropped the ball. The goal shouldn’t just be bringing in new audiences, it should be getting those potential fans to care about the incredible display in front of them. Thompson says that growing the fan base keeps the US Open running, improving facilities, and tennis going strong, but at the same time, laments the trade-off.
The United States Tennis Association has done a superb job of making the US Open a tremendously cool, luxurious, and highly expensive event that everyone wants to go to. But if you actually like tennis, it’s probably better to watch it from home.
