The US Open risks losing a generation of fans by going head-to-head with the NFL

OOf all the sports, baseball has – somewhat arrogantly – claimed the literary mantle, with so many writers waxing lyrical about the game’s inherent beauty, yielding wistful reflections on the end of a season. Consider the quote from the late MLB commissioner Bart Giamatti about baseball being “designed to break your heart” because it starts each year in the spring with hope and then ends in October, leaving its fans alone in the cold and chill of autumn.

But at least baseball fans have the benefit of their sport extending into mid-autumn, making the transition from summer a much smoother and easier affair. And baseball fans shouldn’t be the only inhabitants of our parallel sports universe to take an emotional sick day and wallow in their post-season blues.

For tennis fans in North America, the symbolic—and literal—end of summer (and of the tennis calendar for all practical purposes) is marked by the conclusion of the Sunday night men’s finals at Arthur Ashe Stadium. The championship match always begins in the late afternoon sunlight (when the roof is not needed) with shadows quickly enveloping the stadium before darkness falls and the lights come on as the match draws to a close. Spectators often start the match in T-shirts and end the evening in jackets, as the early autumn chill makes its unwelcome incursion, signaling the end of summer.

And there’s a palpable rush of energy as day turns to night in Ashe, making the match feel even more special. Of the four majors, the US Open men’s final is the only one to go from day to night – the Australian Open final is played under floodlights, while the French and Wimbledon title fights start and end in daylight.

But unless this year’s Open final reaches a record length, Flushing will no longer have that unique day-into-night vibe. For the first time in history, the men’s final will not begin at the usual 4 p.m. time slot, but at the less dramatic and sleepy midday hour of 2 p.m. (the women’s final is played at 4 p.m. on Saturday).

And, in another change, ABC will air the men’s final for the first time ever (the women’s final will remain on ESPN). In the Open era, only two networks have ever aired the final — CBS and ESPN. CBS owned coverage of the event for 47 years, starting in 1968, the first year of Open tennis. ESPN took over the event in 2015. By having ABC air the final, ESPN keeps it in the family, as both networks have been under the Disney umbrella since 1995.

At first glance, the move from ESPN to ABC, with the finale being available on “non-pay TV” (although, in this streaming world we live in, is there really such a thing as “free” TV?), seems logical; after all, ABC is available in 97% of all households in the US, compared to just under 60% for ESPN, so the number of viewers who can get the finale is significantly higher.

But this is Sunday, and football rules Sunday, always has, always will. In fact, according to Nielsen, football is such a dominant media force that NFL games will account for 93 of the 100 most-watched programs in the United States in 2023. It’s staggering how powerful the increasingly global NFL behemoth is.

While more viewers will have access to the game and thus more casual sports fans will have a chance to watch the final (or so ABC and the USTA hope), there is one problem: the 2 p.m. time slot means the game will overlap with the 1 p.m. and 4:30 p.m. soccer games.

Up until this year, when the men’s finals started at 4 p.m., CBS or ESPN would often wait until all of the 1 p.m. soccer games had ended before starting the men’s finals. This meant that only the 4 p.m. games overlapped with the finals, allowing fans who had been watching their team at 1 p.m. to switch to tennis. This was especially true for CBS, as it was the network that carried both sports, so fans didn’t even have to switch channels. However, ESPN – and now ABC – don’t air NFL games on Sundays, so it’s going to take a little extra effort for that average sports fan to find tennis, unlike the seamless transition that used to exist. If you think about it, the “average sports fan” is like the “undecided voter” in a presidential election – they’re a limited but highly sought-after commodity.

Back in the suddenly old days of the pre-fragmented media landscape, people of a certain age can instantly recall Pat Summerall’s unique, relaxed cadence announcing the lineup for 60 Minutes “immediately following this match.” For younger tennis fans, hearing those words was a harsh reminder that the weekend was over and tomorrow was a school day. Summerall and CBS were synonymous with the Open for years. But alas, that consistency, that regularity in sports and media in general, has long since disappeared.

An entire generation of fans has grown up with in-depth coverage of their favorite sport, watching every game of the season, something unheard of for those who grew up in the 80s and 90s. But it has come at a price: that aforementioned consistency of coverage is gone; it has been replaced, as in so many other facets of society, by an à la carte system. Yes, there are more choices, but we miss the unifying regularity that used to be such an essential part of sports fandom. Except, that is, football. Football is the last live fixture left in our culture.

The recent Olympics, by all accounts, have brought the NBC network constellation extraordinary reviewsexponentially better than the postponed Tokyo 2021 games – a 79% increase. So maybe the streaming system, while still unfamiliar to older consumers, is finally working as intended.

But sometimes I wonder if we are really that much more informed about sports than we were decades ago. Just as the proliferation of news sources has not made the general population any better at understanding complex issues, so it is with sports; while fans have unlimited access to their favorite sport and a wealth of statistics at their disposal, there is a lack of awareness of peripheral sports. While it is difficult to prove this quantitatively, just as the evening news consumer was just as well informed when there were only three networks airing a mere 22 minutes of news each night, when ABC Wide World of Sports aired delayed ski or track meets or other “minor sports,” it seems that the average—yes, casual—sports fan had more of a shorthand for the fringe sports.

Be that as it may, the question remains: Are soccer fans willing to miss half of their team’s games to watch the US Open men’s final in its entirety? I doubt it.