For years, the biggest tournaments in tennis — Wimbledon and the U.S., French and Australian Opens — have been tiptoeing around expanding from two-week events to three.

They’ve opened the gates for practices and matches in their qualifying tournaments. They’ve held charity exhibitions involving star players. Three of the four have added a day to the first round, starting their singles draws on a Sunday rather than the Monday.

And the All England Lawn Tennis Club (AELTC) is pushing a $250million (£202m) expansion plan that will allow it to bring Wimbledon qualifying to the site of the main event in south-west London, just like its three friendly Grand Slam rivals.

Tuesday, the U.S. Open crossed the Rubicon by announcing that a main-draw event will take place during what has always been referred to as ‘the week before the tournament’ — or ‘qualifying week,’ or ‘Fan Week,’ as the marketing whizzes at the United States Tennis Association (USTA) prefer.

Starting this summer, the U.S. Open’s mixed-doubles tournament will take place on the Tuesday and Wednesday of that week, meaning that there will be ‘real’ tennis, with an eventual Grand Slam title and $1million prize on the line, five days before the men’s and women’s singles competitions begin for real.

Lewis Sherr, chief executive of the USTA, has pushed Grand Slam tennis towards its next frontier by staging an event that will allow the New York tournament to charge real money for tickets sooner than the sport’s other three majors. It will justify possible price increases for corporate suites, sponsorships, media-rights and the premium box seats that the highest-end fans buy up for the entirety of the tournament.

Entry to the grounds of the Billie Jean King National Tennis Center is free during qualifying week. For last year’s exhibition tournaments, including the ‘Mixed Doubles Madness’ that inspired the format for the main tournament in 2025, the cheapest tickets were $30. A USTA official said it is too early to say what the cost of entry would be for the new mixed-doubles event, which will take place in the site’s main two stadiums, Arthur Ashe and Louis Armstrong.

In an interview, Sherr made it clear he doesn’t anticipate going it alone with this for long.

“I’m hopeful this becomes a new franchise and tentpole in tennis, not just at the U.S. Open, but elsewhere and throughout the year to attract more folks,” he said.

The change, along with a new format including first-to-four-games (down from the traditional six) sets up until the final, is designed to attract top singles players by reducing the risk of them getting injured in mixed doubles before their main priority gets underway. It formalizes an existential quandary that has occupied doubles basically forever: from tactics and court geometry to fame and finances, it is essentially a different sport to singles.

How much tennis should embrace that difference, as opposed to fighting against it, is the essential schism at the heart of decisions like these. The USTA believes that grafting singles stardom onto the doubles court will raise the profile of the latter discipline; while some top doubles players feel they are being denied the glamor of having their own show.

Pam Shriver, the 22-time Grand Slam doubles champion who won the mixed title at the 1987 French Open with Emilio Sanchez Vicario, credits Eric Butorac, a former doubles player who is now director of pro tennis operations and player relations for the USTA, for buttonholing people around the sport for ideas on what the tournament could do to improve the two-v-two experience.

Shriver said she opted not to play much mixed doubles, because juggling that, singles and women’s doubles was a lot.

“Given the journey doubles has taken since the end of my career, I think this (new format) makes sense,” she said Monday night. “If you had told me I could have played mixed the week before the singles, I think I would have done it.”

Austin Krajicek, a former doubles world No. 1 who reached the mixed final at the 2023 U.S. Open, said organizers basically decided to go against 100 years of history. “It just becomes an exhibition for singles guys; which you know, that’s not the worst thing,” Krajicek said. “Those tournaments have to evolve and then look for ways to sell more tickets and make money, but to call it mixed doubles is not correct.”

Tournament organizers have noticed that when well-known men and women team up to play doubles together — even for hit-and-giggle exhibition events — fans pack the stadiums. They show up for the “Tiebreak Tens” charity competition at the BNP Paribas Open Indian Wells, Calif. each March. And they certainly show up for doubles when an Olympic medal is on the line.

In a statement released by the USTA, Tim Bunnell, senior vice president of programming and acquisitions for leading U.S. broadcaster ESPN, called the mixed doubles tournament “an ideal fit.” ESPN’s networks will televise the event this summer, attempting to use it to build momentum for the singles main draw during an otherwise dead time of the American sports calendar in the third week of August.

Ken Solomon, who ran Tennis Channel for two decades until last year, said Monday that when that network started showing wall-to-wall coverage of qualifying week with the bells and whistles of a studio show and expert analysis, the audiences were comparable to those for ATP and WTA 1,000 tour events. “The dual-gender star matchups actually really rate well and are very, very marketable,” Solomon wrote in a text message. “Fans LOVE doubles, and when stars play the ratings take off.”

In other words, Sherr just has to convince the right people to show up.

He’s hoping that won’t be too hard a sell, and that, before long, he won’t just have a tentpole but a full-on colony in a third Grand Slam week, that henceforth may be known as the U.S. Open’s first week of three.

Solomon’s comments, though, forecast the next battle for this new frontier. A week of Grand Slam tennis with the pull of a 1,000-level tour event is a black hole for any smaller ATP or WTA event that happens to be going on at the same time. At some point, the men’s and women’s tours are likely to push back against this encroachment, perhaps by offering more lucrative events ahead of the Grand Slams to ward off the big guns’ calendar imperialism.

The ATP has long been working toward a new top-level tournament in Saudi Arabia ahead of the Australian Open each January, against which the four majors previously entrenched themselves. Every action in tennis usually has an equal and opposite reaction.

This article originally appeared in The Athletic.

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