Why Five-Set Tennis Is Under Pressure After the US Open’s Latest Finishes
At 3:33am in New York, Ben Shelton beat Carlos Alcaraz at the US Open. The match lasted four hours and 28 minutes. Shelton won 6-7 (5-7) 6-1 6-3 1-6 7-6 (10-7) to reach the semifinals and knock out the defending champion. Sky Sports reported it as the latest-ever finish to a US Open match. That result did more than make history. It turned the five-set format into a debate.
The immediate argument is about schedules. A match that starts in prime time and runs past 3am is a problem for players, broadcasters, and fans. But the debate quickly moved beyond scheduling. The Guardian’s Andrew Lawrence writes that the late-night epic has become a referendum on the five-set match and whether men’s Grand Slam matches should still be best of three or best of five.
Five sets are, in Lawrence’s words, intrinsic to the grand slam canon and a badge of honor in the men’s game. They test more than skill; they test endurance, recovery, and nerve. That is why many players built their reputations in five-set matches. Novak Djokovic, the record holder for major titles, is the most obvious example. Djokovic has proposed a scoring change that would keep five sets but reduce the number of games so matches stay near a two-hour window. The exact format of that idea is not clear, but it would be a major change to the game’s longest, most dramatic matches.
The Guardian also notes remarks from Abdo, a tennis official who had made his own comments about the format. Those remarks came after Tiley, his predecessor, suggested that women play five-set matches as well. None of that public discussion would have gained much attention, Lawrence argues, if Djokovic had not first floated his two-hour idea. The proposal has given the debate legitimacy.
But Lawrence says there is a simpler fix for the late-night problem. The U.S. Tennis Association, which runs the Open, could move one of its prime-time matches to Louis Armstrong Stadium, a show court next to Arthur Ashe Stadium, and start matches earlier. That would address the real complaint—matches ending after 3am—without removing the format that creates them.
Why does any of this matter? Men’s Grand Slam singles is the last major tennis event that still uses best-of-five sets. Changing or abandoning it would alter the shape of the sport’s biggest tournaments. The US Open late-night finish did not happen because the format is broken. It happened because of how the schedule was built around it. Whether officials keep the five-set format will say a lot about how they view the sport: as a television product that must fit neatly into a broadcast day, or as a physical contest where the longest matches are part of the appeal. The debate is far from new, but Shelton and Alcaraz’s night in New York made it impossible to ignore.