Having endured the greatest peacetime disruption to sport in the modern history of ball games, surely pushing the Australian Open back a couple of weeks would barely cause a blip on the radar of crisis-conditioned fans.
Simply conducting the 2021 Australian Open at Melbourne Park in February — within a drop shot of its original January 18-31 timeslot — seems something of a triumph, given Victoria was almost disqualified altogether from major sport due to its quarantine bungle false start.
Then there is the context provided by sport’s new abnormal — a Masters championship in November, AFL and NRL grand finals in late October, NBA and WNBA seasons contested inside bubbles, cricket Test matches played without crowds and Wimbledon not played at all.
Yes, starting the Australian Open a couple of weeks later than usual so the players could fulfil (now hopefully improved) quarantine requirements would not be ideal for either tennis devotees or the legion of once-a-year couch experts.
January is the perfect time for both live attendees and late-night TV viewers, even if the intemperate climate sometimes means a dogged baseliner is medium to well done by the conclusion of a five-set epic.
But near the end of a year in which Melbourne lost almost every AFL game — including the grand final — to the ongoing and personally debilitating battle to contain COVID-19, surely watching the tennis on a school night would be a trifling inconvenience.
Certainly a February Australian Open would not provide quite the same bulging bottom line on the sometimes rubbery economic benefit statements used to justify public spending on major events.
But, for all its newfound freedoms, Victoria will still be in a stage of cautious reopening in January and — as the current debate reveals — it will be a triumph to get a few hundred players to Melbourne Park, let alone thousands of travelling fans.
More problematic in the ongoing negotiations about the Australian Open’s start date is the attitude of the players, who are pampered at Melbourne Park like no other major venue.
The toe-curling obsequiousness toward the players began when Tennis Australia needed the powerful player lobby to support the Australian Open’s ongoing Grand Slam status — thus the press-conference birthday cakes and other acts of gratuitous pandering.
In that regard, think of the willingness of a top-100 tennis player to attend an Australian Open where they might have to quarantine as something of a test.
Has the slavish devotion of Tennis Australia to their every whim and the hundreds of millions of dollars spent by successive Victorian state governments on Melbourne Park created a store of goodwill to be returned by those players deigning to endure some inconvenience while collecting their guaranteed five-figure first-round-losers cheques?
If not, surely this would say more about the entitled mindset of the players at a time of international crisis than the intransigence of the Victorian Government.
Cricket may benefit from postponed Open
Perhaps the greatest benefactor of a delayed Australian Open would be Cricket Australia. There are 11 games scheduled in Melbourne from mid-January, which could now avoid the usual ferocious competition from a late-night Nick Kyrgios epic or Serena Williams cliff hanger.
This would be in turn a victory for Cricket Australia’s media partners, Seven and Fox Sports, and perhaps a chastening moment for the Seven officials who attempted to cut ties with the cricket — or gain a massive discount on contracted payments — as the sport battled with unavoidable scheduling complications.
As it turns out, it might be the former home of cricket, the Nine Network, that is suddenly seeking a discount from its new partners at Tennis Australia.
As anyone who has heard Jim Courier express his awkward enthusiasm about a looming season of a reality cooking show knows, the Australian Open provides relentless and presumably valuable cross promotion of the broadcaster’s new-season programming.
This at least partly explains why broadcasters are willing to pay above-market rates for “loss-leading” sports programming, and why dedicated tennis fans have the earworm jingle from a “new smash-hit comedy” in their heads for months after a fortnight of relentless bombardment.
Would the Australian Open be as valuable to Nine in February when its regular programming would usually have commenced, and when the tennis might prove something of a handicap in the race for ratings line honours?
These are the questions the media rights partners and Tennis Australia will be posing in their frantic negotiations with the Victorian Government to get the Australian Open started as close to its original date as possible.
And factors that, I would suggest, won’t get a great deal of sympathy from Victorians who have just taken a stroll without strapping on a mask for the first time in months.
