By Randy Walker
@TennisPublisher
The 2019 Miami Open set 15 different attendance records in its first year at Hard Rock Stadium, including a record 17,373 fans who attended the men’s singles final between Roger Federer and John Isner.
In years to come, the Miami Open will likely continue to set more and more tournament attendance records as more fans hear of the amazing environment at the event and with expanded event content.
However, there’s one major attendance record that the tournament could attain with some additional marketing and ingenuity. That record is for the most fans to attend ANY tennis match in the history of the sport.
I consider myself a bit of a custodian for history and records in the sport, mainly due to my 12-year career at the U.S. Tennis Association, where I served primarily as the U.S. Open, Davis Cup and Olympic historian and press officer. Starting in 2010, I was the editor and publisher of “The Bud Collins History of Tennis” book by the late great Bud Collins, which my company New Chapter Press officially published three volumes of in the last ten years. Featured on page 774 of this book is the listing for records for largest crowds.
The largest crowd to watch a tennis match was 35,681 when Kim Clijsters beat Serena Williams 6-3, 6-2 in the “Best of Belgium” tennis exhibition on July 8, 2010 in Roi Baudoin Stadium in Brussels. This exhibition broke the previous record of 30,492 fans who watched the 1973 “Battle of the Sexes” match between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs, won by King 6-4, 6-4, 6-3 at the Houston Astrodome on September 20, 1973.
In 2017, the biggest crowd to watch a “sanctioned” tennis match (non-exhibition) was 27,448, set during the 2017 Davis Cup final at the Stade Pierre-Mauroy in Lilles, France.
While at the Miami Open, I spent my first hours at the event counting seats and rows and looking to see how many people could potentially see the match with a full of even partially obstructed view of the match. The seating capacity for the event for football is 65,356 but many of the seats do not provide visibility of the court in the current set-up.
According to ROSSETTI, the design architects of the “stadium within the stadium” situated along the west sideline of this football stadium used by the Miami Dolphins and Miami Hurricanes, features 6,000 seats, including the luxury boxes.
I counted the seats that were in the “luxury” section along the sideline that are part of the permanent structure and it was approximately 6,000 seats. The seat capacity for this area is then about 12,000. In the upper deck of the stadium facing the court, there are nine sections with approximately 1,200 seats each, making for about 11,000 seats. Some of these on the edge quite far away and not ideal, but you can see the court. These three sections account for about 23,000 seats, which is equal to the capacity of Arthur Ashe Stadium, which is the largest tennis stadium in the world at 23,771 seats.
Could the Miami Open fill these seats, albeit some on the top section not ideal, and add another 4,500 seats somewhere? This would get them to potentially surpass 27,448 fans in attendance and break the record set at the 2017 Davis Cup final for the most number of fans to watch a “sanctioned” tennis match. If the tournament could find another 12,700 seats, a much tougher task, they could break the all-time record of 35,681 fans who watched the Kim Clijsters vs. Serena Williams match. Then, of course, you have to do a marketing campaign to get this amount of fans to attend.
Prior to the start of the event, tournament officials announced that the seating capacity for the stadium would be 13,800 and clearly there were more that were used by the end of the event, considering that the announced attendance for the final was over 17,000.
The 2019 Miami Open at Hard Rock Stadium joined the 1973 “Battle of the Sexes” at the Houston Astrodome as the only two times in history where a tennis event was played in a NFL football stadium, as he wrote about here: http://www.worldtennismagazine.com/archives/16607
