Call It a Show, Not a Slam

There's a simple way to tell whether a reform is honest: look at what it tries to hide. The US Open's new mixed doubles doesn't hide that it wants to cash in, doesn't hide that it wants the singles stars, doesn't hide that it wants to fill Arthur Ashe a few days before the real tournament begins. It hides only one thing, and it hides it under a single word: Slam.

In August 2025 the US Open cut mixed doubles down to sixteen pairs, nearly all of them made up of singles players, and moved it to the week before the main draw. Shortened sets — four games in the earlier rounds, six only in the final — a deciding point at deuce, a super tie-break in place of a third set. A tournament that lasts two afternoons. Prize money for the winners: one million dollars, against the roughly two hundred thousand shared by the previous year's champions. And atop it all, untouched, the title: Slam mixed doubles champions.

This is where the problem lies. Not in the format.

The format isn't the sin

Let's say it plainly: as a spectacle, the reform works. Record crowds, packed courts, Świątek and Ruud in the final, unlikely pairings of stars posing at the net. Real doubles has barely had a TV audience for twenty years, and the tournaments know it. Taking a discipline dying on the margins and turning it into an event people actually want to watch isn't a betrayal. It's competence.

Andrea Vavassori, who did protest, proposed expanding it to thirty-two pairs and adding a round. It's the reaction of someone who has understood that the ship is sailing anyway, and asks at least for a place on board. He's the one who's right, not those who would turn the clock back.

Short sets and a deciding point don't kill tennis. Tennis already uses them everywhere, from the doubles Finals to the deciding tie-breaks at the Slams. Anyone tearing their clothes over the super tie-break should remember that it's the same federation that imposed it in doubles years ago. The form is negotiable. It always has been.

The sin is the word

The problem is that the US Open wants two things that don't go together. It wants the ratings of a show and it wants the prestige of a trophy. It wants the event to be as light as an exhibition when it has to sell tickets, and as heavy as a Major when it has to carve a line into the record books.

It can't be done. A Slam title is a promise: that whoever wins it has beaten the best in the world in that discipline, over the full distance. If you strip the specialists from the draw, shorten the distance and subtract half of the competitive meaning, that title no longer certifies what it claims to certify. It becomes a prestige label stuck onto a different product. It's marketing disguised as history.

Sara Errani put it in the most concrete way possible: this year the work was taken away from the doubles players. It's not nostalgia, it's a contractual fact. Dozens of players build an entire career on Slam doubles, and in a single stroke that door was shut. Not because they weren't good enough, but because they weren't famous enough.

The million-dollar test

Here comes the strongest objection, and it has to be faced head-on. If the format is so indefensible, why were Errani and Vavassori — the very doubles players who were protesting — the ones who won it, and why did they walk away with a million dollars? Isn't that proof that the system, in the end, still rewards the best?

It's proof of the opposite. That two specialists beat the singles stars at their own game says exactly how out of place those stars were, and how doubles remains a craft you can't improvise in two afternoons. And the million doesn't absolve the reform: it indicts it. That figure exists only because someone decided this event is worth a million, and it's worth a million because the stars are there. It's proof that the stakes were created by the show, not by the sport. The champions won and protested with the same mouth, and they were right twice over.

An honest way out

The solution is almost trivial. Keep the format. Keep the stars, the fans' week, the million, the crowds. Put on the best show you know how to. But call it by its name: a rich, spectacular, opening exhibition. Not a Grand Slam title.

Real mixed doubles, with its specialists and its full distance, can live on alongside it, perhaps far from the cameras, as it always has anyway. It loses in ratings, it gains in truth.

A sport can change everything: the rules, the scoring, the protagonists, the calendar. There's only one thing it can't afford to sell off, and that's the meaning of its own words. The day "Slam champion" comes to mean nothing more than "we put on a nice event," it won't be doubles that has lost. It will be the Slam.