Attendance at the Australian Open 2026 went through the roof – and we don’t mean the retractable roof over the Rod Laver Arena! Over 100,000 fans attended the first Grand Slam tournament of the season in Melbourne, both during the day and in the evening. However, that wasn’t always the case back then, as the Australian Open was the least attended major tennis tournament.
The low point in the history of the Australian Open and fan attendance probably came in a year in which significant history was made. It was the 1969 Australian Open, the first edition of the event where it was “open” to professionals and amateurs. Rod Laver won the men’s singles title this year, the first leg of his history, the second Grand Slam victory of all four major singles titles. This year the tournament did not take place in Melbourne, but in Brisbane in the state of Queensland, far north of Melbourne. Brisbane, the host city for the 2032 Summer Olympics, proved a bust in terms of viewership despite Laver’s return to his home Grand Slam tournament. According to Laver from his book “The Education of a Tennis Player” (for sale and download here: https://a.co/d/av9PeQk), the highest attendance this year was only 4,500!
The following is an excerpt from “A Tennis Player’s Education,” co-written with Bud Collins, in which Laver describes the crowd problems at the 1969 Australian Open – a far cry from the 2026 Australian Open.
By 1958, Brisbane was considered too small to host a Davis Cup Challenge Round, the grand final of the global tournament. There was a Queenslander on the team at the time, Mal Anderson, who had also been coached by Charlie Hollis, and local officials persuaded the Australian Lawn Tennis Association that support would be forthcoming.
Milton seated about 6,500, making it larger than any other U.S. tennis stadium except Forest Hills. The hulking Bill Edwards, who carried his 300 pounds in a suit, waistcoat, starched collar and tie every day in all weathers, played tennis in Brisbane and was convinced that the city would put in a great performance when the US team arrived to play for the cup. The makeshift stands rose so high that Sherpa guides could have been used as ushers. I’m glad I didn’t have to sit in the top row because the stands seemed to be constantly shaking. Every day for three days, 17,886 people crowded into these precarious seats. With the exception of Wimbledon, no tennis event in the world came close to those numbers, and that was in a small town in 1958. It was a thrilling game in which Peru’s Alex Olmedo led the United States to a 3-2 victory, one of the rare occasions the Americans were able to wrest the trophy from Australia’s grasp.
Those were the days of the enormous USA-Australia rivalry in the Davis Cup, when attendances were the highest in the game’s history at 25,578 in Sydney and 22,000 in Melbourne. Unfortunately, this day is over. The last time Brisbane hosted a cup final in 1967, the total attendance over three days was 14,500. Nobody seemed very interested. Spain were the opponents and the sporting public knew it would be a no contest. Australians won’t buy tickets for an inferior product and the Davis Cup, once the highlight of the season, had lost its luster by the time all professionals became eligible to play in 1973 – a shocking delay five years after open tennis was accepted.
In the bar at the Milton Club there was a gigantic photo of the 1958 mob scene that practically took up one wall. It was almost a shrine, and many a glass was raised wistfully to this portrait of another time, praying that it would return. I hope this is the case, and a very positive sign was the opening of a new tennis center in 2009, named after Hall of Famer Patrick Rafter, replacing the dilapidated and abandoned Milton. It has a date on the world tour. When we arrived in Brisbane in 1969 for Australia’s first open championship, we found that France, England, Germany, Ireland, the USA, Argentina and even Switzerland had hosted national openers in 1968, all after the Australian season had ended in January. Australian tennis officials have had almost a year to prepare for their first Open and learn from other countries’ experiences. In Brisbane no one bothered to learn or prepare and the first Australian Open was a terrible flop.
It shouldn’t have taken place in Brisbane anyway. Sydney or Melbourne were the only locations for the first big race. But it was Brisbane’s turn as the national championship was shared alternately with the other three eastern cities, Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide. It was understandable that the stands were not full at the Davis Cup against Spain in 1967, but I for one thought that Brisbane would wake up to an Open again because the standard would be the highest again and the Australians who had not played in the championships for a year or more – Rosewall, Stolle, Roche, Emerson, Newcombe and myself – would come back. We didn’t want the crowds of 1958. Those temporary stands had long since been dismantled, but we thought we could fill the permanent stadium with 6,500 spectators. We didn’t do it. The largest crowd was 4,500 when I beat Emerson in a match between my hometown boys. Other days it was lonely there. Thousands and thousands of people were watching, but they were on the beach, accompanied by televisions. The tournament organizers had given away the TV rights and didn’t have the foresight to black out the Brisbane area. Why would a guy pay for a seat in this bloody heat in Milton when he could sit in a swimsuit with a beer in Surfers Paradise and catch a wave or squeeze a bird during the break on screen?
Brisbane was the last place I thought I would encounter tennis apathy. I would have been less surprised to learn that Las Vegas has lost interest in blackjack.