The Rogers Cup runneth over with complexities. Putting a roof over the main stadium court at the Jarry Park tennis facility in Montreal is not a done deal, but the attempt to do so is once again in the news, just before the 2019 Coupe Rogers begins:

“The addition of a retractable roof over Centre Court pursues one simple goal: to ensure the continuity of the Rogers Cup in Montreal"

Eugène Lapierre, held a press conference to address inaccurate information on the subject.

Details: ⬇️https://t.co/OS8cVgwAfN

— Omnium Banque Nationale (@OBNmontreal) August 1, 2019

The move makes sense in terms of the raw merits, as I explained on Thursday here at Dean Blundell. 

That is one small part of a much bigger picture.

In this piece, I will emphasize — with a lot of photos — that the sport of tennis as a whole has missed so many opportunities to demonstrate long-term vision and leadership on the specific matter of building stadiums which meet the needs of various constituencies and rise to the challenge of staging tennis tournaments in the 21st century.

Let’s start with the fact that Centre Court Wimbledon opened in 1922. This is regarded as the Cathedral of Tennis, the most famous tennis court in the world, in much the same way that the Montreal Forum or Maple Leaf Gardens were hockey cathedrals; Madison Square Garden is the mecca of basketball arenas; and Fenway Park and Wrigley Field are baseball shrines.

Part of what made Centre Court so special is its intimacy. This is a photo of Centre Court before the installation of a roof as part of a multi-year renovation which was completed before the 2009 Wimbledon tournament:

See how contained the structure is, and how close every seat is to the court?

When the renovation of Centre Court was in its early stages in 2007, the overhang had to be stripped away so that a new structure could be built (in 2008) which could then facilitate the installation of a retractable roof (in 2009).

Here is a look at Centre Court during the 2007 Wimbledon tournament:

There aren’t many seats behind the baseline. The seating layout is so close to the court. Not only are fans close to the action, but the stadium’s layout made it comparatively easier to then build a roof over it.

I mention Wimbledon because the All England Club had an ancient stadium which was built in a way which allowed the venerable facility to endure for 84 years before the need to renovate. Renovation, though, was made easier by the original structure. Centre Court is therefore a marvel of tennis architecture, and a sign of foresight among the leaders of a tennis tournament.

Wimbledon is a notable exception among most tennis tournaments. The Australian Open is the other big exception. It built Rod Laver Arena, a new stadium with a retractable roof when moving from its old site — Kooyong — to its current site at Melbourne (formerly Flinders) Park in 1988. Rod Laver Arena retains the kind of intimacy one recognizes in Centre Court Wimbledon:

The standards attained by Centre Court and Rod Laver Arena (plus the Australian Open’s second retractable roof venue, Melbourne Arena, which opened in 2000) are conspicuous because of how rare they are among tennis stadiums and the tournaments which built them.

Tennis Canada is part of this problem, but it hardly shoulders the blame alone. It has a lot of company in the tennis world.

Let’s start with Tennis Canada, though, since this is a Canadian website and the Rogers Cup is upon us.

Uniprix — now IGA — Stadium in Montreal wasn’t built way back in the stone age, when no one could anticipate the needs of the future in tennis. Groundbreaking for the stadium occurred in 1993, a year when the Toronto Blue Jays were flying high in their new SkyDome, a retractable roof building which represented a forward-thinking approach to building sports stadiums. (It hosted the 1991 All-Star Game. There’s a reason Exhibition Stadium didn’t host the MLB All-Star Game in 1983 or 1985, the two years in which the American League could have hosted the game following the 1982 Canada debut at Montreal’s Olympic Stadium.)

The layout of the stadium isn’t bad at all. However, not building a roof back then was a huge oversight, one which has carried through the global tennis industry.

Before I go further, let’s stop for a moment and realize that sports architecture in North America began to take a significant turn at the very end of the 1980s. In 1989, groundbreaking occurred for the baseball stadium which would become Oriole Park at Camden Yards in Baltimore.

Why is that so significant? Camden Yards became the first of a series of sports stadiums in North America which didn’t have massive seating capacities — Oriole Park holds under 50,000 for baseball — but had more luxury boxes and ways to generate significant streams of revenue. Oriole Park provided a more intimate feel for spectators. It was a new stadium with an old-school vibe. Modern amenities, classic ambience. That was the new wave — partly in service of style and atmosphere, but mostly in terms of meeting modern economic needs for sports franchises.

If a sports team or a tennis tournament was building a stadium in the early 1990s or later, there was — and still is — NO EXCUSE for not thinking about the future.

Yet, so many tennis tournaments did not think about the future.

Miami’s big 96-player tournament is now at Hard Rock Stadium, where the NFL’s Miami Dolphins play football. It previously resided at the Crandon Park Tennis Center. Crandon Park’s stadium court had its groundbreaking in 1992.

This is how the stadium looked:

The intimacy of the great tennis stadiums in the world is not found here. What a wide and bulky stadium, with so many seats so far from the court. Also, this is a stadium which makes the installation of a roof today — in 2019 — incredibly difficult. This is a horrible piece of tennis architecture, and it’s no wonder that the Miami Open sought another home (for reasons beyond this, but the stadium experience left fans at the mercy of the hot sun; Hard Rock has tons of shaded seats with very few sun-exposed seats).

Toronto’s Aviva Centre was built in 2004.

This is its layout:

The seating capacity is smaller than Crandon Park, but the layout design has some noticeable similarities. Instructively, building a roof today over the Aviva Centre Court would be hard to do at an affordable rate. The failure to build Aviva properly in 2004 has put Toronto at a disadvantage relative to Montreal, whose IGA Stadium layout is more conducive to the construction of a roof over an existing edifice. Montreal should have built a roof at the beginning, just as Toronto should have, but at least Montreal has a more workable layout.

Cincinnati, the tournament after Canada, is often at the mercy of summer thunderstorms or broiling midsummer heat. In defense of Cincinnati tournament organizers, the main stadium court opened in 1981, roughly a decade before tennis tournaments should have been expected to build stadiums with climate volatility, fan comfort, and TV reliability in mind. Nevertheless, the tournament will continue to be vulnerable to the weather because of the lack of a retractable roof:

At least the tournament — in the past few years — built that overhang on the right side of the picture (the one with the video board) to provide more shade cover for fans, but that is only one quarter of the court. Fans on the east side get seared and broiled. Again, this stadium opened in 1981, but it makes the failure of other tournaments to build weather-shielded courts in the 1990s and early 2000s that much more damning…

… which leads us to the worst offender among all tennis tournaments in this regard, the U.S. Open and the United States Tennis Association.

In 1995, when the USTA National Tennis Center embarked on a multi-year renovation and expansion project, it should have been a no-brainer for the USTA, at that point in time, given all the other developments in other professional (North American) sports, to build a stadium with a retractable roof. This was a major tournament in the media capital of the world, where television is such a central consideration in magnifying the visibility of an event on a global scale. Building a roof — whose merits we discussed in part one of this series on a Montreal roof at Jarry Park — should have been an obvious call. Accordingly, building a stadium which could easily allow for a roof (basically, the Centre Court template at Wimbledon or the recently-built Rod Laver Arena in Melbourne, in 1988) should have been a priority.

Instead, this is what the USTA came up with at its main court, Arthur Ashe Stadium:

If you were to say, “Siri, show me a horribly-built tennis stadium for the modern age,” this is what you would come up with. Total sun exposure for most fans. It’s a wind tunnel — wind could and did sweep through the actual playing surface, making life hell for the players. Thousands of upper-deck seats were a million miles away from the action… and how the truck do you put a roof over that thing, having failed to put a roof over the initial structure?

The USTA did scramble to put a roof over this monstrosity, but because the stadium itself is so large, this meant the USTA had to use so much more raw material (and therefore run up a much bigger bill than it would have if it built a better stadium with a roof in 1995, leading up to the stadium’s opening in 1997).

This is the renovated Ashe without a roof on top:

You can see how the sheer size of the original stadium forced the overhang to be a four-pronged overhang, instead of one sheet of roof which easily slides in one direction and covers the court, with a lot less material being used. This four-pronged overhang represented a dreadfully inefficient use of material.

Here is Ashe Stadium with the roof being closed:

The photo might not convey the full effect, but when viewing the nighttime photo with the roof open, you can see how massive the four-pronged overhang was. Then picture the roof filling in the middle. That’s a truckload of material for a retrofitted roof.

Only last year — 2018 — did the USTA finally realize what it should have done two decades earlier at Arthur Ashe Stadium. The new Louis Armstrong Stadium had the intimacy and simple design of a quality tennis court. Somewhat ironically, the original Armstrong was wide and bulky, along the lines of the other stadiums mentioned above, but the USTA took away the upper deck and created a smaller and much more inviting venue. Then, over that stripped-down venue, it put in a new roof with modern touches.

The product is the epitome of how a modern-day tennis stadium should look, roof included:

It should be known that the first use of the Armstrong roof was for a match involving Canada’s Denis Shapovalov. With so many Canadians attending the U.S. Open from New York, the closed Armstrong Stadium was rocking and rolling for this match. The atmosphere was top-notch. Imagine if Ashe Stadium had this kind of intimacy and electricity the past 21 years, dating back to its opening in 1997.

Tennis really missed an opportunity at Ashe Stadium. Tennis has missed so many opportunities over the years at various tournaments outside of Canada.

Tennis leaders and tennis tournament organizers have not been visionaries. That’s why they are scrambling to push for retrofitted roofs over stadiums built decades earlier. It’s why tennis architecture has fallen far short of the grade. It is why modern tennis tournaments don’t provide the levels of rain shelter or heat shelter they should.

This is part of the backdrop to the Montreal roof discussion.

More on this story in our third and final part of our series.