US Open Night Session: Start Time, Rules, Late Finishes

At 2:50 on the morning of September 8, 2022, Carlos Alcaraz won the last point of his match against Jannik Sinner in Arthur Ashe Stadium and fell on his back. The quarterfinal had lasted 5 hours and 15 minutes. It had not started until well after 9 pm, because another match had been played on the same court first, and no rule in New York required anyone to stop. It was the latest finish the tournament had seen, and it kept that distinction for four years, until a 2026 quarterfinal between Ben Shelton and Alcaraz ended at 3:33 am.

That is the US Open night session in miniature. It is a separately ticketed evening program on Arthur Ashe Stadium, at the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center in Queens, that begins at 7 pm Eastern with two matches scheduled, normally one men's singles and one women's. Since 2018 Louis Armstrong Stadium has run an evening session of its own at the same hour. Neither has a fixed finishing time, and the United States Tennis Association, unlike Wimbledon, works under no curfew.

The US Open night session in plain terms: 7 pm, two matches, no finishing time

• 7Scheduled start, pm Eastern
• 2Matches on the card
• 2Stadiums with a night session
• 1975Year the first one was played

The scheduled start hour and match count apply to a standard evening on Arthur Ashe Stadium; semifinal and final days follow their own timetable.

Everything about the evening follows from three decisions the USTA made long ago and has declined to revisit.

The first is the start. Seven o'clock puts the opening match in American prime time on the East Coast and lets people who work in Manhattan get to Queens on the 7 train. The second is the card: two full matches, not one. The third is the absence of a stopping point. The session ends when the second match does, whether that is 10:40 pm or the far side of 2 am.

A men's singles match at a major is best of five sets. A women's is best of three. Put one of each on a court starting at seven and the range of possible finishing times is enormous. A pair of straight-set wins has the building empty before eleven. A four-hour men's match followed by a three-set women's match, or the reverse order with the men going last, runs the session into the small hours with nobody having done anything wrong.

The session is also an Ashe institution first. For more than forty years the main stadium was the only court with a night card, and the phrase still means, to most people who use it, the two matches under the lights in the biggest stadium in tennis. The building itself, its 23,771 seats and its roof, is described in our guide to Arthur Ashe Stadium.

The night session is not the whole tournament after dark, though. Matches that began in the afternoon on the outside courts carry on under floodlights until they finish, and in the first week a field court at 9 pm can have a better contest on it than the stadium does. Those matches belong to the day session. They are simply still going.

Day session vs night session: two tickets and two crowds

The main stadium is sold twice a day. That single fact explains most of the rules.

	Day session	Night session
Scheduled start on Ashe	Late morning to noon	7 pm
Matches scheduled	Two	Two
Ticket	Its own purchase	Its own purchase
Stadium cleared afterward	Yes, before the evening crowd enters	No, the session runs to the end
Grounds passes sold	Yes, in the earlier rounds	No
Finishing time	Whenever the second match ends	Whenever the second match ends

A day session ticket is a reserved seat in Ashe for the two afternoon matches. A night session ticket is a reserved seat for the two evening matches. They are different products with different barcodes, and holding one confers nothing on the other.

What happens at the changeover

When the last ball of the day session is struck, everyone in Ashe has to leave it. Ushers clear the bowl, crews go through the rows, and only then are the evening's ticket holders let in. The turnover of a stadium this size takes time, and the tournament needs the day session to end comfortably before seven for the evening to start on the hour.

It does not always get that. Two long matches in the afternoon, or a rain interruption before the roof is closed, can push the end of the day session past six. The evening crowd then waits on the plaza, the first night match starts late, and the whole card slides. This is the least visible cause of a 2 am finish and one of the most common. To buy some room, the tournament has adjusted the starting time of the Ashe day session more than once.

Day ticket holders who are turned out of the stadium are not turned out of the grounds. They can normally stay and watch whatever is still being played on the other courts for as long as it lasts. What they cannot do is walk back into Ashe.

Two different audiences

The afternoon crowd skews toward people who have taken the day for tennis: families, out-of-town visitors, club players who will watch six hours of it and wander the field courts between matches. The evening crowd comes from work. It arrives later, drinks more, and treats the session as a night out in New York that happens to have a tennis match in the middle of it.

Players can tell the difference from the first changeover. More on that below.

What a night ticket gets you besides a seat in Ashe

A night session ticket is, before anything else, admission to the tennis center for the evening. In the tournament's published guidance of recent years, evening ticket holders have been admitted to the grounds from 6 pm, an hour before the stadium card begins. Arriving then is worth it.

What is still in progress at that hour depends on the week. During the first several days of the tournament the answer is a great deal: singles matches finishing on the Grandstand and Court 17, doubles spread across the field courts, the last match of the day on a show court going into a third or fifth set with a crowd that has been building around it since four. A night ticket gives first-come access to the unreserved seating at all of them. A spectator can watch the end of a five-setter from the second row of a field court, eat, and still be in an Ashe seat before the first serve.

By the second week the outside courts are quieter. Singles has contracted to the stadiums, and what remains outdoors in the evening is doubles, juniors, wheelchair tennis and the legends' exhibitions. There is good tennis in all of it, and no line to get in.

The parts that are not tennis

The grounds at night are a large share of the appeal, and the USTA knows it. The plaza between the stadiums has a big screen showing the Ashe match to people who do not have a seat for it. The food village stays open late. The fountains are lit. A sizable number of evening ticket holders spend the women's match, or the men's, outside the stadium entirely, which is one reason television shots of the lower bowl at 7:15 pm can look thin.

What a night ticket does not include is any reserved seat other than the one in Ashe. Louis Armstrong Stadium's lower bowl is sold separately, as the next section explains.

One practical point. There is no grounds pass for the evening. The cheaper general admission product that makes the first week such a bargain in the daytime is a day session ticket, and the only ways onto the site at night are an Ashe night ticket or a reserved seat for Armstrong's evening session. The exception is the week before the main draw, when the grounds are open free of charge for US Open qualifying and there are no sessions to buy at all.

Louis Armstrong Stadium, the second night court since 2018

The rebuilt Louis Armstrong Stadium opened for the 2018 US Open with about 14,000 seats and a retractable roof, and with it came something the tournament had never had: a second scheduled night session.

Before then, the number two court played a day program that ran until it finished. Now it has a 7 pm card of its own, usually two matches, through the earlier rounds of the tournament. The effect on the schedule was immediate. Four night matches an evening instead of two meant more seeded players could be given an evening slot, and it took some pressure off the daily argument about who deserved Ashe.

How the Armstrong ticket differs

Armstrong is built in two tiers that are sold in two different ways. The lower bowl, about 6,400 seats, is reserved, and a seat there for the evening session is its own ticket. The upper bowl, with more than 7,000 seats, is general admission. Anyone with a ticket that gets them onto the grounds that evening can climb the stairs and sit down, including holders of an Ashe night ticket.

So the two stadiums' night products are not mirror images. An Ashe night ticket covers a reserved seat in Ashe plus the unreserved upper level of Armstrong. An Armstrong evening ticket covers a reserved seat in Armstrong and the grounds, and it does not open the doors of Ashe.

The result is a kind of informal exchange through the evening. If the Ashe match is a rout and Armstrong has a fifth set going, a stream of people leaves the big stadium for the smaller one, and the upper bowl there fills in minutes. The atmosphere on Armstrong can change in the space of a game as the news travels.

A different building at night

Armstrong was designed to be naturally ventilated. Its north and south walls are made of angled terracotta louvers that let air through and keep rain out, so even with the roof shut it is not sealed. It is smaller, steeper and closer to the court than Ashe. Many players prefer it, and a tight night match there can be the loudest thing on the grounds.

It also has no more of a curfew than its neighbor does, and the late-match policy described further down covers both buildings.

How the two night matches are chosen, and the fight over 7 pm

Each evening's card is set the day before by the tournament referee and the tournament director, and the list of people with an interest in it is long. The American rights holder wants the biggest names in its prime-time window. The international broadcasters want their own players at an hour their audiences are awake. The USTA wants Americans on, and wants its ticket buyers to feel they got a session worth the price. The players want whatever suits their bodies.

The selections themselves are rarely surprising. The top seeds, the defending champions, the leading Americans and anyone on a farewell tour get the evening slots. Serena Williams played every singles match of her final US Open in 2022 at night on Ashe, three in all, because no other scheduling was imaginable. The players the country has followed at this tournament for decades are profiled in our list of American Grand Slam champions.

One men's match and one women's

The standard night card pairs a men's singles match with a women's. The US Open has had equal prize money since 1973, longer than any other major, and it treats the split evening as part of the same principle. It is a better arrangement than the one in Paris, where the single night match has gone to the men nearly every time.

Equal billing does not settle the order, and the order is where the argument lives.

Why going first matters

The 7 pm match starts when it is supposed to. The second match starts when the first one ends, and nobody knows when that will be. The player scheduled second warms up, eats, waits, warms up again, and may walk on court at 9:15 or at 11:45. Then, if they win, they do press, treatment and an ice bath, and get to bed as it is getting light. Their next match is usually two days later, against an opponent who may have finished in the afternoon.

Put the men first and a long best-of-five can leave the women starting near midnight. In 2024, Aryna Sabalenka and Ekaterina Alexandrova began their third-round match after midnight because everything ahead of them on the court had run long. Put the women first and the men's match, the longer format, is the one that runs into the small hours, as in 2022.

Neither order is fair to the second pair. The tournament varies it from night to night, weighing the broadcasters' wishes and the likely length of each match, and it gets complaints either way. A scheduling system in which one of the two featured matches is always a hostage to the other cannot be made to please everyone, and the honest position is that the format itself causes the problem.

Why the finishes are so late

1. 1The day session overrunsTwo long afternoon matches end after 6 pm, leaving too little time to clear and reset the stadium.
2. 2The turnoverThe day crowd leaves, the bowl is cleaned, the evening crowd is admitted. The first night match starts some minutes late.
3. 3The first match goes longA three-set women's match or a four-set men's match runs close to three hours.
4. 4The second match startsThe players walk on after 10 pm, sometimes well after, for a men's match that is best of five sets.
5. 5The match goes the distanceFive sets with tiebreaks can take more than four hours. Nothing in the rules stops it.
6. 6The finishMatch point arrives in the small hours, after 3 am on the worst nights, in front of the few thousand people who stayed.

An illustrative sequence of the delays that compound on a long night. Each step is ordinary by itself; the late finish comes from several of them landing on the same evening.

Arithmetic does most of it. Two matches are scheduled from 7 pm. If the first takes two and a half hours and the changeover between matches takes twenty minutes, the second begins around ten. A best-of-five match that starts at ten and lasts four hours ends at two.

Matches are also longer than they were. Slower courts and heavier balls have lengthened rallies across the sport, the serve clock allows 25 seconds between points and players use all of it, and breaks between sets, medical timeouts and bathroom breaks add up. Five-set matches that pass the four-hour mark, once unusual, are now routine.

The US Open does have one safeguard the other majors lacked for most of their history. It has played a tiebreak in the deciding set since 1970, and since 2022 that tiebreak has been a first-to-ten at six games all, the same at all four majors. A fifth set in New York cannot run to 20-18. The details are in our guide to tennis tiebreak rules. Late finishes at the Open come from late starts, not from endless final sets.

No neighbors, no curfew

The decisive difference from Wimbledon is geography. The All England Club sits among houses, and its Centre Court roof was approved on the condition that play stop at 11 pm. The National Tennis Center sits in a park, bounded by a rail yard, a baseball stadium and two highways. Nobody lives close enough to object. The subway runs all night. There has never been an outside authority in a position to impose a finishing time, and the USTA has never imposed one on itself.

Who is left to see it

By the fifth set of a 2 am finish, most of the stadium has gone home. Those who stay move down, ushers stop checking tickets, and a few thousand people end up clustered in the lower bowl around the court. The matches that produce the records are, oddly, among the most intimate the stadium ever hosts.

The latest US Open match finishes on record

Shelton d. Alcaraz, 2026 (3:33 am)213min

Alcaraz d. Sinner, 2022 (2:50 am)170min

Zverev d. Etcheverry, 2024 (2:35 am)155min

Three matches tied (2:26 am)146min

Zheng d. Vekic, 2024 (2:15 am)135min

Sakkari d. Andreescu, 2021 (2:13 am)133min

Finishing times as reported at the time. The record is stated through the 2026 tournament; the rows below it are the best-documented late finishes through 2025, not a complete ranking. The 2:26 am mark was shared by three matches, in 1993, 2012 and 2014.

Show the numbers

Late US Open finishes, in minutes past midnight

Item	Value
Shelton d. Alcaraz, 2026 (3:33 am)	213min
Alcaraz d. Sinner, 2022 (2:50 am)	170min
Zverev d. Etcheverry, 2024 (2:35 am)	155min
Three matches tied (2:26 am)	146min
Zheng d. Vekic, 2024 (2:15 am)	135min
Sakkari d. Andreescu, 2021 (2:13 am)	133min

Finish	Match	Year	Round
3:33 am	Ben Shelton d. Carlos Alcaraz	2026	Quarterfinal
2:50 am	Carlos Alcaraz d. Jannik Sinner	2022	Quarterfinal
2:35 am	Alexander Zverev d. Tomas Martin Etcheverry	2024	Third round
2:26 am	Mats Wilander d. Mikael Pernfors	1993	Second round
2:26 am	Philipp Kohlschreiber d. John Isner	2012	Third round
2:26 am	Kei Nishikori d. Milos Raonic	2014	Fourth round
2:15 am	Zheng Qinwen d. Donna Vekic	2024	Fourth round
2:13 am	Maria Sakkari d. Bianca Andreescu	2021	Fourth round

The record at the top is stated through the 2026 tournament and the finishes beneath it through 2025, and the list is one that moves. A record of this kind is only as old as the last very long night.

2:50 am, and then 3:33 am

For twenty-nine years the mark stood at 2:26 am, reached once in 1993 and then matched to the minute in 2012 and again in 2014. Alcaraz and Sinner went past it by twenty-four minutes.

Their quarterfinal was the second match of the evening. Alcaraz won 6-3, 6-7, 6-7, 7-5, 6-3, saving a match point on Sinner's serve in the fourth set. He was nineteen. He had already finished his previous match, against Marin Cilic, at 2:23 am two nights earlier, which means he played consecutive rounds that each ended within half an hour of the record. He won the tournament that Sunday. Whether those hours helped or harmed him is unknowable, but nobody would design a schedule that way on purpose.

At 5 hours 15 minutes it was, when it was played, the second-longest match in the tournament's history, behind the 1992 semifinal between Stefan Edberg and Michael Chang. A first-round match in 2024, Dan Evans against Karen Khachanov, has since passed both.

The finishing-time record lasted four years. Alcaraz was on court when it fell, this time as the loser: his 2026 quarterfinal against the American Ben Shelton went to a fifth-set tiebreak and ended at 3:33 am, forty-three minutes later than the Sinner match. Shelton went on to the final. Alcaraz has now been on court for the tournament's latest finish twice.

The women's matches past 2 am

Women's matches reach these hours for a different reason. They are best of three and seldom last more than three hours, so a women's match that ends after 2 am has almost always started very late, behind a long men's match.

Sakkari and Andreescu played three and a half hours in the fourth round in 2021 and finished at 2:13 am, then the latest for a women's match at the Open. Zheng and Vekic went two minutes later in 2024, which was the women's mark through the 2025 tournament. That 2024 tournament was a rough one for the clock in general, with the Zverev finish and the post-midnight Sabalenka start falling in the same few days, and all of it came in the first year of the tournament's late-match policy.

What the tournament has done: the late-match policy

For the 2024 Open the USTA adopted a written policy on late starts. It applies to the night sessions on both stadiums. If a match scheduled there has not begun by 11:15 pm, the tournament referee has the discretion to move it to another court.

The logic is simple enough. On a night when the Ashe card is running hours behind, Armstrong or the Grandstand may be sitting empty, and the waiting pair could be playing instead of watching a clock in the locker room.

The limits of the policy are just as plain. It is discretionary, not automatic. It says "may," and the referee has to weigh a move against the ticket holders who paid to see that match in that stadium and the broadcaster that built its night around it. It does nothing about a match that starts at 10:50 pm and runs four and a half hours. And it relocates a late match without shortening it. The finishing-time record fell again in 2026, two years after the policy was written.

What the tours did, and why the Open did less

The ATP and WTA went further for their own events. Rules they introduced on a trial basis in 2024 say that no match should go on court after 11 pm without the approval of the tour supervisor, that night sessions should start no later than 7:30 pm, and that a court should carry no more than five matches a day. Those rules govern tour events. The four majors are run by their own national associations under the Grand Slam rule book, and each sets its own schedule.

The Australian Open, which had the worst problem, made the most structural change. It added a day to the tournament in 2024 by starting on a Sunday and cut the day sessions on its main arenas from three matches to two, to give the evening a cleaner start.

New York's version of that came in 2025, when the US Open also moved to a Sunday start and spread the first round across three days. That change was about selling another day of tennis as much as about lateness, and it left the evening card as it was.

Why 7 pm has not moved

The obvious fix is to start earlier. A 6 pm first serve would pull every finish forward by an hour.

It has not happened because the start time sits between two things the tournament will not give up. The day session needs enough afternoon to complete two matches and clear the building, so the evening cannot begin much sooner without cutting into it. And the audience, in the seats and on television, is at work until five or six. A night session that began at six would open to an empty stadium and miss part of prime time. The USTA has chosen full houses at 7 pm and occasional chaos at 2 am over the alternative, and commercially it is hard to argue the choice has been wrong. For the players in the second match, it is easy.

One match instead of two would solve it outright. That is the French model, and it would halve the tennis a night ticket buys.

How the tennis changes after dark

Night matches are played on the same court with the same balls, and they are a different contest.

Air is the main reason. As the temperature falls after sunset the air gets denser, and in a New York summer the humidity often climbs at the same time. A ball moving through cooler, heavier air loses a little more speed on the way to the bounce and comes up a little lower off the court. The felt picks up moisture and fluffs, which slows it further. None of these effects is large by itself. Together they are enough that players talk about the court as "slow at night" and "quick in the day" as though it were two surfaces.

Who it suits

Slower, lower conditions take something from the server. An ace out wide at 2 pm is a returnable ball at 10 pm. Rallies lengthen, and the advantage tilts toward players who defend well and are content to hit one more shot. Big servers who win quick points in the afternoon heat can find themselves in long baseline exchanges after dark, and the reverse holds too: heat and a lively ball are the great equalizer for a player with a huge serve and not much else.

Players arrive in New York after a month of North American hard-court events played largely in afternoon heat, a run explained in our guide to the US Open Series, and the first night match on Ashe can take a set to adjust to. The court's acrylic layers, and how the tournament tunes their speed, belong to the page on the US Open's hard courts.

Light

There is no sun to serve into at night, which removes one of the day session's real hazards. In its place are banks of floodlights high on the stadium rim. A lob or a high ball toss can pass straight through one, and overheads are missed at night that would be routine at noon. Depth perception under artificial light is slightly different as well, and players say it can take a few games to time the ball.

With the roof shut

Rain on a night session now means a closed roof on Ashe, and the stadium becomes something close to an indoor arena: still air, no wind, humidity held in, and the sound of 23,000 people reflected back down onto the court. Indoor hard-court tennis rewards clean, flat hitting. A player who has been using the breeze, or who relies on heavy topspin kicking up in dry heat, loses part of his or her game when the panels meet.

The crowd as a factor

Tennis has an etiquette of silence during points. The Ashe night crowd honors it loosely.

There is a constant low noise in the stadium after dark, made up of conversation, concourse traffic and the hum of a very large building, and it does not stop when the server bounces the ball. Spectators call out between first and second serves. The upper deck, a long way from the court, behaves more like a crowd at a ballgame than at a tennis match. The tournament has relaxed its own rules on movement in recent years, allowing more coming and going during play than the sport traditionally permits, which accepts the reality without changing it.

What players do with it

Some feed on it. Jimmy Connors built the most famous run in the tournament's history out of night-session noise in 1991, the year he turned 39. In the first round he came back from two sets and 0-3 down against Patrick McEnroe in a match that ended at 1:35 am, conducting the crowd between points like a bandleader, and he rode the same energy to the semifinals.

Others have to play against it. An opponent of a popular American at night is facing two things at once, and the second one is louder. Ajla Tomljanovic, who beat Serena Williams in Williams's last match in 2022, spoke afterward about how hard it had been to shut out a stadium that wanted the other result on every single point.

And sometimes the crowd simply recognizes what it is watching. In the 2001 quarterfinal between Pete Sampras and Andre Agassi, a night match in which neither man lost his serve across four sets, all four decided by tiebreaks, the stadium stood and applauded both players before the last tiebreak began. Nobody had asked them to.

Unlike anything else

Players reach for the same comparisons when they describe it: a prizefight, a concert, a basketball arena. The comparison that fits best is to the city. A night match on Ashe is loud, late and impatient, and it rewards performers. A player who shows emotion is given more of it back. A player who goes quiet can find twenty thousand people have adopted the other side by the middle of the second set.

It is not to every player's taste and it is not good for the quality of every match. It is the reason the session exists.

Forest Hills, 1975: where night tennis at a major began

The 1975 US Open changed two things at once. The West Side Tennis Club in Forest Hills, Queens, tore up the grass courts the national championships had been played on for decades and laid a gray-green American clay. And it put up floodlights.

No major had played at night before. The motive was television and ticket sales in roughly equal measure. An evening session gave the network a live event in prime time, and it gave the tournament a second gate from the same stadium on the same day. The first night match was played in the opening week, and Onny Parun of New Zealand beat the former champion Stan Smith in it.

The idea worked immediately. People who could not take a weekday off could come after work. The cooler evenings were kinder to spectators than an August afternoon in full sun. And the matches looked different on television, the court lit like a stage with darkness around it.

The move to Flushing Meadows

When the USTA left Forest Hills for the new National Tennis Center in 1978, lights were part of the plan from the first drawing. Louis Armstrong Stadium, the original main court, staged the night session for nineteen years, and many of the nights the tournament still trades on, Connors in 1991 among them, happened there. Arthur Ashe Stadium took over in 1997 and added several thousand seats to the evening gate.

The surface under the lights changed in those years too, from grass to clay to hard court in the space of five years.

What television made of it

By the 1980s the night session had become the tournament's identity in a way no one had planned. The other three majors were daytime events watched in the United States at breakfast or in the afternoon. The US Open was the one that was on at night, live, in prime time on the East Coast, with a crowd that sounded like New York.

A scheduling experiment had turned into the event's signature. That history is a large part of why the USTA is reluctant to tamper with it now. The late finishes are a cost. The session that produces them is the most recognizable thing the tournament owns, and the broader structure it sits within is set out in our US Open format explainer.

How the other majors handle the night

Each of the other three majors eventually followed New York into the evening, and each drew the line somewhere different.

Tournament	Night format	Hard stop
US Open	Two matches from 7 pm on two stadiums	None; referee may move a match not started by 11:15 pm
Australian Open	Two matches in the evening on its main arenas	None
French Open	One match on Court Philippe-Chatrier, since 2021	None
Wimbledon	No separate night session; play continues under the Centre Court and No. 1 Court roofs	11 pm curfew

Melbourne

The Australian Open has had night sessions since it moved to Melbourne Park in 1988, and it copied the American model closely: a separate evening ticket, two matches, no curfew. It has paid the same price, with interest. Lleyton Hewitt beat Marcos Baghdatis there in 2008 in a match that finished at 4:34 am, the latest finish on record at any major through 2025. Andy Murray's five-set win over Thanasi Kokkinakis in 2023 ended at 4:05 am. The changes of 2024 were a direct response.

Paris

Roland Garros had no floodlights until 2020. Its night session began in 2021, after the roof went on Court Philippe-Chatrier, and it took the opposite approach to quantity: a single match, sold as its own ticket, starting in the evening. One match cannot be delayed by another, and most Paris night sessions end at a civilized hour.

Not all. When rain wrecked the day schedule in 2024, Novak Djokovic and Lorenzo Musetti did not finish their third-round match until 3:07 am. And the one-match format has a problem New York's does not: with a single slot to fill, the organizers have chosen a men's match almost every night, and have been criticized for it every year.

Wimbledon

Wimbledon has no night session and does not want one. What it has is a roof and lights on Centre Court since 2009, which allow a match to continue past dusk, and a curfew of 11 pm agreed with the local council as a condition of building that roof. In 2012 Andy Murray finished off Marcos Baghdatis at 11:02 pm, with the referee allowing the last game to be completed. More usually a match that reaches the deadline is stopped and carried over. The 2018 semifinal between Novak Djokovic and Rafael Nadal was halted for the night after three sets and finished the next afternoon.

A curfew is a blunt instrument, and suspended matches have their own unfairness. It does mean that nobody at Wimbledon plays tennis at 2:50 am. The club's other customs are in our piece on Wimbledon's rules and traditions.

The four majors now sit along a line from Wimbledon's fixed stop to New York's and Melbourne's open-ended nights, with Paris in between. The US Open invented the thing the others adapted, and it remains the tournament least willing to rein it in. More on the sport is collected on our tennis hub.