Can the US Open Still Be the ‘People’s Slam’?

This summer, as part of his broader effort to make New York’s cultural spectacles more accessible, Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced that the city would be making $100 tickets to the U.S. Open available to 1,000 residents.

The U.S. Open has not always needed a $100 ticket program though. For decades, affordable tickets were simply part of the Queens-based tournament. 

In 1999, a U.S. Open ticket was $35. In 2012, a grounds pass cost as little as $54, which gave fans access to the tournament’s outside courts and unreserved seating without buying a ticket to Arthur Ashe Stadium. In 2015 and 2018, USTA offered grounds passes for finals week at just $25.

“For generations the US Open has traded on its reputation as the people’s slam,” sports writer Bryan Arman Graham recently wrote in The Guardian. “Take the 7 train to Queens, buy a grounds pass and spend the day milling about within a few feet of the world’s best tennis players.”

The phrase “people’s slam” sounds quaint in a new era when a seat close enough to see the players’ faces can cost more than many New Yorkers earn in a week.

This year, grounds passes started at just $65, but tickets reached $363 on the tournament’s official resale market. Before the tournament, the average get-in price for a first-round session was $197, up 33 percent from the previous year. And in Arthur Ashe Stadium, a single courtside seat could cost more than $2,000, while hospitality packages ran into the tens of thousands. The traditionally affordable event has become an ostentatious show with prices out of working-class budgets  — something The New York Times recently described as a “tale of two U.S. Opens.”

Growing demand can explain part of the U.S. Open becoming such an expensive sporting event. The tournament surpassed one million visitors for the first time in 2024 and welcomed nearly 1.2 million in 2025. But the U.S. Open is also changing what it sells.

Arthur Ashe Stadium is currently undergoing an $800 million transformation. The project will add 2,000 courtside seats, expanding the courtside section from 3,000 to 5,000 seats, alongside new luxury suites and hospitality spaces. At the same time, roughly 3,500 moderately priced loge seats are being removed. The old loge inventory averaged about $291 per session; many of the new courtside seats replacing it average more than $560, while some hospitality offerings cost more than $2,300.

The pattern is familiar across American sports. Professional leagues have long operated as profit-maximising enterprises, but the ways they generate revenue — across premium seating, private equity, and increasingly expensive fan experiences — continue to evolve toward broader unaffordability. The U.S. Open is following that broader commercial logic even as it tries to cultivate the image of an accessible New York institution.

That tension raises a pressing question: can the U.S. Open remain a “people’s slam” when access to its most valuable spaces increasingly depends on who can pay?

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani offered one answer this summer.

In August, his administration worked with the USTA to make 1,000 US Open tickets available exclusively to New York City residents for $100 each. The tickets included seats in Arthur Ashe and Louis Armstrong stadiums and grounds access to the rest of the tennis center. New Yorkers could purchase up to two tickets on a first-come, first-served basis.

The response was immediate. Reports put the online queue at more than 100,000 people, and, at its peak, over half a million. Clearly, there was significant demand for affordable access to the tournament.

The $100 ticket program is far too small to change the economics of the US Open. One thousand tickets represents a negligible share of a tournament that draws more than a million people. 

That doesn’t mean it’s not meaningful. This summer, the city carved out an affordable space inside an increasingly exclusive system. The discounted ticket program establishes a pool of tickets in which residency and interest, rather than purchasing power, determine who gets access. For the program, affordability is an explicit goal — much like the administration’s reduced World Cup tickets and the broader platform of city leadership. 

That is a limited form of economic democracy: not an attempt to remake the business model of professional tennis, but an acknowledgment that access to a major institution can be treated as a public concern in addition to a commercial one. Crucially, the program advances the simple principle that New Yorkers should have some opportunity to attend the major sporting event that takes place in their own city.

For a sport with such a long history as a class marker, that assertion is a marginal but meaningful shift. Economic democracy has found a foothold, however small, at the concrete courts of the U.S. Open. The “people’s slam” in New York is still an idea worth fighting for.