US Open (Tennis)

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

The US Open has played its championship matches at three different venues in three different American states, a history none of the other three majors shares. The tournament began in August 1881 at the Newport Casino, a resort clubhouse in Newport, Rhode Island built specifically for the sport, where the first US National Singles Championship crowned Richard Sears as its inaugural men's champion.

The tournament left Newport in 1915 for the West Side Tennis Club in Forest Hills, in the New York City borough of Queens, a move driven by the sport's growing spectator numbers and by New York's status as the country's tennis and social capital. Forest Hills hosted the championship for more than six decades, through the start of the Open Era in 1968 and the tournament's rise into the modern professional game.

The tournament's final move came in 1978, when it relocated a few miles away within Queens to Flushing Meadows Corona Park, into a newly built stadium that has expanded twice since, first with the addition of Arthur Ashe Stadium in 1997, still the largest tennis venue in the world by seating capacity, and later with a retractable roof completed in 2016 so that rain no longer threatens the tournament's tight two week schedule. The complex was renamed the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center in 2006, honoring the same player who won the tournament's singles title four times and who fought for equal prize money for women there in 1973, a change the US Open adopted before any of the other three majors.

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

The tournament now called the US Open began as a men only event in August 1881, organized by the newly formed United States National Lawn Tennis Association at the Newport Casino in Rhode Island. A separate women's national championship followed in 1887, six years later, first held at the Philadelphia Cricket Club rather than at Newport, and the men's and women's championships were not merged into one combined event at a single site until 1968.

That 1968 merger arrived alongside the tournament's larger transformation: the start of the Open Era, when for the first time professional players were permitted to enter alongside amateurs, ending a distinction that had shaped the tournament, like the sport generally, since 1881. The championship adopted its now familiar name, the US Open, that same year, retiring the US National Championships title the event had carried for eighty seven years.

Billie Jean King's 1973 campaign for equal prize money made the US Open the first of the four majors to pay its men's and women's singles champions the same amount, a change other majors did not match for decades afterward; Wimbledon was the last of the four to equalize prize money, in 2007. The tournament's move to hard courts, and its reputation for late night finishes under the lights of a major media market, have given the US Open a character distinct from the other three majors' older, more tradition bound settings, even though its own origin in 1881 makes it, after Wimbledon, the second oldest of the four.