#243 1970 · Jimmy Van Alen / US Open (USTA) · Sports administration / broadcastingdead-time
Tennis had no rule that guaranteed a match would ever end, so Van Alen wrote one in
the problem
A sport's own scoring rule allowed an individual match to run for an unbounded, unschedulable length of time
background
Traditional tennis scoring required a set to be won by two clear games, with no cap: if two evenly matched players kept trading games at 6-6, 7-7, 8-8 and beyond, the set — and the match built from several sets — had no guaranteed maximum length. For casual club play this was a curiosity; for a televised tournament with a schedule, a broadcast window, and other matches queued behind it on the same court, it was a real operational problem no rule addressed.
The sport's instinct was to treat marathon sets as tennis working as designed — a test of endurance and nerve — rather than as a scheduling defect, and no format change had ever been seriously trialed at the top level because it meant altering the game's oldest and most identity-defining rule.
the move
Jimmy Van Alen, developer of the broader Van Alen Streamlined Scoring System, proposed a hard stop: once a set reached 6-6, instead of continuing indefinitely under the two-clear-games rule, players would switch to a separate, bounded mini-game — an early sudden-death, best-of-nine-points format — whose winner took the set outright regardless of the two-game margin. The US Open adopted it experimentally in 1970, the first Grand Slam to do so, signaled to spectators by a red 'Sudden Death' flag raised at the umpire's chair once a set reached 6-6.
the payoff
Fans at the 1970 US Open reportedly received the format with enthusiasm even as several top players, including Pancho Gonzales, publicly complained about its abruptness and intensity; the format was refined over the following years into the now-standard best-of-twelve-point tiebreak and was adopted across the sport.
what came after
The tiebreak is now standard at every level of tennis and is directly credited with preventing marathon sets like the 1991 Wimbledon semifinal between Stefan Edberg and Michael Stich from becoming unbounded — Edberg himself remarked that without it, he and Stich might still be out there playing — and Van Alen's core insight, that an open-ended rule needs a separate bounded escape hatch, is now built into virtually every competitive format that inherited tennis's old scoring logic.
references
- [1]Jimmy Van AlenWikipedia, 2026en.wikipedia.org
- [2]50 Years of Influence, US Open: James Van AlenTennis.com, 2020tennis.com