#374 1970 · Jimmy Van Alen / US Open (USTA) · Sports administration / broadcasting
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.
what everyone would do
Treat marathon sets as tennis working exactly as designed -- a legitimate test of endurance and nerve -- rather than as a scheduling defect, and leave the two-clear-games rule untouched, since it was the sport's oldest and most identity-defining feature.
what they saw
Van Alen saw that the open-ended, two-clear-games rule wasn't a feature to be preserved everywhere, it was a scheduling risk hiding inside the sport's core scoring logic -- the fix didn't require replacing that rule, only adding a separate, bounded escape hatch that activated once the normal process had already had a fair chance to resolve itself and simply hadn't.
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.
why it works
Letting the standard two-clear-games rule run until 6-6 preserved the sport's normal competitive logic for the vast majority of sets that end well before then, so the change cost nothing in the common case. Switching to a bounded sudden-death mini-game only once a set reached that threshold guaranteed a hard maximum length without altering how any ordinary set was played or decided, which is why the tiebreak could be adopted without touching tennis's identity in the 93%+ of sets that never reach it. Because the forcing mechanism only activates as a fallback, it solves the unbounded-duration problem exactly where it actually occurs, rather than changing the rule for every match to fix a risk that only materializes rarely.
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.
where it breaks
This only works when the underlying open-ended process genuinely has a natural resolution point most of the time, so the bounded fallback is a rare exception rather than the normal outcome -- if stalemates were common rather than occasional, capping the process at a threshold would functionally replace the original rule rather than supplement it. It also requires participants and audiences to accept the fallback's legitimacy once triggered; several top players' public complaints about the format's abruptness show that even a well-designed forcing mechanism can face resistance for feeling like a lesser or less 'real' way to decide the outcome than the process it interrupts.
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
- [3]The US Open introduced the tiebreak set 50 years ago todayUS Open (USTA), 2020usopen.org