{"id":346605,"date":"2025-12-14T02:41:19","date_gmt":"2025-12-14T02:41:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/346605\/"},"modified":"2025-12-14T02:41:19","modified_gmt":"2025-12-14T02:41:19","slug":"tournament-boss-craig-tiley-could-become-the-new-chief-of-the-us-open-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/346605\/","title":{"rendered":"Tournament boss Craig Tiley could become the new chief of the US Open"},"content":{"rendered":"

Tiley came under intense scrutiny when the Australian Open was heavily impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic<\/a>. The 2021 tournament was delayed \u2013 held in February instead \u2013 and required tennis players to undergo quarantine beforehand in Australia. The following year the tournament was overshadowed by the Novak Djokovic deportation saga<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"Novak<\/p>\n

Novak Djokovic with Tiley after the 2021 Australian Open men\u2019s final.Credit: Getty Images<\/p>\n

Tiley joined TA as director of tennis in 2005 before becoming the Melbourne grand slam\u2019s tournament director the following year.<\/p>\n

He has openly been driven by the lofty ambition to transform the Australian Open into the biggest sporting event on the planet<\/a>. Organisers are close to awarding players $100 million in prizemoney, an amount that has risen sharply from $76.5 million in 2023, to $86.5 million for the 2024 event and $96.5 million this year.<\/p>\n

Nearly two years ago, Tiley told this masthead he had emerged from the \u201cmost difficult\u201d period of his working life \u2013 the pandemic and Djokovic\u2019s deportation \u2013 intent on not only enhancing Australia\u2019s slam, but playing a role in revolutionising the entire circuit.<\/p>\n

In the same interview, Tiley said he did not believe in putting a time limit on a leadership position and would remain in his dual role in Australia until he no longer had the energy or motivation, or if he felt he was no longer innovating enough.<\/p>\n

\u201cI want the Australian Open to be the biggest sporting event, not just in the southern hemisphere, or in January, but the biggest sporting event in the world,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re going to expand the time we have, which we\u2019ve already started doing with the opening week, and we\u2019re going to be at the forefront of the technological experience. You\u2019ve got to invest millions of dollars in digital transformation.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think when you do come on-site here, you\u2019ve got to feel that you\u2019re in the most special experience in the world, and the only way you do feel that is if I know exactly what you want. So, you\u2019ll be creating a million different experiences. That\u2019s a challenge for people because it\u2019s not the way people normally think.\u201d<\/p>\n

Tiley is a former South African Davis Cup captain and highly successful college coach at the University of Illinois in the United States. He led the \u201cFighting Illini\u201d to the NCAA title in 2003 and was inducted into the school\u2019s athletics hall of fame in 2017.<\/p>\n

Watch all the Australian Open action live on Nine, 9Now and Stan from Sunday, January 18.<\/p>\n

News, results and expert analysis from the weekend of sport are sent every Monday. Sign up for our Sport newsletter<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Tiley came under intense scrutiny when the Australian Open was heavily impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. The 2021…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":344600,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[565],"tags":[64,63,85,747],"class_list":["post-346605","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tennis","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-sports","tag-tennis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/346605","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=346605"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/346605\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/344600"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=346605"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=346605"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=346605"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}