Ever Ambitious, Craig Tiley Makes His Next Move
From Africa to Australia to America, Craig Tiley has kept his eyes on the horizon for chances to advance. Next stop: the U.S. Open.
The worst kept secret in tennis was officially confirmed on Tuesday afternoon, as Craig Tiley, the longtime Tennis Australia chief executive and Australian Open tournament director, was named the new chief executive of the U.S. Tennis Association.
“Tiley will formally assume his responsibilities as USTA CEO in the coming months as he continues to work closely with the Board of Directors of Tennis Australia to ensure a smooth transition of leadership,” the U.S.T.A.’s press release said in announcing a replacement for Lew Sherr, who had vacated the role last June.
For Tiley, now in his mid-60s, it’s the latest step in a singularly ambitious career up the leadership ladder of tennis, driven by a mentality forged in an unlikely fire: a Cold War proxy battle in Angola.
One Battle After Another
“That’s where I learned you have to be aggressive,” Tiley said of his time in the South African Army in a 2003 interview with The Decatur Herald and Review. “That’s where I learned if there’s something out there, you have to go after it.”
Tiley, who said he patrolled South Africa’s borders with both Angola1 and Mozambique, “protecting the borders from Cubans and Russians,” said the lessons he learned as a rifle-toting soldier stuck with him.
“I lived on a battleground, and there was fighting,” Tiley said. “I never saw anyone get killed, but I shot in that direction.”
Tiley’s service topped out at the rank of lieutenant before turning his work toward rising up the ranks of tennis. The 2003 profile in The Decatur Herald and Review, when he was head coach of the University of Illinois’ men’s tennis team, paints a portrait of Tiley that remains recognizable—most clearly his nonstop appetite for work. Even then, Tiley said he was getting by on only four hours of sleep a night.
“I never go to bed before 2 a.m.,” Tiley said. “My most productive time is from 11 p.m. to 2 a.m. that’s when I plan the next day. If I feel it’s well-planned, the next day is pretty easy.”
Tiley began coaching the team in 1992 when they were in the basement of the Big Ten, and turned Illinois into a powerhouse juggernaut. Illinois won an NCAA national championship in 2003 with a perfect 32–0 record.
Soon, Tiley was onto the next assignment, becoming Tennis Australia’s Director of Player Development in 2005. Tiley assumed his most visible role a year later, becoming Australian Open tournament director in 2006. Tiley further consolidated his power Down Under by becoming Tennis Australia’s chief executive in 2013.
An Era of Sunshine and Happiness
Tiley’s tenure was a boom time for the Australian Open, which grew closer toward parity with the other majors than it ever had before. Players as recent as Andre Agassi had skipped the Australian Open for big chunks of their career; Agassi didn’t deign to make the trip to Melbourne until 1995, by which point he’d already played the U.S. Open nine times. Once he showed up he loved the place, winning four of his eight majors there.
By Tiley’s time, player attendance in Australia was as good as at any of the other majors. The facilities were arguably the best, too, with three stadiums with retractable rooves—still the most of any major.
But it was another men’s tennis star who gave the tournament its calling card in Tiley’s time.
As I wrote for Racquet in 2022:
The year’s first Grand Slam event has made good vibes its calling card, sending scenes of Southern Hemisphere sunshine to viewers in the cold, dark north. As it grew in stature toward parity with the other Grand Slam events, the Australian Open capitalized on a soundbite from one of its favorite adopted sons.
“It’s kind of like ‘The Happy Slam,’ so to speak, because people are happy to play again, happy to see each other,” Roger Federer said in 2007, shortly before winning his third of six Australian Open titles. “It’s a great, great tournament. Things are really easy here: hotels close to the courts; always a lot of fans on the grounds.”
Federer’s turn-of-phrase lodged itself firmly into the tennis consciousness, and Tiley leaned into a player service ethos. Sometimes the catering went way overboard—the year where players could get unlimited food from the player restaurant went as badly as you’d expect—but mostly Tiley and his team earned raves—no other tournament director ever earned as many personal mentions by name from players as Tiley did.
From The New York Times in 2015:
The cafeteria has had goji berries, chia seeds and an endless supply of fresh sushi. The child-care center has had an entire staff care for a minor boom of player babies. The salon had free hair-waxing treatments, even for the men.
Now, with the planned construction of a $100 million center for player services next to Rod Laver Arena — a stadium named after a man banished for years from the Open because he insisted on being paid — far more is in the offing, including his-and-her hot-and-cold plunge pools, outdoor and indoor player lounges and high-tech locker rooms stuffed with rounded couches and flat-screen TVs.
Tom Larner, director of facilities for the Open, said the building was part of a yearslong effort to improve players’ lives, an effort that includes doubling the prize money to $32 million this year from $16 million in 2007; stipends for travel, accommodation and food expenses; and, this year, free racket stringing.
The tournament already built a tennis training site in the first phase of an $800 million government-funded redevelopment of Melbourne Park. A golf-cart ride from the Laver arena, the training center has eight indoor and five outdoor hardcourts, eight outdoor clay courts and a vast gym that players describe with awe. The new building, part of the second phase of construction, is expected to be completed as soon as 2017.
“Maybe because it’s so far for most of us, the Australian Open is more welcoming than any other tournament in the world,” said Eric Butorac, president of the ATP’s Player Council. “It’s awesome here.”
Butorac, fittingly, will be working side-by-side with Tiley in New York: he was announced last year as the U.S. Open’s new tournament director, succeeding Stacey Allaster after years of working under her wing in tournament leadership rules.
The U.S. Open has never done anything like the handouts which won Tiley so many fans in the player ranks.
More from that 2015 NYT article:
This year, the travel stipends total about $1,088,000, with $1,979 going to each player, including qualifiers. Each receives $300 per night for a hotel and $60 per day for meals. Tournament officials said the stipends and per diems were expected to rise next year.
“We said to the players, by the time we hit 2016, we’re going to take all your costs away,” said Craig Tiley, the tournament director.
To save players airline booking and flight change fees, Tiley formed a unit to operate an around-the-clock travel service.
Tiley’s Tennis Australia has also had a uniquely entrepreneurial spirit beyond the month-long Australian summer swing, taking a leading role in creating and managing the Laver Cup in 2017.
Dark Shadows Cast by the Happy Slam
But as those who have paid attention to the last decades of the Australian Open know well, not everything has been unlimited sushi and ear-to-ear smiles.
Tiley had a strange penchant for promising that stars who seemed unlikely to play his event would be there guaranteed: he was wrong about Serena Williams in 2018, and he was wrong again about Roger Federer in 2021.
Tiley also regularly fearmongered about an imminent threat of the Australian Open being stolen away, as if by thieves in the night, to China or the Middle East, as a gambit to secure even more government funding for his event.
One of the most notable things to me, which might not always come through as clearly on television: the Australian Open has a creeping commercialism which is unmatched among the majors.
In 2016 the tournament became the only major this century to introduce a prominent gambling sponsor when it signed with William Hill; that tournament was overshadowed by reports of match-fixing, including a report I did for The New York Times about suspicious betting patterns in a mixed doubles match.
This year the tournament renamed Show Court 3 as ANZ Arena, its third court with a corporate title sponsor after Kia Arena and 1573 Arena. The other three majors have a combined zero courts named after corporate sponsors.
One name hasn’t changed, however, disregarding the calls of many: after years of virulent homophobic and transphobic comments, Margaret Court’s name remains affixed to Margaret Court Arena. Those calls reached a peak in 2017, after comments Court made criticizing Casey Dellacqua and her partner having a baby appalled many tennis players.
Tennis Australia said that Court’s views “do not align with Tennis Australia’s values of equality, inclusion and diversity,” but never changed the name.
The next year, Billie Jean King sat next to Tiley at an Australian Open press conference—where she was named “Australian Open Woman of the Year” and appeared to stun Tiley when she changed the headlines of the day by saying the name of the arena should be changed away from her former rival.
But the biggest controversy of Tiley’s tenure was still a few years away. After staging the 2020 Australian Open right before Covid-19 became a full-blown global pandemic, and losing A$100 million staging a 2021 event that required weeks of players in quarantine, it was the 2022 edition which probably should have derailed Tiley.
With Australia and other countries mandating vaccination for travel, Tiley’s tournament arranged an exemption program which provided a late and dubious exemption for nine-time champion Novak Djokovic, who had loudly refused to get vaccinated. Tiley’s gambit badly misread the appetite of the lockdown-weary Australian public for any rule bending, and resulted in a geopolitical firestorm and backlash that saw Djokovic detained and then deported. Though Tiley bore ultimate responsibility for the fiasco, he remarkably continued onward in his role for another four editions of the tournament.
Not only did Tiley not resign as some expected, he didn’t seem to miss a beat from what could’ve been a career-crippling moment. If anything, his ambitions at the Australian Open accelerated: he built out the tournament’s “Opening Week” full of exhibition programming like the 1 Point Slam, and ramped up the festival-like roster of performing musicians and other non-tennis attractions.
Many fans complained of overcrowding, but the tournament boasted about the 1,368,043 people who came through the gates over its three weeks last month.
If Tiley Can Make It There, Can He Make It Anywhere?
In some ways the move to New York is an upward one: the U.S. Open remains bigger, as an event and a brand, than the Australian Open, and the U.S. population is about 12 times bigger than Australia’s. There was also a personal draw to the U.S. for Tiley and his family, as his wife, Ali, is an American.
In some ways, the move is a lateral one; Tiley had worked to put the Australian Open closer to level footing with the U.S. Open. Both Tennis Australia and the U.S. Tennis Association are each one of what I often refer to as the “Seven Kingdoms” that rule the tennis landscape. The U.S. piece of the pie is undoubtedly bigger, but any one of the seven terrains is already major real estate.
And in some ways, the move might be a downward one. Tiley’s most visible role in Australia was as tournament director, and Eric Butorac holds that post in New York. How much will Tiley be able—or want—to get as much power, control, and credit as he got for all those years in Melbourne? The U.S.T.A. also figures to have considerably more bureaucracy, and operate under considerably more scrutiny, than Tiley had to face during his time Down Under, where he was essentially an emperor on an island.
There are two other parts of Tiley’s philosophy that I will be interested to watch translate to his position at a different helm.
The first is Tiley’s uniquely conciliatory approach to the PTPA, as evidenced by Tennis Australia breaking ranks with its codefendants to start settlement talks with the insurgent group that has been dragging tennis governing bodies into costly legal battles.
“What I can say is that we decided as an organization early on that if we’ve got to expend resources ... we would much rather make it in compensating the players and growing the game than we would in legal fees and damages,” Tiley said in January. Could Tiley push the U.S.T.A. toward a similar rapprochement?
The second element, not for nothing given the Trump administration’s increasing insertion of itself into major moments in American sports: under Tiley, the Australian Open became, unexpectedly, by far the “wokest” of the four majors.
From this year’s tournament programming:
Wednesday 21 January marks Evonne Goolagong Cawley Day and will feature a Welcome to Country, performances from Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander dance groups, live music including didgeridoo performances, First Nations art exhibitions, soundscapes and Indigenous ballkids taking centre stage on court.
In a striking contrast to the event’s inaction on Margaret Court Arena’s name, the Australian Open flies pride flags all over the grounds, holds a large LGBT tennis tournament called “Glam Slam” on its courts in the second week, and is the only tournament where I’ve ever seen drag queens roaming the grounds.
Ever the busy workaholic, Tiley was often hard to find on the grounds of the Australian Open, but he always found time to attend the AO Pride Launch event, emceed each year by Nick McCarvel.
What this all might mean in terms of how Tiley faces political intrusions and interference at the U.S. Open isn’t clear—and how Trump derailed last year’s U.S. Open men’s final should be remembered—but this is the base from which Tiley is starting.
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South Africa no longer borders Angola, of course, due to Namibian independence.
"One of the most notable things to me, which might not always come through as clearly on television: the Australian Open has a creeping commercialism which is unmatched among the majors."
This is what I fear most, because the U.S. Open's current commercialism seemed unmatched to me. On top of that, Tiley has always seemed a bit sleazy to me -- because of his annual false promises about who would be playing, and especially because of his role in the Djokovic fiasco in 2022.
Thanks Ben. I didn’t know that the AO was so forward thinking when it comes to LGBTQ issues, let alone that Tiley himself is so supportive. That is heartening to hear and hopefully bodes well for his tenure with the USTA.