Here is the closing time of the Arthur Ashe Stadium night session for the first six nights of the 2026 US Open, as compiled by the tennis site Puntodebreak:

Three finishes past two in the morning. Five past midnight. Exactly one night — one — on which the last ball was struck before the calendar turned over. If a restaurant kept these hours it would be a nightclub. If a nightclub kept these hours it would be a normal nightclub, which is roughly the point.

Night One, In Detail

The first of those 2 AM finishes deserves its own paragraph, because it is the one people will remember.

On the opening Sunday, the night session on Ashe led with Novak Djokovic against Mariano Navone. That match — the one where Djokovic lost in the first round of the US Open for the first time in his life — went four hours and thirty-six minutes. It ended a little after midnight.

Then Venus Williams walked out.

Williams is 46 years old. She was playing Sofia Kenin. Her match — the second match of a session that had started at 7 PM — began, per the tournament’s own clock, at 12:13 in the morning, which is the latest start in the history of the US Open. Kenin won in straight sets. They finished after 2 AM. Asked about it afterward, Williams described the scheduling as “not ideal,” which is the kind of thing a seven-time major champion says when she has decided not to say the other thing.

Nobody planned for Venus Williams to play tennis at 1:30 in the morning. But nobody planned against it, either, and that is the entire problem in one sentence.

Why It Keeps Happening

The night session at the US Open is two matches. It starts at 7 PM. A best-of-five men’s match can run four and a half hours on a bad night. A women’s best-of-three can run two and a half. Add a changeover, a warm-up, and a walk-on with the lights and the music, and the arithmetic does itself: if the first match goes long, the second match starts near midnight, and there is no mechanism — none — to stop it.

Other tournaments have found mechanisms. Wimbledon has an 11 PM curfew imposed by the local council, and the tennis simply stops. The Australian Open, after Andy Murray finished a match at 4:05 AM in 2023 and called it a “farce,” added a fifteenth day to its schedule to ease the crush. Roland Garros runs one night match, not two.

The US Open runs two, at 7, and has for years. When the question was put to tournament director Stacey Allaster two summers ago, the answer was that a 6 PM start had been considered and rejected because “it’s hard for New Yorkers to get here even at 7 PM,” and that the tournament was “staying the course with two night matches” while continuing to “evaluate it.” This year, per multiple reports, the tournament’s position is the same. The evaluating continues. So do the 2 AM finishes.

The Players

The complaints are not new, which is part of what makes this year’s version of them so grim — the same people are saying the same things into the same microphones, at the same hour. Jessica Pegula and Aryna Sabalenka have both spoken out this fortnight about what the schedule does to recovery: a player who leaves the court at 2 AM still has press, treatment, food, and a car to Manhattan before sleep, which puts lights-out somewhere around dawn and a next match, potentially, the following afternoon.

Carlos Moyá, who coached Rafael Nadal for eight years and is not a man given to radical proposals, offered one anyway this week: first match at 11 AM, three or four matches through the day, no night session, and a hard rule that the last match cannot start after 9 PM. It is a sensible schedule. It is also, in the current economics of the tournament, a fantasy, because the night session is where the television money lives and the television money is why the prize pool hit a record this year.

That is the trade, stated plainly. The players got a 20 percent raise. In exchange, a few of them get to play Venus Williams’ hours.

The Seats

There is one more number, and it is the one the tournament should worry about most, because it is not about the players.

At 2 AM on Arthur Ashe Stadium — capacity 23,000-and-change — the crowd is not 23,000. It is not 10,000. Reports from this week’s late finishes describe a lower bowl with more empty blue seats than people, and an upper bowl that has simply gone home. The television broadcast, which is the reason the session starts at 7, is by 2 AM being watched by insomniacs and the players’ families. The tennis being protected for the audience is being played, at the end, for nobody.

“It’s hard for New Yorkers to get here even at 7 PM.” Fair enough. It is also, it turns out, hard for them to still be there at two.

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