As a player, Jimmy Van Alen never made much of a name for himself at the U.S. National Championships, now the US Open. He entered the tournament only once, shortly before his 29th birthday, and won his debut match before being dismissed in straight sets in the next round. That happened in 1931, two decades prior to his becoming president of the Newport Casino, one of the nation’s oldest tennis clubs, in his hometown of Newport, R.I. There he would devise the most revolutionary change to tennis's scoring system in the history of the sport—the tiebreak set.
Van Alen came up with the idea in 1954, the same year he decided to convert the Newport Casino—the original home of the U.S. National Championships—into what is now the International Tennis Hall of Fame. He was serving as tournament director of the Newport Casino Invitational, a tournament with a long history of attracting the world’s premier players, when he saw the crowd grow increasingly restless as they waited for the men’s singles final between Louis Straight Clark and Ham Richardson to end. The fans wanted to see Lew Hoad and Ken Rosewall, two of the game’s top stars, play doubles but had to hold on for five sets—a total of 83 games—before Richardson managed to win the singles crown. Van Alen decided on the spot to do something about seemingly interminable matches.
“There had to be a better, more exciting way to control the length of matches.”
“There had to be a better, more exciting way to control the length of matches without those damnable deuce sets,” he said.
By nature a progressive thinker, he came up with Van Alen’s Serving and Scoring System—more simply known as VASSS. His invention included placing the service line three feet behind the baseline to deemphasize the serve and a scoring system much like the one featured in table tennis.
Van Alen experimented with his changes to the game at the 1958 Newport Casino Invitational, but they didn’t take hold, so he went back to the drawing board and came up with a new version of VASSS—the Van Alen Simplified Scoring System—in which the first player to reach 31 points was the winner of the set, while a match consisted of either two or four 31-point sets. If the score in a set was tied at 30-30, the players had to play a “tie-break” of nine points, which Van Alen at first called an “extra game.” The player who won five of the tiebreak points was declared the winner of the set.
Van Alen lobbied repeatedly at meetings of the United States Lawn Tennis Association (now the USTA) and with the International Lawn Tennis Federation (now the ITF) to have his system implemented, but they refused to adopt any of his modifications. With nowhere else to turn, he eventually gave up trying to convince the sport’s governing bodies and went to the game’s leading pros. In mid-July 1965, Van Alen staged a $10,000 event at Newport that used the VASSS system. The 10-man round-robin tournament was not warmly embraced by the pro players.
“It will take a month of play to get used to this scoring and the service restriction,” said Rod Laver, who won the tournament.
“I’ll never play this again,” Richard “Pancho” Gonzales said after failing to make the final. “I’m not going to play the game for 25 years and then get beaten by someone in a freak thing.”
But even if the VASSS system was not fully accepted by players, it did not completely disappear. Several tournaments continued to experiment with scoring systems that limited the length of sets, with seven-, eight-, nine- and 12-point tiebreaks receiving tryouts.
Van Alen’s nine-point tiebreak, with the players alternating serves at 2-2-2-3, was the first to break through. Eager to make the US Open more exciting in its second year, tournament officials for the 1969 US Open decided to add a new event during the first week of the competition—a consolation tournament for first-round losers, with $12,000 in prize money at stake—and to make it more interesting by using Van Alen’s nine-point tiebreak. Often referred to as the “sudden death” tiebreak because the set could be determined by a single point, it became an instant hit with US Open fans.
The first open tournament to use a tiebreak in its main draw took place five months later, in February 1970, at the U.S. Pro Indoor Championships in Philadelphia. The event featured many of the game’s top players—including Margaret Court, Billie Jean King, Tony Roche and Laver—and started out with a seven-point tiebreak before shifting in the later rounds to a 12-point tiebreak, in which the first player to reach seven points wins the set, unless the point score is 6-all. Unlike the odd-point tiebreak, in which a player can win the set by a single point, the even-point tiebreak requires a victory margin of two points.
Stan Smith, the highest-ranked American man in the tournament, gave the tiebreak a thumbs-up. The new scoring system was “the game of the future,” he said. “But it will take some adjusting by the players to realize that each point is crucial in a tie‐breaker.”
Players generally preferred the 12-point tiebreak, maintaining that the nine-point tiebreak gave an unfair advantage to the player who served an extra time if the set reached the last point. Arthur Ashe called the sudden death tiebreak “a kamikaze drill.” Virginia Wade said, “It’s not fair to have the outcome of the match hinge on such a short playoff.”
Yet the USTA had already decided following the 1969 US Open to endorse Van Alan’s tiebreak, not only because it had tested well with US Open fans but for its television potential. Recognizing America’s growing appetite to consume live sports on television, the USTA had signed a broadcast agreement with CBS prior to the 1969 US Open for the network to televise the tournament for five years, at $100,000 per year—double the rights fee paid by CBS to air the inaugural US Open in 1968. Using a streamlined scoring system throughout the tournament would help with the scheduling and make the growing sport more inviting to television viewers.
As the months edged closer to the 1970 US Open, the USTA tried the sudden death tiebreak at three lead-in tournaments over the summer, including the U.S. Pro Tennis Championships in Boston, which gave the scoring system its first national television exposure.
“Why use this tournament to experiment?” Laver asked. “It’s one of the biggest events in the world, with a lot of money at stake, and we’re playing a bloody system that the players don’t want and the people don’t understand.”
A number of players signed a letter of protest and sent it to the US Open leadership. They were not swayed.
“We consider this to be major step forward for the game of tennis,” US Open tournament director William Talbert said of the nine-point tiebreak. “It provides tennis with a finish line, such as we have in racing, basketball, football and other major sports.”
Van Alen’s tiebreak made its Grand Slam tournament debut at the 1970 US Open on Wednesday, September 2, and was hailed by the New York Times as “the most revolutionary step the sport has ever taken in its scoring system.” The tournament notified fans around the grounds that a tiebreak was about to begin by raising above the court a red flag whose big white letters of S and D—representing sudden death—dwarfed a smaller V and A logo, a nod to Van Alen and his renamed “Streamlined Scoring System.”
Nearly half of the 43 matches played on Opening Day staged at least one tiebreak set. Twenty-six tiebreaks took place in all, including two fifth-set tiebreaks, neither of which reached nine points. If they had, a uniquely remarkable situation would have occurred: both players would have held match point.
One of the day’s most anticipated matches on Stadium Court, between Smith and his frequent doubles partner, Bob Lutz, included a tiebreak that required all nine points to be played in the second set. After Smith knotted the score at 3-all in the tiebreak, Lutz held the last three serves but was unable to capitalize on his advantage. Pushing a volley outside the lines on the ninth point, he lost the set and, eventually, the match.
“I think Bob’s philosophy on the ninth point was to serve to my backhand, since I play the forehand court in doubles,” Smith said afterwards. “I guess I was pretty lucky on the tiebreaker. It could have gone either way.”
In the next round, Gonzales became one of the first players to play two tiebreak sets in a match. He survived both bouts with the sudden death tiebreak, defeating the young Soviet star Vladimir Korotkov, 7-6, 6-3, 7-6, but was not thrilled by the ordeal.
“I feel I use more energy in eight points or nine points during a tiebreaker than I do in an entire set,” said the 42-year-old Gonzales, a player long-admired by fans for his steely resolve. “The nervous strain is too much. I might have a heart attack.”
Although the tiebreak experiment received overwhelming approval from the tennis fans who attended the 1970 US Open, the players continued to voice their complaints against it. Too much money was on the line for a match to be decided by just a few points, they argued. In 1975, the US Open finally gave in to the players’ demands and replaced the sudden death tiebreak with the 12-point tiebreak, which is still being used today.
Van Alen was not pleased by the change to the longer tiebreak. “Lingering death,” he called it.
Nevertheless, the US Open has proven time and again over the past 50 years that whenever a tiebreak begins, a match is never more alive.
