Tennis Players Hated the Tiebreak So Much They Rewrote It Within a Year

Jimmy Van Alen spent close to two decades trying to convince tennis to adopt his tiebreak system before anyone actually let him try it in a major tournament.

When the US Open finally did in 1970, the New York Times called it the most revolutionary step tennis scoring had taken since love became a synonym for losing. Players hated it almost immediately.

The Newport aristocrat who wanted sudden death

Van Alen grew up in a Newport, Rhode Island mansion with servants and a Rolls-Royce in the driveway, and went on to found the International Tennis Hall of Fame in 1954.

His tiebreak idea, first developed around 1958, was designed to solve a real problem: tennis sets with no tiebreak could theoretically run forever, since a set had to be won by two clear games with no cap.

His original version, which he genuinely called Sudden Death, was brutal in its simplicity. Once a set reached 6-all, players would play a nine-point tiebreak, first to five points, decided outright on that final point. Crucially, this created a bizarre and genuinely dramatic possibility: because of how the scoring landed, both players could simultaneously hold match point on the exact same point.

Van Alen was such a showman about it that he’d sit courtside with a giant red flag reading “SD” for sudden death, physically raising it above the court whenever a set reached 6-all to signal the drama about to unfold. Arthur Ashe described the atmosphere at the 1970 US Open perfectly: “Those red flags are out and the crowd is absolutely silent.”

The players revolted, politely but firmly

Fans loved Sudden Death. Players petitioned to have it removed almost immediately. The specific complaint centered on how little room the format left for a mistake, a single unlucky point deciding an entire match with almost no chance to recover from a bad shot or bad call.

Rod Laver, one of the sport’s biggest stars at the time, helped develop an alternative that first appeared at a Philadelphia indoor event: a twelve-point tiebreak, first to seven points, requiring a two-point margin to win, giving players room to fight back from a shaky start the way a normal game or set allows. Van Alen despised this compromise so much he gave it his own dismissive nickname: “lingering death.”

The version that survived, and what got left behind

Laver’s twelve-point, win-by-two format is the tiebreak every tennis fan knows today, standard across every tour event and every Grand Slam. It’s fairer, unquestionably, giving players genuine room to recover from an early mistake rather than living or dying on a single unlucky point.

But it’s also less theatrical than what Van Alen originally envisioned. True sudden death, where a single point could end a match and both players stood on the knife’s edge simultaneously, generated a specific kind of unbearable tension that the fairer, more forgiving version simply can’t replicate. Tennis chose fairness over that particular flavor of drama, and it’s hard to argue that was the wrong call competitively. It’s a little harder to argue nothing was lost in the process.

Van Alen’s invention remains, by most tennis historians’ accounts, the only genuinely lasting scoring innovation in the sport’s long history, even in its softened form. The original version he actually wanted never got the chance to stick around long enough to prove whether fans would have kept loving it, or eventually revolted right alongside the players.

Would tennis be better or worse today if the original sudden-death tiebreak had survived instead of the fairer compromise version we actually use?