People were excited for all the Roger Federer matches in Miami - Blake+
The Miami Open Hard Rock Stadium was not the best looking centre court from TV. The steels on the first row, the empty seats you could see on the background made people have a wrong perspective than how it really was. In an interview to Miami Herald, the Tournament Director James Blake said: “We are definitely going to address the camera angles. I had people text me or call and say, `Hey, it looks like it’s empty, what’s going on?’ and I’m sitting in the stadium at the same time and I say, `It’s packed.’ And they send me a screenshot of their TV and you see empty seats. We have to figure out how to make the product look better on TV because if you’re in the stadium, you see people are still excited. I was there for [David] Ferrer-[Sasha] Zverev, and the energy was palpable. Same with Ferrer-[Frances] Tiafoe, anytime Roger plays, Novak [Djokovic] and Roberto Agut, so we’ve seen there are passionate diehard tennis fans who are still enjoying it but it doesn’t translate on well on TV, which is a huge issue we will fix.”
A record 388,000 people attended the event. Blake believes that the new venue was a great incentive: “Every tournament has a stadium court that’s bigger and detached from the others, but not every stadium is a 65,000-seat stadium and this one is. There’s going to be that figuring out period of where to go, and a lot of fans are still figuring that out. I love the fact that if a casual fan wants to sit at Kiki’s or Moet’s, have a drink, watch the video board and just have a good time and never come into the stadium, that’s on them. We have the space and can sell as many grounds passes as we want. We didn’t have that ability on Crandon Park. We wanted to sell out the stadium and then we could offer some grounds passes. Here, we have the ability to distribute thousands of more passes and people can still have a good time and it doesn’t feel as crowded because we have the space.”
from Tennis World USA http://bit.ly/2OYCfaG
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