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One of the first places Paco visits in Melbourne is Melbourne Park, where the Australian Open is normally held each year. He gets really surprised at the courts and the magnificent retractable roofs of the Rod Laver Arena and Hisense Arena courts. Before entering the court, he reads a big poster on the wall of one of the corridors:

The Australian Open¹

The Australian Open is the first of the four Grand Slam tennis tournaments held each year in January at Melbourne Park. It was held for the first time in 1905 and was contested on grass until 1987. Since 1988, the tournament has been held on hard courts. Mats Wilander is the only male player who has won the tournament on both grass and hard courts.

The two main courts used in the tournament are Rod Laver Arena and Hisense Arena and feature retractable roofs, which can be shut in case of rain or extreme heat.

In 2008, the Rebound Ace surface, which had been in place for the past 20 years at Melbourne Park, was replaced by a cushioned, medium-paced, acrylic surface known as Plexicushion Prestige. The main benefits of the new surface are better consistency and less retention of heat. The change was controversial because of the new surface's similarity to DecoTurf, the surface used by the US Open.

The singles winners in 2010 were Roger Federer and Serena Williams. In men's doubles, the winners were Bob and Mike Bryan, and in women's doubles, the winners were Serena and Venus Williams - the second time in history that both doubles titles were won by siblings, and for the second consecutive year at the Australian Open.

By Skyscraper297. C. Commons

The tournament was first known as The Australasian Championships and then became the Australian Championships in 1927 and the Australian Open in 1969. Since 1905, the Australian Open has been staged in five Australian and two New Zealand cities as follows: Melbourne (54 times), Sydney (17 times), Adelaide (14 times), Brisbane (7 times), Perth (3 times), Christchurch (in 1906), and Hastings (in 1912). In 1972, when it was decided to stage the tournament in the same city each year, the Kooyong Lawn Tennis Club was selected because Melbourne attracted the biggest patronage.

Melbourne Park was constructed for the 1988 tournament to meet the demands of a tournament that had outgrown Kooyong's capacity. The move to Melbourne Park was an immediate success, with a 90 per cent increase in attendance in 1988 (266,436) on the previous year at Kooyong (140,000).

Because of its geographic remoteness very few foreign players entered this tournament at the beginning, which made it an uninteresting tournament. In the 1920s, the trip by ship from Europe to Australia took about 45 days. The first tennis players coming by aircraft were the US Davis Cup players in November 1946. Even inside the country, many players could not travel easily. When the tournament was held in Perth, no one from Victoria or New South Wales crossed, by train, a distance of some 3000 kilometres between the east and west coasts.

¹ Adapted from Wikipedia.org