US Open: The smell of marijuana in Flushing remains a problem for players and fans
A view of Court 17, which has an always present marijuana smell, during a match at the US Open tennis championships at the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center on Friday. Credit: Kathleen Malone-Van Dyke
The organizers of the U.S. Open have heard them all.
“The U.S. Open is going to pot!”
“There’s something in the air at the U.S. Open!”
“The players thought they left the grass behind at Wimbledon!”
To be perfectly blunt, the issue of the smell of marijuana wafting over the courts at the U.S. Open is not a new one.
Players and fans have been complaining about it for years. But since pot is legal in New York City and the National Tennis Center sits inside a park, the smell does make its way into the Open grounds even though smoking inside the venue is prohibited.
The latest example of the issue came on Friday when world No. 1 Aryna Sabalenka stopped play during her third-round match because of the odor and complained to the chair umpire.
Sabalenka was not the first player to raise the issue in this year’s tournament. It started back during qualifying, when British player Katie Boulter told ESPN.com, “You go down to the practice courts and down in the park courts, you do smell it a lot. I'm not a huge fan of it. I know a lot of players have complained on some of the specific courts. I've played on one before and I did smell it during my match. I'm trying to focus and then obviously, it takes you out of the moment . . . You don't need distractions.”
Sabalenka, the two-time defending Open champion, must not have been too distracted during her straight-set victory over Kamilla Rakhimova, which took place at Louis Armstrong Stadium. The usual culprit in terms of pot smell is the stadium at Court 17, which is notorious for its proximity to Flushing Meadows Corona Park and, apparently, folks who enjoy smoking pot in it.
In 2023, Alexander Zverev said: “Court 17 definitely smells like Snoop Dogg’s living room. Oh my God, it’s everywhere. The whole court smells like weed.”
Maria Sakkari also complained in 2023 while playing on Court 17.
“The smell, oh my gosh,” she said. “I think it’s from the park.”
A year earlier, Nick Kyrgios asked the chair umpire to do something about the marijuana smell during a second-round match at Armstrong because he suffers from asthma and was having trouble breathing.
As in most cases, the umpire made an announcement that smoking is not permitted inside the Open grounds. In Sabalenka’s case, the umpire alerted officials by making a smoking gesture with her fingers. Officials scoured the crowd to look for an offender. None was found and play continued.
Earlier in this year’s tournament, Adrian Mannarino of France mentioned the pot smell after a second-round defeat. But it was only a footnote in his general complaints about the Open atmosphere.
"People are allowed to move around in the crowd during points,” he said. “Before, they were not allowed in the [stands] except during changeovers. Now they come in whenever they feel like it. They move around and talk. The tournament puts up with it, and I don’t know if it's the best thing for tennis in general. There's a smell of marijuana on the court, noise from everywhere. It's turning into a bit of a zoo.”
Kim Jones, a tennis fan and former Open juniors player from Darien, Connecticut, said: “You could smell it everywhere. It’s incredibly disruptive to players and fans alike. Competing on the court and having to deal with a smell like that, there’s no way to perform optimally. It’s also not fair to people who want to spend an entire day and quite a large amount of money watching tennis. There’s got to be someone monitoring this and saying, ‘No, you can’t do this amongst the fans and the players.’ ”
U.S. Tennis Association spokesman Brendan McIntyre said in a statement: “While we can’t control what takes place off the grounds of the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center, we continue to be vigilant as we maintain this facility as a smoke free environment.”
Complaining about smells at the Open can be traced all the way back to at least 1982 and had nothing to do with pot.
Former Wimbledon champion Pat Cash, then a juniors player, recently told BBC radio, “There was a cloud of smoke coming from one of the hot dog stands by the court. It was crazy.”
Thankfully, that is not a problem these days. Chicken tenders with caviar that sell for $100 don’t send clouds of smoke over any courts.
Anthony Rieber covers sports media and business and professional sports (you know, games and trades and things). He has worked at Newsday since Aug. 31, 1998, and has been in his current position since Jan. 1, 2026.
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