Culture · Miami
Miami Open’s Journey From Key Biscayne to Miami Gardens
The Miami Open has grown from a South Florida tennis fixture into one of the sport’s biggest events outside the Grand Slam tournaments.
By KLGBT News Desk ·
Each spring, some of the world’s leading tennis players converge on Miami Gardens for the Miami Open, a major stop on both professional tours. Played outdoors on hard courts at Hard Rock Stadium, the tournament takes place in late March and early April and brings elite men’s and women’s competition to South Florida.
The event is part of the ATP Tour’s 1000-level tournaments and the WTA Tour’s 1000-level series, placing it among the most significant competitions on the annual tennis calendar. On official tour websites and promotional materials, it is identified as the Miami Open presented by Itaú, a name used since 2015.
The tournament’s current home is not where it began. From 1987 through 2018, the Miami Open was held at the Tennis Center at Crandon Park in Key Biscayne. It moved to Miami Gardens in 2019, shifting the competition to the Hard Rock Stadium complex and giving the tournament a new setting within the broader Miami metropolitan area.
Its scale has continued to make it a major part of the region’s sports calendar. The 2023 edition lasted 12 days and drew more than 386,000 attendees. That turnout placed the Miami Open among the largest tennis tournaments in the world outside the four Grand Slam events.
The tournament is also linked to the Indian Wells Open through the “Sunshine Double,” the informal name for winning both events in the same year. The two tournaments are consecutive, high-level hard-court competitions in the United States. Indian Wells is played in California, while the Miami Open gives the sequence its Florida stop.
For Miami, the event represents more than a series of matches. Its move from Key Biscayne to Miami Gardens reflects the tournament’s changing footprint and continued expansion. The combination of international players, long competition days and a large audience makes the Miami Open a recurring fixture in the city’s cultural and sporting life.
Beginning in 2026, the tournament is also identified as an ITF Wheelchair Tennis Tour event at the WT500 level. That addition places wheelchair tennis within the event’s expanding competitive profile while maintaining the Miami Open’s place as one of the area’s most prominent annual sporting gatherings.
Source and reuse information This backgrounder adapts factual material from “Miami Open (tennis)” on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miami_Open_(tennis) The adapted text is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license (CC BY-SA 4.0): https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/. This story has not been independently reviewed or fact-checked.
Further links listed by the Wikipedia page (not independently checked): - https://maps.google.com/maps?ll=25.709145,-80.159662&spn=0.004674,0.007532&t=k&hl=en - https://web.archive.org/web/20140316113226/http://prolebrity.com/sony-ericsson-open/ - https://www.miamiopen.com/history - https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2018/mar/30/miami-open-miami-dophins-stadium-hard-rock-tennis - https://www.miamiherald.com/sports/tennis/article225353530.html - https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/18/sports/tennis/miami-open-hard-rock-stadium.html Image rights Photograph description: Jimy Szymanski en el Miami Open de 1993 Creator: Julio Benavides León. License: CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0). Original image page: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3AJimy_Szymanski.jpg. The image was resized for display; no other changes were made.