The US Open Final Is Tomorrow — Last Year the Tournament Made $17 Million on One Cocktail — Woody Magazine, Sept. 11, 2026

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The US Open Final Is Tomorrow — Last Year the Tournament Made $17 Million on One Cocktail — Woody Magazine, Sept. 11, 2026

Woody Magazine

We write the things that aren't news

Sept. 11, 2026 (Fri.)

Food & Drink Sept. 11, 2026

The US Open Final Is Tomorrow — Last Year the Tournament Made $17 Million on One Cocktail

In Three Lines

  1. The US Open wraps up this weekend in New York. Last year the tournament sold 738,459 Honey Deuce cocktails at $23 each.
  2. In its first year, 2007, the drink cost $12 and sold about 24,000. The price nearly doubled; sales grew thirtyfold.
  3. This is not a story about a governing body gouging fans. The cocktail is 3 percent of the tournament's revenue. The story is the cup.

Walk through the gates at Flushing Meadows, in Queens, and the first thing you register is a color. A tall plastic cup, pink liquid, three pale-green melon balls on a skewer floating at the rim. The cup is in the stands, on the stairs, in the line at every concession stand. During the tournament one goes out roughly every second and a half.

It costs $23. New York prices, you might think, and leave it there. Fair enough. But the same drink cost $12 in 2007, and as the price climbed the sales did not fall. They rose, thirtyfold. When people buy more of something the more it costs, the first question is whether the thing they are buying is really the thing on the menu.

For every 100 fans through the gate, 65 cups went out

The numbers come from the United States Tennis Association's own post-tournament release. Over the three weeks of the 2025 US Open, bartenders served 738,459 Honey Deuces, up 32 percent on the year before. At $23 apiece that comes to just under $17 million.

738,459
Honey Deuces sold over the three weeks of the 2025 US Open. On the busiest day, nearly 60,000.

Attendance over the same three weeks was 1,144,562. That works out to 65 cups for every 100 people who came through the gate. Plenty of people bought more than one, so fewer fans than that actually drank one, but the ratio still says something: two out of three tickets, roughly, turned into a cup. The tennis center's event staff said the single-day peak was close to 60,000.

One thing should be set aside early. The USTA does not run on this drink. The US Open brought in $560 million in 2024, and that one event is about 90 percent of the association's annual revenue. Seventeen million dollars of cocktails is 3 percent of the tournament. It is a pleasant line on the ledger, not the money that keeps the lights on. And still the drink makes headlines every August. What draws people in is not the revenue. It is how the thing is sold.

It started with a fruit salad in 2007

Grey Goose, the vodka brand, became a US Open sponsor in 2006 and needed a drink to sell on the grounds. It gave the job to Nick Mautone, a New York restaurateur who worked as the brand's ambassador. Mautone has told the story this way: he was making a fruit salad, scooped some honeydew into balls, and noticed they looked like tennis balls. He put vodka, lemonade and raspberry liqueur in a glass and dropped three of them in on a skewer.

In 2007 the drink cost $12 and sold about 24,000. A respectable start, and one-thirtieth of where it is now. The drink itself has not changed. What changed was the cup it comes in, and what the tournament decided to do with that cup.

The tournament went to the Kentucky Derby and took notes

Daniel Zausner, chief operating officer of the National Tennis Center where the Open is played, told Front Office Sports where the idea came from. The Kentucky Derby, America's best-known horse race, sells about 120,000 Mint Juleps over one weekend, each one in a souvenir glass. What Zausner noticed was not the bourbon. It was what people did afterward.

"For them, it was tradition. You brought home that glass and cherished it."

The nearest everyday comparison is the toy in a Happy Meal. Nominally you are buying the meal. In practice a great many people are buying the toy, and the food is what it comes with. The Honey Deuce cup is the toy. The drink gets finished; the cup goes home.

The cup carries the name of every US Open singles champion in the tournament's history. It is reprinted each year with the newest names added, so a 2024 cup and a 2025 cup are different objects. A full one can be had only inside the grounds, only during the tournament. Put those conditions together and people stop doing the arithmetic on the vodka. One fan who has attended for more than a decade told Front Office Sports that the first item on her wedding registry was a melon baller, so she could make the garnish at home. The cups fill a cabinet in her apartment.

In the year with no drinks, the cups still went out

Three things show that the cup, not the cocktail, is the product.

First, 2020. That year the Open was played without spectators. There was nobody to sell a drink to, but 50,000 cups had already been ordered. The tournament gave them away. Zausner's description was that, in a sad way, the cup became one of the only souvenirs to come out of that year's Open. Take the drink out and the cup still stood on its own.

Second, the resale market. After every tournament, empty cups appear on eBay at $10 to $20 each; a set of six goes for around $100. Not many drinks leave behind a container with a market price once the liquid is gone.

Third, the official shop. The same cup, empty, sells there in pairs for $14. Seven dollars each. And people walk past that counter to stand 45 minutes in a $23 line. The $7 empty cup and the $23 full one are different goods. One is something you bought. The other is something you drank there, that day. Fans are buying the second.

Six price increases in ten years

The Honey Deuce cost $14 in 2012 and $22 in 2022, a rise of 57 percent. Over the same decade American consumer prices rose 29 percent. The tournament raised the price at twice the rate of inflation and sold more every year. Since 2024 it has been $23, now three years running, and this August the freeze itself got coverage. A cocktail whose price did not go up had become a news item.

Maybe it just tastes good, you could say. The people who buy it every year have answered that. One told Front Office Sports it is a good drink she "would never order outside of the US Open." Another put it more bluntly: it is expensive, you will not get drunk, it is for the vibes, and you already paid for the ticket. Neither of them is describing a beverage. They are describing proof of having been there.

The Australian Open copied the whole design

Other tournaments have shown the method travels. Wimbledon pours more than 300,000 glasses of Pimm's, but that is a tradition more than half a century old that nobody engineered. The engineered case is Melbourne. In 2025 the Australian Open worked with Grey Goose, the same sponsor, to launch a cocktail called the Lemon Ace. Tennis Australia's head of product flew to London to work on the recipe, and it sold more than 100,000 in its first year. It was an attempt to build the Honey Deuce's ritual from scratch, on another continent, with the same partner.

Zausner also explained why tennis in particular. Fans are on the grounds for eight hours. Unlike football or basketball, tennis is long pauses and side courts and wandering. In a sport where you have time to carry something around, the cup becomes a prop.

This year they ordered 800,000 cups

Behind the tournament now runs a supply chain built for one drink. Each spring a New York produce distributor calls a melon grower in California's Central Valley to settle how many honeydews to plant for the Open. This year that meant 8,000 cases, eight semi-trucks, three to four days on the road to Queens. Dedicated Honey Deuce taps went in in 2024, and the vodka and lemonade are now premixed on site. Until recently each drink was measured by hand, which is why the lines ran to 45 minutes. And the cup order for 2026 was 800,000, about 60,000 more than last year's sales.

The US Open did not get good at selling drinks. It printed the year onto a cup, the way a toy gets dropped into a meal, and left exactly one way to get it. After that, people stopped counting what the vodka cost. What they bought was evidence that they were there this year. The drink came with it.

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Sources

Woody Magazine is edited and published by Woody. Claude AI is used as a tool in the editorial process, and all editorial judgment and final responsibility rest with the editorial desk. Readers are encouraged to verify independently.

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