Serena Williams’ US Open return lasted two matches and one afternoon Tuesday as she and Carlos Alcaraz followed a first-round win with a quarter-final defeat by Belinda Bencic and Flavio Cobolli in the headline attraction of the reimagined mixed doubles competition.

Back inside Arthur Ashe Stadium 1,453 days after the defeat by Ajla Tomljanovic that had appeared to end her career, Williams emerged from the tunnel at half past three to the roars of more than 10,000 spectators. As the 44-year-old American and Alcaraz warmed up in matching purple-and-black Nike kits, public-address announcer Andy Taylor rattled off her accolades one by one to a steadily rising wall of applause. Together they carried 30 grand slam singles titles, a record for a mixed-doubles team at a major.

Qualifying week with main-draw intensity

The tournament was still officially in qualifying week, but the crowds had already swelled to main-draw proportions. The scenes along the boardwalk from the Mets-Willets Point subway station to the Billie Jean King National Tennis Center looked like the middle weekend of the tournament. The No 7 train exhaled bursts of fans every few minutes. Vendors rolled enormous coolers through the crowd, selling cold water and canned soda. Jehovah’s Witnesses stood beside literature carts.

Have you heard the good news? The Open was on a week early and Serena was back. Alcaraz, returning from a hiatus of his own due to a wrist injury in the spring, wore a white sleeve and looked rusty from double-faulting on the opening point. The pair dropped three of the first four games, but won eight of the final nine games to beat the British-New Zealand pair of Lloyd Glasspool and Erin Routliffe 5-3, 4-1.

“I never expected to be back on this court,” Williams said after the first match. “I never thought this would happen.”

Mixed doubles results and format at a glance

That momentum did not survive the quick turnaround, with Bencic and Cobolli ending their run 5-4 (4), 4-1. Yet Williams looked anything but a nostalgia act, flying to the net and reading points a stroke ahead. She even served the opening game of the quarter-final ahead of Alcaraz – a rarity in mixed doubles. When it was over after 55 minutes, Williams might have been second-guessing her decision to decline the singles wildcard organizers had kept open for her before giving it to Sofia Kenin.

Key match details from Williams and Alcaraz’s campaign:

• First round: def. Lloyd Glasspool / Erin Routliffe 5-3, 4-1
• Quarter-final: lost to Belinda Bencic / Flavio Cobolli 5-4 (4), 4-1
• Venue: Arthur Ashe Stadium, Billie Jean King National Tennis Center
• Competition phase: mixed doubles event staged during qualifying week

How the US Open’s new mixed doubles model works

This was the bargain offered by the revamped mixed doubles championship: unprecedented star wattage, abbreviated matches and abrupt endings. Last year’s overhaul moved mixed doubles to a standalone slot before singles, cut the field to 16 and raised the top prize to $1m, favoring singles stars over the objections of doubles specialists. Early rounds use four-game sets, no-ad scoring and a 10-point decider. Only Wednesday’s final returns to six-game sets.

The changes sit within a broader trend of major tournaments experimenting with formats to concentrate elite names in shorter time windows. For organizers working under the umbrella of the International Tennis Federation, the aim is to protect player workload while maximising prime-time content across singles, doubles and mixed events.

Star tandems and the risk of the shortened format

Williams and Alcaraz were not the only star tandem caught by the format’s trapdoor. Top seeds Novak Djokovic and Aryna Sabalenka lost in the opening match on Ashe to Katerina Siniakova and Henry Patten, who then fell to the married couple Elina Svitolina and Gaël Monfils.

Svitolina and Monfils edged them 5-4 (6), 4-5 (3), 10-8, then kissed and embraced. Both have gone on deep singles runs here without winning the title. In Monfils’ final grand slam before retirement, they are two victories from a trophy and a seven-figure windfall when the event concludes on Wednesday night.

“Happy wife, happy life,” Monfils said.

Legacy, commercial stakes and what Williams’ return signals

The revamped event promised maximum attention for minimum wear and Williams delivered both. Her stay was fleeting, but long enough to make the US Open feel as though it had truly arrived ahead of schedule.

For tournament organizers, placing mixed doubles at the front of the schedule with a $1m top prize has clear commercial logic: it front-loads the fortnight with household names, lifts qualifying-week ticket value and creates an additional title with meaningful financial and symbolic weight for players already in heavy singles and doubles workloads.

For Williams, who already owns more Grand Slam singles titles in the Open era than any other woman, the brief return underscored how her presence still reshapes the scale of an event. Even in a tight format built for volatility, her movement forward, the way she read exchanges at the net and the decision to share a court with Alcaraz placed mixed doubles at the centre of the US Open’s opening narrative rather than at its margins.

In a sport where scheduling, prize money and format changes are increasingly used to attract and protect top singles players, this afternoon on Ashe showed how mixed doubles can be used as a showcase rather than a sideshow – and how, even in two short matches, Serena Williams remains one of tennis’s defining forces.