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The Indian Wells Masters (also known as the Indian Wells Open and branded as the BNP Paribas Open for sponsorship reasons) is an annual professional tennis tournament played on hardcourt at the Indian Wells Tennis Garden in Indian Wells, California, United States. The tournament is an ATP Masters 1000 event on the Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP) Tour and a WTA 1000 event on the Women's Tennis Association (WTA) Tour. It is normally held in March for two weeks as the first event of the "Sunshine Double", a term given to the Indian Wells and Miami Open tournaments held consecutively in the same month. Since 2009, the tournament has been owned by Oracle co-founder and executive chairman Larry Ellison. Former world No. 2 Tommy Haas was named tournament director in 2016.

Between 1974 and 1976, it was a non-tour event; from 1977 to 1986, it was a secondary tournament of the Grand Prix Tennis Tour. But in 1987, it was upgraded to replace the U.S. Pro Indoor, the indoor tournament held in Philadelphia, and become the first Super Series event of the year's Grand Prix Super Series, the series of nine tournaments categorized below the four Grand Slam (Major) tournaments and the year-end tour finals in importance.

The Indian Wells Masters is one of two tour events (along with the Miami Open), other than the Majors, in which main draw play extends beyond eight days. The women's main draw starts on Wednesday and the men's main draw starts on Thursday. Both finals are held on the Sunday of the following week. Both singles main draws include 96 players in a 128-player grid, with the 32 seeded players getting a bye to the second round.

The tournament is the best-attended tennis tournament outside of the four Grand Slam tournaments, leading the event to earn the nickname as the "fifth Grand Slam" or "Grand Slam of the West". The main stadium, Stadium 1, is the second-largest permanent tennis stadium in the world, behind the Arthur Ashe Stadium in New York City.

Grounds
The Indian Wells Tennis Garden was built in 2000 and consists of 29 tennis courts. Stadium 1, the 16,100-seat main stadium, is the world's second-largest permanent tennis stadium in capacity. After the 2013 tournament, the Indian Wells Tennis Garden began an expansion and upgrade of its facilities that included the construction of a new 8,000-seat Stadium 2. The revamping of the facilities also included the tour-first recoloring of all courts to a purple created specifically for the ATP Masters Series in order to make the tennis ball more visible during matches.

History
The event was first held in March 1974 as a men's professional tennis tournament at the Tucson Racquet and Swim Club in Tucson, Arizona. Tucson had outbid Phoenix for the event and the city council dedicated US$10,000 to the inaugural event. The tournament offered US$150,000, matching that of other premier tournaments on the ATP Tour, and the winner would receive US$25,000. American Airlines agreed to sponsor the event after president George Warde sought after new investments and wished to be aligned with the growing sport. The inaugural event also included an exhibition executive and celebrity doubles tournament, drawing participants including Merv Griffin.

After the first edition was held, the airline had planned to move the tournament to other resort cities it flew to in order to promote its destinations, which left the tournament's fate undecided. But the tournament was ultimately kept in Tucson and was moved to Margaret Court's Tucson Racquet Club Ranch for the following year, along with seeing an increase in the prize package to US$175,000. The Tucson Daily Citizen reported

The tournament was founded by former tennis pros Charlie Pasarell and Raymond Moore.

Originally the women's tournament was held a week before the men's event. In 1996, the championship became one of the few fully combined events on both the Association of Tennis Professionals and Women's Tennis Association tours.

In 2004, the Indian Wells Masters expanded to a multi-week 96 person field.

In June 2008, the tournament parted ways with American insurance company Pacific Life in order to seek a larger package to match the scale of its international scope. In January 2009, French bank BNP Paribas agreed to sponsor the tournament and the event's name was changed to BNP Paribas Open. The new sponsorship also allowed tournament organizers to provide equal prize packages for both the men and women, making it the seventh major professional tennis tournament to do so, after all four Grand Slam tournaments, the Miami Open, and the Madrid Open. By the end of the year, Oracle co-founder and then-chief executive Larry Ellison purchased the tournament from Pasarell and Moore for up to US$100 million. The deal averted competing bids that had planned to move the tournament elsewhere and ensured the existing management team would be kept for the next four years. BNP Paribas extended their sponsorship in 2013 and 2018.

Amid the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, the tournament marked its first-ever cancellation in March 2020. The event was further postponed the following year from March to accommodate regional health protocols until it returned in October 2021.

https://www.desertsun.com/story/news/2016/03/07/bnp-paribas-open-indian-wells-tucson/80697420/ https://www.palmspringslife.com/bnp-paribas-opens-growth/ https://business.uoregon.edu/sites/business1.uoregon.edu/files/media/UO-Warsaw-Center-Indian-Wells-Case-Study.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20130301182129/http://bhcourier.com/the-long-and-winding-road-to-indian-wells/2009/03/11 http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/sports/tennis/2011-03-13-bnp-paribas-open-larry-ellison_N.htm https://www.desertsun.com/story/sports/tennis/bnp/2019/03/04/larry-ellisons-influence-bnp-paribas-open-goes-beyond-his-checkbook/2986768002/ https://www.google.com/search?q=indian+wells+fifth+grand+slam&ei=Vdn0YcmPF7nFkPIPmKmLmAw&start=20&sa=N&ved=2ahUKEwiJjvzJpdb1AhW5IkQIHZjUAsM4ChDw0wN6BAgBEEo&biw=1707&bih=821&dpr=1.13 https://www.newspapers.com/clip/93779044/clipped-from-tucson-daily-citizen/

Williams sisters boycott
Venus and Serena Williams refused to play the Indian Wells tournament from 2001 to 2014 despite threats of financial sanctions and ranking point penalties after. The two were scheduled to play in the 2001 semifinal but Venus withdrew due to an injury. Amid speculation of match fixing, the crowd in the final loudly booed Serena when she came out to play and continued to boo her intermittently through the entire match, even to the point of cheering unforced errors and double faults. Williams won the tournament and was subsequently booed during the awards ceremony. The following month at the Ericsson Open, Richard Williams, Venus and Serena's father, claimed racial slurs were directed at him while in the stands. Neither Venus nor Serena played the tournament until 2015, when Serena made her return, ending her 14-year boycott of the event. Venus ended her boycott the following year.

2016 resignation of Raymond Moore
On March 20, 2016, the day of the finals of the 2016 event, tournament chief executive Moore shared with the news media at his annual media breakfast, "In my next life when I come back I want to be someone in the WTA, because they ride on the coattails of the men. They don’t make any decisions and they are lucky. They are very, very lucky. If I was a lady player, I’d go down every night on my knees and thank God that Roger Federer and Rafa Nadal were born, because they have carried this sport. They really have." The comments drew immediate criticism from several players, including from the women's singles finalist, Serena Williams, who challenged his claims that the women on tour did not bring equally as much attention to the sport as the men do by asserting that tickets for the 2015 US Open women's final had sold out faster than the men's final, a first in US Open history, during her campaign for the calendar Grand Slam. Additional backlash came from women's singles champion Victoria Azarenka, former players Billie Jean King and Martina Navratilova, WTA chief executive Steve Simon, and Patrick McEnroe, who publicly called for Moore to resign while commentating on the ESPN broadcast. The tournament later issued an apology from Moore during the men's final. Later, in response to Moore's comments, men's singles champion Novak Djokovic elicited further controversy when he stated that though women deserve the prize money they receive, "...our men’s tennis world, ATP world, should fight for more because the stats are showing that we have much more spectators on the men’s tennis matches. I think that’s one of the reasons why maybe we should get awarded more. Women should fight for what they think they deserve and we should fight for what we think we deserve." In the wake of the significant backlash, Moore submitted his resignation to Ellison the following day, though the tournament later confirmed he had maintained his position as chief executive of the tennis facility.