Coordinates: 27°31′30.12″S 153°0′26.06″E / 27.5250333°S 153.0072389°E / -27.5250333; 153.0072389

The Brisbane International is a professional tennis tournament played on outdoor hard courts. It is currently part of the ATP World Tour 250 series of the Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP) World Tour and of the WTA Premier tournaments of the Women's Tennis Association (WTA) Tour. It is held annually in January at the Queensland Tennis Centre in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia, just before the first Grand Slam tournament of the season, the Australian Open.

The origins of the Brisbane International trace back to the early 1970s, when the Grand Prix tennis circuit, formed in 1970, and which ran concurrently with other tours as the World Championship Tennis circuit, decided to feature on its calendar an event in Australia's Queensland region, to develop a South West Pacific season around the Australian Open –then taking place in Brisbane– alongside other Oceanian events of Sydney; Hobart; and Auckland. The Adelaide-based South Australian Tennis Championships, running as an amateur, then as a state championship, since 1880, were brought to the professional circuit in 1972. The first professional edition of the men's event, played, like the Australian Open, on outdoor grass courts, saw the victory of Soviet Alex Metreveli over Kim Warwick, while the women's event, still not featured in either the Commercial Union Grand Prix circuit or the Virginia Slims circuit, saw Australian Evonne Goolagong win the title.

Brisbane ( /ˈbrɪzbən/) is the capital and most populous city in the Australian state of Queensland and the third most populous city in Australia. Brisbane's metropolitan area has a population of approximately 2.1 million, and the South East Queensland urban conurbation, centred around Brisbane, encompasses a population of more than 3 million. The Brisbane central business district stands on the original European settlement and is situated inside a bend of the Brisbane River, approximately 23 km (14 mi) from its mouth at Moreton Bay. The metropolitan area extends in all directions along the floodplain of the Brisbane River valley between the bay and the Great Dividing Range. While the metropolitan area is governed by several municipalities, a large portion of central Brisbane is governed by the Brisbane City Council, which is by far Australia's largest Local Government Area by population. The demonym of Brisbane is Brisbanite.

Brisbane is named after the river on which it sits, which, in turn, was named after Scotsman Sir Thomas Brisbane, the Governor of New South Wales from 1821 to 1825. The first European settlement in Queensland was a penal colony at Redcliffe, 28 kilometres (17 mi) north of the Brisbane central business district, in 1824. That settlement was soon abandoned and moved to North Quay in 1825. Free settlers were permitted from 1842. Brisbane was chosen as the capital when Queensland was proclaimed a separate colony from New South Wales in 1859.

Roger Federer (German pronunciation: [ˈfeːdəʁɐ]) (born 8 August 1981) is a Swiss professional tennis player who held the ATP No. 1 position for a record 237 consecutive weeks from 2 February 2004 to 18 August 2008. Federer has occupied the #1 ranking for 285 overall weeks, one week short of the record 286 weeks held by Pete Sampras. As of 28 May 2012, he is ranked World No. 3. Federer has won a men's record 16 Grand Slam singles titles. He is one of seven male players to capture the career Grand Slam and one of three (with Andre Agassi and Rafael Nadal) to do so on three different surfaces (clay, grass, and hard courts). He is the only male player in tennis history to have reached the title match of each Grand Slam tournament at least five times and also the final at each of the nine ATP Masters 1000 Tournaments. Many sports analysts, tennis critics, and former and current players consider Federer to be the greatest tennis player of all time.

Federer has appeared in an unprecedented 23 career Grand Slam tournament finals, including a men's record ten in a row, and appeared in 18 of 19 finals from the 2005 Wimbledon Championships through the 2010 Australian Open, the lone exception being the 2008 Australian Open. He holds the record of reaching the semifinals or better of 23 consecutive Grand Slam tournaments over five and a half years, from the 2004 Wimbledon Championships through the 2010 Australian Open. At the 2012 Australian Open, he reached a record 31st consecutive Grand Slam quarterfinal. During the course of his run at the 2012 French Open in Roland Garros, Federer eclipsed Jimmy Connors long standing record of 233 match wins in Grand Slam tournaments when he defeated Adrian Ungur in a second round match.

Jarkko Kalervo Nieminen (born July 23, 1981 in Masku, Finland) is a professional tennis player from Finland.

His highest ranking is World No. 13, which he achieved on July 10, 2006. He has won two ATP singles titles and two doubles titles in his career. His best performances in Grand Slam tournaments have been reaching the quarterfinals of the 2005 US Open, the 2006 Wimbledon Championships, and the 2008 Australian Open.

Arguably Finland's best player ever, Nieminen is the highest-ranked Finn ever, and is also the first and so far only Finnish player to have won an ATP singles title and to have reached the quarterfinals of a Grand Slam event.

His wife, Anu Nieminen, is currently Finland's top-ranked badminton women's single player.

Nieminen won the Sydney International for his second career title against Julien Benneteau. He was a finalist in doubles in the same tournament with Matthew Ebden against Mike Bryan and Bob Bryan.

He was a quarterfinalist at the Open Sud de France and in Rotterdam.

Lleyton Glynn Hewitt ( /ˈleɪtən ˈhjuːɨt/; born 24 February 1981) is an Australian professional tennis player and former world no. 1, who has a current ATP ranking of 176.

Hewitt is the youngest male ever to be ranked no. 1 at the age of 20. His career achievements include winning the 2000 US Open men's doubles, the 2001 US Open and 2002 Wimbledon men's singles, and back-to-back Tennis Masters Cup titles (2001 and 2002). In 2005, TENNIS Magazine put Hewitt in 34th place on its list of the 40 greatest tennis players since 1965.

Hewitt might well have followed in the footsteps of his Australian rules football-playing father Glynn. Instead, he became one of the youngest winners of an Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP) tournament when, as an almost unknown youngster, he won the 1998 Next Generation Adelaide International, defeating Andre Agassi in the semifinals. Only Aaron Krickstein winning Tel Aviv in 1983 and Michael Chang winning San Francisco in 1988 were younger when claiming their first ATP title. Hewitt then left Immanuel College to concentrate on his tennis career.. He was an Australian Institute of Sport scholarship holder.