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Change rarely comes quickly to tennis media. Coverage of a Grand Slam tournament today doesn’t look all that different from 10, 20 or in some cases 30 years ago, despite huge technological advances. The camera angle slanting down from above, which can flatten the real shape of the players’ shots. Two familiar voices, likely stars from decades past, reciting the most entrenched ideas about the people on court. Post-match analysis from different voices in the same demographic, mostly looking ahead to the next match and divining what, if anything, the result means for the grand narrative of the tournament.
As many have done, another media network is vowing that it has found a better way. This time, it is Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD), the owner of TNT Sports and the new U.S. rights-holder for the French Open. WBD and the French Tennis Federation (FFT) agreed a 10-year deal worth $650 million in June 2024, putting an end to a hodgepodge of coverage that had previously aired across NBC, the Tennis Channel, Tennis Channel+ (its streaming service) and Peacock.
Its promise to tennis fans is something different. Interviews with coaches mid-match, some of whom will be mic’d up. Interviews with players at practice sessions. New camera angles. And whip-around coverage reminiscent of the NFL’s Red Zone, which spends game days hopscotching from one game to another when teams have scoring opportunities. In Paris, where tension and drama arise, TNT says, the cameras will go.
Some of these innovations are not new. Courtside discussions happen at the Laver Cup, the annual ATP-sanctioned exhibition, as well as at the United Cup, the mixed international team event that opens the season. A new camera angle at the Madrid Open, which pans with the players’ movement and is set around their strike zone, reveals the magnificent arcing of their shots (while shadows from the stadiums make them disappear).
Some of the voices using those innovations will be new. Venus Williams, the seven-time Grand Slam champion, will join Andre Agassi on TNT’s roster, along with contemporary players and recent retirees, including Sloane Stephens, Chris Eubanks, Caroline Wozniacki and Sam Querrey.
Chris Eubanks interviews Jannik Sinner at the 2024 U.S. Open. (Jamie Squire / Getty Images)
Max, formerly HBO, will stream every match, a full-circle moment since HBO made a name for itself in part with coverage of Wimbledon in the 1980s. Familiar faces John and Patrick McEnroe and Chris Evert will be on hand. And at the center of this bid to do what myriad networks have not quite managed is a former college tennis player: Craig Barry, the chief content officer for TNT. He played at Menlo College in Atherton, Calif. and came of age in the first golden era of professional tennis, when larger-than-life luminaries Jimmy Connors, Björn Borg, John McEnroe, Guillermo Vilas, Evert and Martina Navratilova dominated the sport.
Like most tennis fans of a certain vintage, Barry appreciates the sport’s traditions, including those connected with how it’s presented. He also sees tennis as having lost a degree of cultural relevance, especially with younger sports fans.
“It’s time to play it forward,” Barry said in an interview last week. “It’s time to find a groove and push this sport back to where it belongs. I don’t know why it’s lost as much momentum as it has.”
NBC, which didn’t prioritize tennis coverage and didn’t televise any of the other Grand Slams, struggled to grow the audience for the French Open in a meaningful way in recent years. About 1.6 million people watched last year’s men’s final, but fewer than 1 million watched the women’s. That is substantially less than the average audience for Wimbledon coverage on ESPN.
TNT will begin with a walking start. WBD also owns Eurosport, which televises the French Open in Europe. Viewers in America will see some of the best-known voices and former players in the sport internationally, including Mats Wilander and Boris Becker, two stars of the 1980s and, in Becker’s case, a chunk of the 1990s. Barry hopes that they will see them differently. The coverage styled on the NFL Red Zone won’t have separate announce teams on each match, but rather a group in an onsite studio watching the action and talking about it along with everyone else.
“What interests me is a conversational approach to the game, where I feel like I’m sitting in a room talking tennis,” Barry said. “I understand there’s a certain formality to the tradition of tennis and I’m not here to change that, but cutting people loose to have opinions and giving them a forum to have a conversation and look at different ways of calling matches is an important part of the evolution.”
The Tennis Channel and ESPN have gone down this conversational route, but rarely with cuts to key moments of matches. Whether that model will work for a sport with pressure points that can occur every other game — the out-of-context presentation of which is a key problem for highlights — remains to be seen.
What is certain is that having players who are still active, or who might play in the tournament in question before lending their expertise fresh off an exit, is revolutionary. When Eubanks started moonlighting with the Tennis Channel during tournaments, fans lapped up his knowledge and his perspective from the very heart of the tour, as opposed to the removed view of many of his colleagues.
Eubanks, who originally got into television as a backup for a tennis career that was sputtering, treasures that removed view — but from his own game, not the sport at large. He has kept up the work with ESPN and the Tennis Channel because he likes it, sees it as a future career path, and believes it has made him a better tennis player.
The move to broadcasting coincided with Eubanks’ best season, in 2023, when he made the quarterfinals of Wimbledon. He said it allowed him to understand his sport unemotionally, and to experience his own matches from that position of emotional detachment. He has since slipped back to just outside the top 100, but has solidified his second career, both on camera and as a post-match on-court interviewer.
It’s Williams, who has not played a competitive match for over a year but has also not formally announced the end of her career, who will be the star, alongside Agassi. But the biggest stars have the most to lose by saying the wrong thing, or by, in Barry’s words, “cutting loose.” Venus, who has lived through the tennis evolution that came alongside her and Serena’s domination of women’s tennis, could be a contextualising bridge for the fans of now and those of her era.
Stephens, the 2017 U.S. Open champion, is in a similar position to Eubanks. Her ranking has slipped to No. 134, and she has started to make forays into television but isn’t done playing yet. She is currently recovering from a foot injury, which will keep her from trying to play in Paris. But she figures to be a valuable asset in France, given her reservoir of clay-court success: she made the French Open final in 2018.
Querrey retired in 2022 after a 16-year career. A Wimbledon semifinalist, he has a podcast that has a solid following with younger fans called Nothing Major. The title involves a bit of self-mockery since he and co-hosts John Isner, Jack Sock and Steve Johnson never won a singles Grand Slam. He never played Sinner or Alcaraz, but is plenty familiar with everyone else.
Wozniacki looked to be headed to a solid schedule of television work when she retired in 2020 and had two children. But then she came back four years later and started winning matches again. She last played at the U.S. Open last year, where she made the round of 16, and recently announced the pending birth of her third child.
They will mix in with the traditional voices, the McEnroes and the Everts. How that will all work remains to be seen, but Barry knows time is on his network’s side.
“We have 10 years to to kind of figure out the best direction,” he said. Any fans who think this tennis train is off the track will turn off much sooner than that.
(Top photo: Thomas Samson / AFP via Getty Images)
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