Heading into the final stages of the French Open, analyst John McEnroe is pleased with how TNT Sports’ debut covering the event has gone. McEnroe has worked across a wide range of networks covering tennis, but he said working for TNT has been interesting and positive given the company’s embrace of personality.
| Site | Subscription Price | Supported Countries |
|---|---|---|
| FuboTV | 5-day free trial, $10–$90/month | USA, Canada, Spain |
| ESPN+ | $11.99/month | USA |
| Fanatiz | €6.99–€10.99/month | Worldwide |
| StreamLocator | 7-day free trial, no credit card required! $9.90/month | Worldwide |
“Each network does their thing a different way,” McEnroe said on a media call Thursday. “ESPN’s going to do the way they believe is best for their network, and it’s obviously the same at TNT. TNT seems to embrace more, like, personality in a way: obviously you look at Charles [Barkley] and the Inside The NBA [team]. And from what I’m seeing, they’re trying to bring some of that to what they’re doing in tennis, so I think that’s great. Personally, I like that.”
Beyond that embrace of personality (which even saw him show up on Inside The NBA to promote the French Open last month), wide array of commentators, and technological/access gains, McEnroe said he thinks it’s tremendous for tennis that TNT Sports has the French Open’s entire rights. That’s a sharp change from some previous splits.
“It’s just having them do everything,” he said. “The whole time I used to work for NBC, for example, for many years, 30-something years here, they never did more than maybe half of the day. So this is a totally different thing. There would be Tennis Channel or ESPN [with the other coverage]. I think it makes it easier and better for the viewer, I believe, just like it’s better that ESPN has everything at Wimbledon or the [US] Open, for example. So I think that is a shot in the arm for the sport.”
| Site | Subscription Price | Supported Countries |
|---|---|---|
| FuboTV | 5-day free trial, $10–$90/month | USA, Canada, Spain |
| ESPN+ | $11.99/month | USA |
| Fanatiz | €6.99–€10.99/month | Worldwide |
| StreamLocator | 7-day free trial, no credit card required! $9.90/month | Worldwide |
Another change TNT (which has also received praise from players) brought this year was the early-tournament MacZone whiparound show, hosted by McEnroe and his brother Patrick. He said that show is the culmination of something he’s wanted to do for a long time. It came after seeing how early-tournament broadcasts often didn’t wind up showing lesser-hyped matches that turned out to be dramatic, and after seeing the success of other alternate broadcasts such as the ManningCast.
“I’ve been pushing that even with ESPN in a way, especially the first week of majors, especially when I saw Eli and Peyton do the ManningCast,” McEnroe said. I thought ‘Oh my God, this is perfect.’ I thought it was so great that they’re doing this. I’m like, ‘We’ve got to do this in tennis.’
“And I’d actually asked for something that even before. Because sometimes you get, you know, Roger Federer, okay, who doesn’t want to do Federer? But then he’s 6-1, 6-2, 4-1, and then there’d be a tiebreaker somewhere, and, you know, it might be two unknowns, but let’s see this. So it’s actually nice that with that whiparound, we can go to three, four, five, six different courts. That to me absolutely captures the energy of a Slam more than anything previously.”
“ESPN, in their defense, talked about it, but didn’t do it. And I like being up in that set, my brother and I, we’d just go anywhere. And some people would come up. So we’ll see what happens with ESPN, because I think that works, personally.”
| Site | Subscription Price | Supported Countries |
|---|---|---|
| FuboTV | 5-day free trial, $10–$90/month | USA, Canada, Spain |
| ESPN+ | $11.99/month | USA |
| Fanatiz | €6.99–€10.99/month | Worldwide |
| StreamLocator | 7-day free trial, no credit card required! $9.90/month | Worldwide |
When it comes to the actual on-court play at Roland Garros so far, McEnroe said the most notable thing for him this year has been the speed current rackets are allowing players to hit with.
“My biggest takeaway is that the sport of tennis is being helped by the technology more at this event almost than any other. Because you used to see tennis where there’s a lot of moving balls and they look very slow, especially when you’re using wood rackets. But even in the last couple of years, the pace, the amount of mph they can put on even ground strokes is amazing. I mean, it’s crazy.”
“You’re seeing that more and more, not only from the top guys, because I’m not really surprised from who I’m seeing in semis at all, I would probably bet these four guys in the semis. But it’s a lot of other players, including them, that are seemingly taking the sport to a place that makes me shudder to think what it’s going to be like in 10 years.”
McEnroe was asked about Novak Djokovic’s run to the semifinals at 38 and how it compares to his 1990 run to the US Open semifinals against Pete Sampras at 31. He said it’s remarkable to see what today’s athletes are able to do with conditioning to extend their peak much longer than he could.
“I actually felt like 31 was 38 at that point. We were like, ‘If we get to 30, then we were impressed with ourselves.’ I mean, now it seems embarrassing. The amount of work and conditioning, the condition he’s kept himself, it’s almost in certain ways better. I really admire that, because I wasn’t able to do that.
“I think my best tennis was like 25 or 26, and I felt like I was getting worse, which was a horrible feeling. And I was not understanding and not being willing enough to do enough about it. So I look at what he does, and I’m like ‘I can’t even understand that.’ Because I wasn’t able to sort of get even close. He’s arguably better at some things than he was, you know? And I can’t say the same for the last couple of years of my career.”
But McEnroe has certainly managed to have a great post-playing run as a commentator. And it’s interesting to hear him discuss what he’s enjoyed about working with a new network in this space.
TNT’s French Open coverage continues through the women’s singles final Saturday and the men’s singles final Sunday.
