If America’s enthusiasm for tennis is no longer as far-flung as it was during the heady days of the 1980s, Wimbledon remains a can’t-miss event for the sport’s hard core of devotees. Still, for many of the players who were dominant during tennis’ defining era, today’s shrunken audiences are somewhat baffling, given the athleticism on display and the dizzying velocity of the aggro-baseliner game.
John McEnroe was one of the biggest, brightest and noisiest stars of tennis’ golden age—his unforgettable duel with Björn Borg in the 1980 Wimbledon men’s final averaged 8.42 million viewers on NBC, a record that still stands—and his frequent laments for the vanished audiences of yesteryear are informed by a sort of crabby wistfulness. Six months ago, in a special Bahamas-set installment of Andy Roddick’s Served podcast, McEnroe sounded more aggrieved than ever about tennis’ decline in status here in the States.
“Believe it or not, in the early 1980s—and this sounds laughable—we had the same ratings as the NBA,” McEnroe said. “If you had told me in the early ‘80s that golf, of all things, would have double the ratings of tennis, I would have laughed at you. The next thing you’re going to tell me is that pickleball’s gonna have better ratings.” (McEnroe, who has served as a vocal pitchman for pickleball for the last couple of years, has at times joked about how much America’s Fastest-Growing Sport® “sucks.” With apologies to another exuberantly yawping New Yorker, Johnny Mac’s mouth is large, it contains multitudes.)
McEnroe this week sounded a bit more optimistic during a pre-Wimbledon tune-up with reporters staged by ESPN. Like pretty much anyone who caught the epic Jannik Sinner-Carlos Alcaraz final at Roland Garros earlier this month, McEnroe seems to believe that tennis has found a rivalry to succeed the epochal tripartite struggle between Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic.
“I really can’t wait to see what it’s going to be like in 10 years, … five years, even,” McEnroe said. “I hope these players stay healthy. If they stay healthy, they’re going to be winning a lot of things for quite a while.”
Chris Evert, whose rivalry with Martina Navratilova outshone even McEnroe-Borg—both women would go on to win 18 majors during their long competitive arc, with the steely Czech import enjoying a 14-8 career advantage in their Grand Slam collisions—suggested that Roland Garros should help prime the pump for the June 30-July 15 fortnight. “What happened at the French, hopefully that momentum will carry through to Wimbledon,” Evert said during the ESPN call.
In its first year of televising the French Open, TNT crushed it. The Alcaraz-Skinner barn burner averaged 1.76 million viewers, up 8% versus 2024’s analogous Alcaraz-Alexander Zverev match on NBC (1.62 million). Coco Gauff also scared up some numbers with her victory over Aryna Sabalenka; per Nielsen, the match averaged 1.47 million viewers, up 94% compared to last year’s record-low draw of 756,000 for Iga Świątek’s third straight title on the clay courts.
McEnroe and Evert each gave TNT high marks for its debut, with the latter commentator praising the cable network’s willingness to experiment with big names and decidedly untraditional features. Evert particularly enjoyed Venus Williams’ recurring “Roland with Venus” segment, in which the five-time Wimbledon champ suited up in Lacoste to talk shop (and shopping) with the likes of Lisa Leslie and Sarah Jessica Parker.
That lighter touch could go a long way toward helping draw a younger set of viewers to a sport that generally serves a somewhat creaky audience. “I think I read somewhere that, like, 80% of the viewers were over 50 years old,” Evert said. “Tennis needs to find little ways to bring the younger generation in.”
Evert went on to say that she hoped that ESPN may take some inspiration from TNT’s early experiments with form and style, while giving her employer the edge in terms of presenting the “really classic, elegant” aspects of the game.
McEnroe echoed the sentiment, although he made sure to preface his remarks with a nod to the people who sign his checks. “ESPN is like the king of sports,” he said. “It’s taken the sporting scene to a whole new level. … They’ve been doing a great job for a long time, but now maybe they’re going to be, ‘Hey, we’re going to look at it a little differently, too.’”
Disney originally locked in its rights deal with the All England Club in 2012, inking a contract that was valued at around $480 million over a 12-year stretch that ended in 2023. The partners brokered an extension in 2021, agreeing to another dozen years of coverage in a $630 million deal.
In the last decade, ESPN enjoyed its biggest TV turnout care of the 2019 Djokovic-Federer final, a five-set, five-hour wonder that averaged 3.33 million over the complete telecast window and 3.83 million for the match itself. The rule of thumb for men’s tennis is, the longer the string of numbers on the scoreboard, the bigger the TV audience. ESPN’s deliveries for Djokovic’s victory in Federer’s 12th Wimbledon final were its highest since 2012, and the readout looked like this: 7–6(7–5), 1–6, 7–6(7–4), 4–6, 13–12(7–3).
While a shorter telecast tends to boost the ratings of pretty much every other televised sport—witness how the pitch clock has supercharged MLB’s deliveries—a drawn-out slugfest is the secret to putting up big men’s tennis numbers. (The same principle does not apply to the best-of-three women’s format.) Alcaraz’s Centre Court match against Djokovic in 2023 ground on for four hours and 42 minutes and averaged 3.2 million viewers.
If Wimbledon’s 21st century U.S. deliveries are a shadow of what they were during the ‘80s, the event still moves the needle everywhere from the Home Counties to the sleepier environs of the United Kingdom. When the Scotsman Andy Murray won the title on the lawn in 2013, the BBC’s broadcast of the match averaged 12.1 million viewers, peaking at 17.3 million. Here in the States, the full Murray-Djokovic telecast averaged 2.5 million viewers, with a high-water mark of some 3 million. Such is the enduring power of a home rooting interest; bear in mind that the U.S. population is almost exactly five times larger than that of the U.K.
If ESPN isn’t likely to adopt any TNT-style flourishes during its two weeks in London, the network may conceivably get a ratings boost from a far less manageable set of circumstances. This week saw a broad swath of the U.S. get cooked by record temperatures, as an angry sun compelled some 160 million Americans to seek relief from heat-index values that reached as high as 110ºF. The New York market and its 7.49 million TV households endured two consecutive days of 106ºF “real feel” conditions, and aside from making everything smell like Hell’s abattoir, the gruesome weather sent a whole bunch of people scrambling for indoors entertainment options. On Wednesday, New York HUT levels were up nearly 10% compared to the previous week, when the air didn’t feel (and smell) like some sort of infernal fish chowder.
As much as another clock-gobbling Skinner-Alcaraz title bout or a deep run by Gauff will help lift ESPN’s Wimbledon deliveries, perhaps nothing would get the Nielsen dials spinning like another plunge into the meteorological swamp. Of course, Bristol can’t control the weather (at least not yet), but the comforts of blasting the AC while watching some of the world’s greatest athletes grinding it out in that green and pleasant land are hard to overstate. Stay inside. Hydrate. Watch Wimbledon. Your pickleball game has been canceled.
