Latest news with #ATP-sanctioned
Yahoo
11-07-2025
- Sport
- Yahoo
Trumpy Billionaire, 59, Flamed for Pro-Tennis Debut Disaster
Tennis fans are serving up savage critiques after billionaire Bill Ackman stole someone's spot at a tennis tournament and lost miserably. The 59-year-old MAGA financier caused quite a racket Wednesday after he and his doubles partner, retired pro player Jack Sock, failed to win a single set at the Hall of Fame Open, a famed summer tournament in Newport, Rhode Island. After an hour and seven minutes, the pair lost the match 6-1, 7-5. Ackman was forced to step off the court, dripping with sweat. 'I could give a speech to 2,000 people, no problem,' he said. 'But to get in front of 150 people and play tennis is a little different.' Ackman is a major donor to the International Tennis Hall of Fame, which puts on the tournament. But tournament officials claimed that Ackman played as part of a 'wild card' entry granted to Sock, who was eligible for it as he won the 2021 doubles title at the Hall of Fame. Nevertheless, onlookers questioned how Ackman got a spot to play in the first place. Or, as USA Today columnist Dan Wolken wrote, 'Whether it's Wimbledon or the lowest-rung tournament in tennis' minor leagues, there aren't any shortcuts to getting in. Unless, of course, you're billionaire hedge fund guy Bill Ackman.' 'Another mega-billionaire living out his own private dream,' tennis fan Lydia Chambers told The New York Times. 'I hope he's making a huge donation.' Journalist Glenn Greenwald posted on X, 'BillAckman used his vast wealth to worm his way into a professional, ATP-sanctioned tennis tournament at the Hall of Fame at the age of 59. His level was so abysmal that it forced the professional players on the court to pat the ball to him, enraging the tennis world.' 'Bill Ackman (59 y/o billionaire hedge fund manager) somehow bribed his way into a professional tennis tournament today. It went about as well as you could expect,' one X user scoffed. Another said, 'I guess when you're worth $9.5 Billion, tour players will treat you like a 'Make-A-Wish' child in your ATP Challenger match. Bill Ackman is an absolute joke.' A third added, 'Bill Ackman should not have been given a wild card for a professional tennis tournament, when he doesn't play on that level. If Ackman wanted to be mocked for competing in a circus event in which he'd be overmatched, he could have called Jake Paul.' Ackman's excuse for his horrible defeat? Stage fright. 'I can speak in front of an audience of a thousand people or in a TV studio on a broad range of topics without any preparation and without a twinge of fear, but yesterday I had my first real experience with stage fright,' he wrote on X. He even claimed that his body involuntarily froze and his 'difficulty breathing ' was 'not a fitness issue.' 'I regularly play with mid-20-year-old D1 college players and recently retired pros on a familiar court with no audience with none of the same symptoms,' he insisted. Ackman's awkward excuse came amid a flurry of other posts he made expressing his love for Elon Musk and slamming Democratic mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani as a 'communist.' His failure also came less than a week after he announced on X that he was playing 'the best tennis of my life.'
New York Times
08-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Tennis television coverage needs a new dawn. Can TNT's French Open provide it?
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. Advertisement 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. 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. Advertisement 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. Advertisement 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. Advertisement 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.
