TNT Sports is giving John Isner and Venus Williams significantly more to do at this year’s Roland-Garros, the network announced Thursday.
Isner and Williams are both taking on expanded roles for the 2026 tournament, which kicks off May 24 across TNT, truTV, and HBO Max. Williams, a seven-time Grand Slam singles champion who spent years at No. 1 in the world, contributed pre-taped packages during TNT’s first year at the tournament in 2025. This year she will be live in Paris in the studio for the quarterfinals, semifinals, and women’s final.
Isner, who was primarily part of Bleacher Report’s coverage last year with limited on-air appearances, will now be involved throughout the full two weeks across studio and match coverage. He retired in 2023 as the all-time leader in ATP Tour aces with 14,411 and was the top-ranked American men’s player eight times.
“When we had the opportunity to present Roland-Garros, I really wanted to push tennis coverage into the 21st century,” TNT Sports talent exec Craig Barry told Front Office Sports.
It’s a natural progression for a broadcast that earned its stripes in year one. TNT entered the 2025 tournament with no experience in tennis production and a roster of skeptics who assumed the Roland-Garros rights acquisition was about plugging the hole left by losing the NBA rather than any genuine commitment to the sport.
Andre Agassi, in his first-ever broadcasting role, was one of the best analysts on the coverage and became the story of the tournament. Sam Querrey, who Barry nearly passed on before catching a podcast he did with Isner that changed his mind, was a genuine breakout. The coverage broke through on social media in a way tennis almost never does in the United States, driven by TNT’s Bleacher Report and House of Highlights properties. Barry told Awful Announcing after the tournament that it felt like a TNT show, that it had TNT DNA, the same authenticity behind Inside the NBA applied to a sport that had rarely had it on American television.
Agassi is back for the semifinals and final, which is notable given Barry told AA he hadn’t spoken to him since the tournament beyond a thank-you, and Agassi had come in purely to try it once. John McEnroe, Lindsay Davenport, Jim Courier, Caroline Wozniacki, Sloane Stephens, Querrey, CoCo Vandeweghe, and Mary Joe Fernandez all return, with Genie Bouchard, a former world No. 5 and Wimbledon finalist, joining as a new on-site contributor. Adam Lefkoe, Patrick McEnroe, and Mark Petchey host alongside play-by-play voices Brian Anderson and Alex Faust, with Jon Wertheim handling features and interviews.
About Sam Neumann
Since the beginning of 2023, Sam has been a staff writer for Awful Announcing and The Comeback. A 2021 graduate of Temple University, Sam is a Charlotte native, who currently calls Greenville, South Carolina his home. He also has a love/hate relationship with the New York Mets and Jets.