​THE ALL ENGLAND CLUB, London — A ball kid scurries along the net, then crouches low. The wind lifts the hem of a skirt. A player wipes a bead of sweat from their brow as they prepare to serve, bouncing the ball once, twice, three times. Then it arrives: the sharp, percussive thwock of strings meeting ball. No words carry more weight than that sound, and when fans watch tennis on television, they do so in near-silence. The movements of the players, the precise geometries they carve, and the speed of thought and shot are all visible to the eye. For a commentator, to speak would be to get in the way.
“That’s sacrilege,” says Jonathan Overend, a tennis commentator with Sky Sports, who has spent more than 25 years in the booth and previously with BBC Radio. At 53, he views tennis commentary as a musical composition shaped by the rhythm of not only the games, sets, and matches but the action itself. The server receives the balls. The point unfolds. The crowd reacts. The cycle repeats. Yet on radio, silence does not equate to absence; without talking, there is no match, and no tennis. In radio, words are the sport. This division—uncommon in most sports and only rivaled by snooker and certain target disciplines like curling—defines the essence of commentating tennis.
That art has evolved in step with the sport’s broader cultural arc. Radio commentary now often accommodates conversational breaks, interjections from a range of voices in the commentary box, and even what fans are observing with their own eyes and ears at home. When Andy Murray neared his first Wimbledon triumph in 2013, BBC Radio 5 Live received messages from people in the most unlikely places—hot air balloons, supermarket car parks—relying on radio to know what was happening on one of the most historic days in British sport.
Grand Slam tournaments, which sell their television rights for hundreds of millions, have embraced radio not only as an additive audience experience but also as a promotional vehicle they can own. Wimbledon and the U.S. Open offer on-site radio services that let fans in the stands slip on earpieces and hear insights as they sit courtside, but the real art of radio commentary lies in painting a vivid picture of a match that would otherwise remain unseen.
“I want people sitting at home to feel like they are here,” says Gigi Salmon, a presenter and both TV and radio commentator for Sky Sports and BBC Radio 5 Live, during an interview at Wimbledon. At 49, Salmon favors describing every ball in a rally. “I just get lost in a world, storytelling,” she explains. “That’s how my passion for the sport comes out.”
Here is how she called Novak Djokovic’s seven-time Wimbledon champion performance in a quarterfinal point against No. 3 seed Félix Auger-Aliassime: her voice tracing the arc of the rally, each moment colored with nuance, each breath and beat of the crowd woven into the narrative. It is in this meticulous, sonic storytelling—this living picture painted with words—that tennis commentary finds its most potent form, a discipline where silence, sound, and speech converge to bring the court to life for listeners near and far.