Tennis served for breakfast
Live sports at 5 a.m.?
That's what ESPN Classic is offering each day this week, with live coverage of French Open tennis until 10 a.m., when it switches to ESPN2 until 2:30 or 3 p.m., depending on the day and matches.
We can't vouch for the 5 a.m. start, having done a JIP (joined-in-progress) at about 8 yesterday. However, the ESPN folks did a nice job of helping viewers enjoy a smorgasbord of first-round matches.
For the network's bean counters, the early-morning ratings aren't likely to be on the profit side of the ledger.
For the serious tennis fan, however, the ESPN initiative to establish itself as ''The Grand Slam Network" is great news.
Mark Shapiro, ESPN's executive vice president of programming and production, feels the network's 111 hours of coverage of the Australian Open and 109 1/2 scheduled hours from Paris over the next two weeks have done just that. ''In a very short time," he said, ''we have established ESPN2 as America's tennis destination network."
The best boost ESPN could get would be to have US players do well in Paris, getting into what analyst Patrick McEnroe calls ''the meat of the tournament -- the second week." But McEnroe is not terribly optimistic. ''The American guys are struggling as a group," he said in a conference call last week. ''They swoon when they see the color of the [red clay] surface. I'd be more surprised if it happened on the women's side."
However, with Lindsay Davenport still seeking her first French Open title and Serena Williams withdrawing, ESPN may have to introduce the audience to some of the world's other top players.
''We're ready," said ESPN coordinating producer Bill Bonnell. ''If no Americans make it into the second week, our job is to make viewers care about the other people. That will be part of Dick Enberg's storytelling role."
This will be at least the third foray into live tennis coverage for ESPN Classic. It was used for the US-Croatia Davis Cup matches in March and the Fed Cup last month.
Unbridled praise
Producer David Michaels emphasizes live coverage (vs. prerecorded features) in NBC's horse racing events, an approach that paid off in Saturday's Preakness. Donna Brothers (on horseback with victorious but shaken jockey Jeremy Rose), Mike Battaglia, and Bob Neumeier hit all angles in the wake of Afleet Alex's remarkable rally to win after stumbling and almost falling when cut off by Scrappy T coming off the final turn. NBC also covered the big political story -- Pimlico's legislative quest for slot machines -- without letting it take away from the race coverage. Charlsie Cantey showed her racetrack roots with an impassioned plea from the horsemen's side of the argument. And host/interviewer Bob Costas, the only non-track veteran in the broadcast crew, had Maryland governor Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. address the issue at the postrace awards ceremony. Ehrlich said, ''The Preakness is never going to leave Maryland." Nationally, Preakness ratings fell 22 percent from 9.2 to 7.2 on NBC, an indication that Derby winner Giacomo didn't excite the public the way Smarty Jones did a year ago. In the Boston market, the ratings were down 5 percent, from 9.9 to 9.4 . . . Channel 4's ''25 on 4: The Bob Lobel Era," a 25-minute highlight video that ran on Sunday's ''Sports Final," was worth recording. Lobel followed the video with in-studio guests Bob Ryan and Neumeier. All three have been in town and ''on the job" for the quarter-century that the feature covered . . . The Sox ''go network" against the Yankees this weekend. After Friday night's game on Channel 38, they're on Fox (Channel 25) Saturday afternoon and then ESPN's ''Sunday Night Baseball." . . . Former Sox infielder John Valentin joins Ryan and Dan Shaughnessy to talk Yankees-Red Sox on NESN's ''Sports Plus" tomorrow at 5:30 and 11:30 p.m.
New team in town
ESPN Boston (our name for the incoming sports radio group) plans to launch on 890 AM and 1300 AM in ''early to mid summer," according to station principal Jessamy Tang. The station's management team is coming into place, with program director Doug Tribou from WGAN-AM in Portland, Maine, sales manager Bud Paras, a radio veteran with ClearChannel in Boston and Providence, and marketing director Kevin Gabbay from Star 98.7-FM in Los Angeles. Tang plans a mix of local and ESPN network programming. As for the currently available Celtics rights and future talks with the Red Sox, she said, ''We'll be looking at what is available and makes sense for both the station and listener." . . . Channel 56's Sunday night ''Sports Zone," which ran from 10:45-11 p.m., is no more, having been absorbed into an hour-long 10 o'clock newscast . . . ESPN has the premiere episode of its six-part series ''Shaquille," narrated by Shaq himself, tonight at 7:30, leading into the NBA pregame show at 8, the draft lottery special at 8:30, and Game 2 of the Suns-Spurs series at 9.
Bill Griffith's e-mail address is griffith@globe.com. 
