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In the April issue of TENNIS, sandwiched between racquet reviews, the magazine ran a piece about counterfeit frames. Aptly titled, Phony Frames, the story warns readers that buying a racquet at an auction site on the Internet, such as eBay, can be a risky proposition. Forgers, primarily located in Southeast Asia, are producing knockoffs of popular models and selling them on the web at heavily discounted prices to unsuspecting bargain hunters. It’s not an epidemic, but it does happen.
To illustrate the article, we ran pictures of a real and a fake Wilson n6. The impetus for the story came out of a meeting some of us at the magazine had with Wilson at their headquarters in Chicago last summer. Jon Muir, the general manager of racquet sports, told us about the problem and how the company had hired an agency to patrol the web looking for racquet cheats. We thought it an appropriate subject to address in the Spring Gear Guide, and when the time came Wilson was generous enough to loan us a counterfeit they had confiscated, along with its authentic counterpart, to photograph and compare for the piece. Hence the dueling n6’s.
Now for the confused.
A few readers studied those pictures and assumed the discrepancies that made that racquet bogus applied to all Wilson frames. Not so. It was just a comparison between one model and an obvious forgery of it. So even if your new [K] Factor stick has a word spelling that matches the counterfeit in the article, it does NOT mean you’re holding an imitation. As stated in the article, if you bought your Wilson from authorized reseller – Internet or otherwise – then you have nothing to fear. Your racquet is legit. Use it in good health.
That said, the whole episode does beg an interesting question: has the Internet supplanted the pro shop? Not this blog, but the good ol’ retail shop that avid players call on to satisfy all their equipment needs. For the most part, the anxious readers who thought they had been swindled had bought their racquets over the web. Not an auction site, either, but a certified dealer. If a name and a face rather than a computer screen had sold them the racquets, would they have been as panicky about their authenticity?
Not likely. Yet a recent report released by the Tennis Industry Association called, “Tennis Participation Trends & Studies”, revealed that consumer buying over the Internet has increased in all categories except for tennis balls. So greater numbers of players are doing their shopping from their laptops. Economics is a foreign language to me, but the three prevailing reasons for this have to be pretty much the same for most Internet consumption:
Convenience – who doesn’t like buying stuff wearing nothing but boxers?
Massive selection – there’s not a mall on the planet that can match it.
Lower costs – lots of competition and limited overhead result in friendlier price tags.
Admittedly, when I do buy tennis equipment it tends to be with a mouse click. In fact, the only times I find myself in a pro shop of any kind is because I’m too lazy (and painfully slow) to re-string my own racquets. Besides the three reasons above, the feature that drives me to the web most often is information. Not just product reviews, which are helpful, but the most critical of all eyes - customer feedback. You know, the opinions and recommendations you get from peers in forums and message boards. Take my last blog entry. I mentioned that I grew up playing with a wood frame, and several readers left comments about how they still play with one and which current strings work best with that type of racquet. Where else can you find that kind of knowledge?
It’s not that you can’t get wise counsel from John Q. Storeowner. If you frequent a shop or sporting goods store with an astute tennis equipment expert, you’re ahead of the curve. But short of that, I find avid players using the products to be the best judges of their merits. For one thing they don’t have to straddle the murky line of honesty and salesmanship. Is this guy telling me what I want to hear or does he truly believe this is most absorbent overgrip I will ever use? And most importantly, they can be candid about whether the performance matches the promise because their opinions come from having first-hand experience with the equipment.
Unless, of course, they bought a fake.
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