2 posts categorized "August 2009"
Hey, blog-gears. Thanks for your response to last week’s introductory post on gear game-changers that clearly showed I’m not alone with fond memories of my first racquet fling. Special kudos to SouthPaw for writing the line I wish had been mine -- “Love at First Strike” -- that in four best-chosen words describes Paw’s first date with the Prince Graphite 110.
 I also sent your first batch of gear questions to Bruce “Mad Dog” Levine, TENNIS.com’s chief racquet guru. He’ll get back to you with his picks of three or four racquets he thinks you should playtest based on the personal playing bios you sent -- your level and style, and the racquet you now use and what you need most that you’re not currently getting from it.
But be a little patient with us because the Dog is always in high demand at U.S. Open time. But we’ll have his responses for you sometime after tonight when the Dog woofs on the latest equipment trends for WNBC-TV here in New York (tune in at 7 p.m. if you’re in town), and before next Sunday when he receives his national award from the USTA for running one of the 12 best tennis facilities in the country – the Courtside Racquet Club in Lebanon, N.J.
Meanwhile, I’m off to the Big Show at the BJK National Tennis Center where I’m meeting up with another of TENNIS.com’s top-of-the-crop gear advisors, Roman Prokes, a.k.a. the king of strings, to get the skinny on the pros’ picks and the stories behind them.
Roman and his team of 14 stringers are the hardest working and most skilled artists and craftspeople at the Slam this side of Venus and Serena. The team is spending from 7 a.m. until the wee hours each of the 14 days, restringing and refitting some 3,500 racquets from their shop inside Arthur Ashe Stadium.
Roman is the stringer, racquet customizer and technical go-to guy for some of the biggest names in tennis where he modifies their frames’ lengths, weights, and balances, and then matches it all with tailor-made string. Think of Roman as the tennis equipment equivalent to Billy Joel’s piano tuner and Dale Earnhardt, Jr.’s chief mechanic.
His A-list clients range from Rafa to Roddick, and often they call on him for more than just his string expertise. He helped Maria Sharapova, for one, find a new racquet a few years ago when she wanted to control the extra power she’d been carrying around a few years ago and helped guide her to her current stick, the Prince 03 Speedport. I’ll ask Roman this week if Maria has altered her racquet characteristics or string tension to accommodate her recovering shoulder and her new compensating shortened serve.
Got a question about your favorite player’s string combination, tension, or racquet weights and balances? Email me by using the "Contact" tab at the top of this blog and we’ll take it to the highest court.
Talk to you from Flushing.
Welcome, blog-gears to our little corner of TENNIS.com. We're here to help guide you through the myriad of mind-numbing racquets, shoes, strings and accessories choices out there and keep you on top of the latest equipment news and trends. Email me your questions and comments by using the "Contact" tab at the top of this blog, and TENNIS.com's equipment experts and I will try to hone in on the gear candidates that best suit your playing level, style and aspirations, whether that means getting to the finals of the parks & rec or club tournament, or just keeping pace with Bob and Bonnie in the regular Saturday morning match. Also, feel free to comment on my posts themselves. Here’s a question for you to get things started: Have you ever have a racquet that boosted your game overnight? A Profile, Sledgehammer, Radical, Graphite, MaxPly, T-2000? I’ll go first. There was this one special stick that changed both my game and my life. Let me explain. I was a baseball player in high school and college who was drafted a few years later into tennis by a spouse who kind of liked the outfits and insisted we needed a mutual hobby to help us “grow” the relationship, a very popular notion that shaped the social consciousness of the late 1970s and spawned a zillion self-improvement books. She signed us up for the next mixer and bought a pair of his-and-her Wilson Chris Evert racquets (since I knew nothing about this game, I just assumed Chris was a guy). The Everts had the standard 68-square-inch head that seemed awesomely bulbous compared to the sweetspot on my Louisville Slugger. So I figured it would be easy for me to transfer my batting skills to swatting a tennis ball. But that wouldn’t be the case. Our first opponents bagled us in a pro set. Muffy, 13, and Buffy, 11, were a couple of country-club sisters raised on tennis and crumpets. They certainly had plenty of game, but the worst part of the ordeal was I bounced more balls off the frame than on the stringbed and sprayed them all over the adjacent courts. I was finished with this game. But something caught my eye as I hurled the Chris Evert in the donate-a-racquet-for-kids bin -- a couple of beginners on a distant court were effortlessly trading dozens of back-and-forth moonballs using racquets the size of Bigfoot’s snowshoes. They each had the new Prince, the ugliest piece of sporting goods equipment I had ever seen -- its head was ridiculously too large for its body like those hideous bobblehead dolls. I was told this Prince was invented by an aeronautical engineering genius and horrible recreational tennis player by the name of Howard Head, who solved his own miss-hit misery by figuring out a way to legally expand the conventional 68-square-inch string bed to a whopping – count ‘em – 110 square inches! It looked like any fool capable of hitting the broadside of a barn could make string contact with this monster, so I picked up a loaner and, sure enough, I was rallying! Most, not just some of the balls indeed hit the stringbed. By the end of the session I was hooked on the Prince and tennis. The racquet carried me to the head of the novice class and eventually to a respectable 4.0 NTRP within a few years. I even got a job in the tennis business. But more important, the Prince was the catalyst for my spouse and me to a new and expansive social circle. We met all these like-minded people with a mutual passion for the game and they quickly went from strangers to tennis friends to best friends. They became the folks we regularly invite to go to “hit some balls” and then take in a movie. We’ve been to their cottages and on their sailboats. We’ve celebrated milestone birthdays together, and once – it was last year -- we all attended the funeral of the nicest guy I ever met, which took place on a tennis court 25 years ago. And when we moved from the Midwest to the East Coast where we didn’t know anybody, all it took was one call to the local tennis club to clone our friends back home. So yeah, finding the right racquet made a big difference for me. What about you?
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