3 posts categorized "October 2009"
 Thanks for the responses to last week’s story on the 10 player types and their equipment needs. It seems we have in our midst a lot of “Baseline Retrievers,” who should be thinking about using gut strings for more power; “Wild Thangs,” who should consider polyester strings if they don’t have any arm issues; and “Club Contenders” who, in pursuit of more effective volleys, should opt for larger grips and should try adding weight to the heads of their racquets for stability.
Your feedback will help us consider the different player types in future gear reviews. Some of you identified an 11th player type we overlooked—“The Bargain Hunter,” an especially relevant category in the recession, and one that we plan to add to the mix.
We also asked Nate Ferguson, founder of Priority One Tennis and racquet customizer to the stars, to answer a few of your questions. These represent some of the recurring themes we noticed among the responses to last week’s piece.
She wants to be ‘Amazing Grace’ for the team: “I’m a high school player, somewhere between a 4.0 and 4.5, who really wants to help our team win more this year! What would Nate suggest to improve my consistency, help me develop an all-court game and keep me from popping a lot of strings? –Grace
Ferguson: Try adding some weight with lead tape to the head of the racquet and see if that helps improve your consistency and power, Grace. In addition to giving you a power boost, the heavier racquet will slow down your and control your swing, plus help you net fewer volleys than you would with a lighter frame. You might also try a hybrid combination of Luxilon polyester in the main strings (for durability) and gut in the crosses (to help you control your new power game).
He’s a racquet flip-flopper: I’m a self-taught player who came to tennis after playing high school and college team sports. I’ve gotten myself to a 3.5, mostly from watching tennis and using my quickness. I can get to most balls, but I lack the stroke fundamentals and hit short a lot. I’m switching back and forth between a Babolat Pure Drive and the Prince 03 White. –Cory of Pocatello, Idaho
Ferguson: First, you need to commit to one of the two racquets because they’re at polar opposites, Cory. I’m also curious why your cross-string tension is four pounds greater than in the mains. The pros sometimes do this but their racquets are highly customized from the handles to the hoop. But since you’re buying your sticks off the shelf, you should use equal tension on the mains and crosses since that’s the way they were designed.
He’s playing through pain: I am a 5.0 baseliner getting over tennis elbow pain, and I love hitting with lots of topspin, but I’ve had to switch to Luxilon Big Banger Ace strings because nylon and synthetic gut just don’t last. I know that Nate says they’re not the “correct” choice for someone with elbow pain, but I have reduced my playing time in order to enjoy the strings. –Alladio
Ferguson: I’d never recommend that anybody with arm, shoulder or wrist problems string with Luxilon—it’s just too harsh, Alladio. Since you’ve decided to trade off frequency of play with quality of play to get the supreme spin that Luxilon delivers, you should at least soften the blow to your arm by using gut in the mains to go with Lux crosses, and drop your tension into the lower ranges to help protect your arm.
The dilemma: Big or small grip? I’m in my late 40s and hit flat with a one-handed backhand. I want to get some spin on the ball as well as improve my volleying. I’m wondering if I should go to a thinner handle, like a 4 1/4-inch from my current 4 3/8. –Rui
Ferguson: The smaller grip will help you get a more wrist into your shots and help create a little spin, but at the expense of improving your volleys. Larger grips provide more stability at the net and prevent twisting on off-center hits. I think you should stay with your 4 3/8, Rui.
Kevlar no, polyester, yes: I’m an 18-year-old 5.0 who uses Kevlar in the mains, and I know they’re bad for the arm. I’d like a little more power on my backhand and forehand topspins. –Nik
Ferguson: Try polyester strings in the mains, Nik. They’re much more responsive than Kevlar, help create way better spin and are easier on your arm without giving up your 5.0 level of control. Poly won’t be quite as durable, but it comes close and beats Kevlar in every other category.
Stretching the life of his strings: I am 52 with some wrist problems and currently playing with light and long Gamma G260 and a standard-length Fischer M Pro. I string loose with full gut for comfort but the strings move around too much and don’t hold their tension for long. Which racquet should I use and would string savers solve the problem? –John
Ferguson: Players with wrists problems shouldn’t be playing with light and long racquets, John. It’s a bad combination. That eliminates the lightweight and 27½-inch long Gamma. The Fischer is about an ounce-and-a-third heavier which makes it the best bet, and you should keep the string tension low. But string savers won’t lock the strings in place; they just help with wear-and-tear from friction. The way to prolong string tension is to tell your stringer to pre-stretch the string by pulling at the two ends before it goes on the machine.
So many racquets and strings, so many choices. And so many player types. To help you cut through some of the gear clutter, we presented Nate Ferguson, founder of Priority One Tennis in Tampa and stringer and racquet customizer to the top pros like Roger Federer, Andy Murray and Novak Djokovic, with 10 common player identities and asked him for some gear tips for each type. Here is the feature.
See if you find yourself in one of these 10 and, if not, please give us your personal player type including your level (based on the NTRP scale), the current racquet and string type you use, and what you need to improve your game. We’d like to create a database that covers the basic player types to help us provide more specific information in future equipment reviews in TENNIS magazine and on TENNIS.com. Just click on the "Contact" tab at the top of this blog to send me an email, or post a comment here to let us know.
Think you’re fussy about your gear?
Look at Ivo Karlovic. (Actually, he’s really hard to miss at 6-10 and with hands so big he could wrap them around the trunk of a birch tree and probably uproot it with a single tug if he wanted.) The Croatian ace king insists that his grip be a jolly-giant size 5 3/8 inches around, which probably makes it the thickest handle in tennis since the late Jack Kramer swung a 5¼-incher back in the 1940s, and it’s well over the current ATP tour average of 4 3/8 to 4½.
Then there’s Robin Soderling, who long ago nixed using the conventional eight-sided plastic buttcap, opting instead to wrap 13 layers of tape on his handle to form a knob at its end like on a baseball bat.
And then there’s Roger Federer, Andy Murray, Novak Djokovic, Gael Monfils and Fernando Gonzalez. They’re so persnickety about everything from the shape, weight and the feel of their racquet handles to the amount of lead tape in the hoop that they pay as much as $50,000 a year to take Nate Ferguson and his customization crew on the road with them to all Grand Slam and Masters Series tournaments and Davis Cup matches.
Ferguson, 46, is the founder of the Priority One racquet customization shop based in Tampa and he’s pulled a lot of strings and raised a lot of racquets over the years to get where he is today. And today he happens to be making a brief pit stop at his shop to send out invoices to his who’s-who list of pro tennis clients before jumping the next series of planes that will take him to the Shanghai tournament on October 12 and then all the European indoor season stops.
“When one of our clients plays in a major tournament, at least one of us is there, sometimes two,” says Ferguson about a schedule that keeps himself and the three other members of the Priority One team—Ron Yu, Glynn Roberts and Michael Ludwig—on the road about 30 weeks a year. Ferguson also makes house calls. Last week he was in California to present the Bryan brothers with 16 new fully customized racquets to try out. Which makes those of us who live and breathe tennis gear ask: How does one get a gig like that?
You can become a certified racquet technician or even get your Bachelor of Science degree from Michigan’s Ferris State University in Professional Tennis Management, but that will probably only land you a job at a club or a parks and recreation facility. Earning the privilege of servicing the stars’ gear is as tough as graduating from the Challenger circuit to the pro tour. Client expectations are as high as Ivo’s eye, with players demand that their gear be as fine-tuned as Perlman’s fiddle. “It drives players crazy when they get a batch of racquets that play a little different, or have string tensions that vary a pound from the day before,” Ferguson explains. Catering to this clientele requires an artisan’s creativity—and good problem-solving abilities.
Take, for instance, the time when Ferguson got a call from Karlovic, who was looking to build his now-legendary monster grip. The easy part was getting it up to size. Ferguson injected 1.2 ounces of polyurethane foam into a standard handle to balloon it to 5 3/8 inches, and then strategically put lead tape from the 10 o’clock to 2 o’clock position on the hoop to maintain the racquet’s headlight balance and swing weight.
Adding the buttcap was the hard part, simply because nothing that big existed. So he took a racquet with a 4 5/8-inch grip, cut the buttcap into quarters and placed them on the corners of the handle, and filled the middle with a liquid epoxy. He then made a permanent mold out of his Frankenstein creation. (See the photo to the right of a regular 4½- inch grip next to Ivo’s.)
It’s that kind of creativity that turns top racquet customizers into industry legends like Warren Bosworth, who started with Ken Rosewall in 1972; Jay Schweid, who was discovered by Martina Navratilova; and Roman Prokes, who has worked with Andy Roddick and Maria Sharapova.
Ferguson is the newest member of the elite racquet-geek fraternity. He paid his dues as a stringer at Bosworth’s shop in 1986, and got his big break four years later when Bosworth client Pete Sampras came around looking for a private customizer because he felt slight inconsistencies in the frames of the half-dozen Wilson Pro Staff 6.0 racquets he carried on court. For Sampras, that was like starting a term paper on a Mac and finishing it on a PC.
“He had two specific needs,” Ferguson recalls. “He wanted to make sure his racquets were always strung tight on the road and he wanted the same person to custom build his racquets for across-the-board consistency.”
Ferguson got the job and became—literally—Pistol Pete’s right-hand man. A few years later Sampras referred Ferguson to a good friend, Tim Henman, and then Ferguson became chummy with Lleyton Hewitt’s agent. Then came Michael Chang.
By 2001, there were too many clients and not enough Ferguson go around, so he hired Yu, who had been Andre Agassi’s private stringer. As old clients retired, he picked up a whole new batch.
Today, Priority One ranks up there with Bosworth. Ferguson and his staff travel with 10 players and customize racquets for dozens of others including Soderling, Sam Querrey, John Isner and Andy Murray’s brother, Jamie. Occasionally, Priority One also works with recreational players, but Ferguson says, “I’d much rather expand our presence with the pros because that’s what we’re set up to do.”
And even though business is booming, he’s not claiming his services can take any pro to the Wimbledon final. “I like to think I’m an important guy, but I can’t make vast improvements in a pro player’s game by tweaking their racquets and strings,” he says. “I can build Karlovic a grip that fits his hand like a glove to help him on his serve, but I can’t do anything to help him with the rest of his game. He just doesn’t move that fast.”
The racquet customization business may have its legends, but there are no miracle workers.
|
