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.