January 6th, 2009
The latest issue of Tennis magazine is out with a little feature on the 10 most influential racquets of all time. If you’ve ever followed the sport, you can probably guess five of them off the top of your head. But buried in the entry on the Wilson Pro Staff 6.0 85 is this fascinating nugget:
Pete Sampras didn’t merely play with the Pro Staff 6.0 85; he insisted on playing with those produced in a former Maidenform undergarment factory on the [Caribbean island of St. Vincent] (early Pro Staffs were made in Wilson’s Chicago factory and later ones in China). When the St. Vincent factory closed in 1990, he stockpiled a bunch of the frames and got more from Wilson when he ran out. The St. Vincent Pro Staffs had a slightly wider beam due to older manufacturing techniques. According to Sampras’ stringer, Nate Ferguson, the St. Vincent racquets are also slightly stiffer than those made elsewhere.
This sort of thing always amazes me. There’s a story about Bill Bradley going to the opening of a YMCA or some such (maybe from A Sense of Where You Are?). Bradley was to dedicate the basketball court by taking a free throw. He missed the first free throw, clanging the ball off the rim. He took another one, with the same result. He grumbled that the rim was an inch off. Someone measured it and sure enough, it was.
I think we mortals often underestimate how different it is, as a simple physical proposition, to encounter the world as a professional athlete. It’s not just what you can do–it’s that you can actually see and feel things that normal people can’t.
PS: Why wasn’t the Wilson Profile included in the Tennis list? It totally revolutionized raquet design, even though it was more cricket bat than raquet.
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