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Tag: Tennis technology

  • You knew I was a winner and now ADV has confirmed it!

    A contest winner that is…

    A few days ago I was one of the winners of a drawing sponsored by premium bag maker ADV. Me? I seldom enter and never win contests but I did this time.

    My loot from ADV!

    The package from ADV includes a really nice court towel made from organic cotton, some bamboo wristbands and 12 ADV over grips, six in black which is less tacky but thicker (.75mm) and six in white which is thinner (.60mm) and tackier although not as tacky as the mint green over grips from Toroline which I have decided are actually too tacky for my tastes.

    ADV calls the black Felt Tac and the texture is excellent. I wish it, too, was .6mm but perhaps its thickness is a function of the material. My problem is that I use two over grips rather than a replacement grip on my racket that cries out for a black grip. I know — complicated.

    The white has a very pleasing texture and I am cool with its level of tackiness. Like all thin over grips it requires care while wrapping since any wrapping sloppiness results in puckering.

    Let’s face it — I am beyond picky when it comes to grips. It all started with golf and my relentless search for the perfect grip. By the way, it was Golf Pride 50th Anniversary. For some reason, GP used a proprietary and never-again-used rubber compound for that grip. In the decades before I left golf behind I hoarded dozens and dozens. Yup. Crazy. The ADV Felt Tac is the best feeling over grip I’ve used but I need to figure out a combination that allows me to get the grip size I need.

    The last item is perhaps the most versatile. Ostensibly, it’s an expandable packing cube. But when I look at it I see a hold everything bag for my current tennis bag. I like to pack light when I play and that means using a 3-racket bag. The bag is Ok but is very short on what I call zippered storage. Since I use the bag to carry two rackets it leaves plenty of space for the ADV packing cube whether it’s expanded or not.

    I am hoping that someday ADV will make a bag that falls between its Tennis Bag PRO V3 and its backpack-style bags. I like the idea of the backpack solution until I want to travel with my tennis gear (at least several times a year) and that’s when I need a conventional tennis bag. My wishlist includes a new bag from ADV designed for 4-6 rackets — kind of scaled-down version of the PRO V3.

    But hey, I am not complaining (again). Before I close I want to thank ADV for holding the drawing and the tennis gods for making sure I finally won something other than a tennis match.

    Thanks, ADV (and the tennis gods).

  • Tourna Ballport Deluxe Hopper; that’s right…Deluxe!

    I dig the Tourna Ballport Deluxe. It’s light, holds plenty of balls (I will leave its exact capacity for my esteemed colleagues at YouTube) and has wheels. In fact, Deluxe means wheels, funky two-piece wheels to be precise. Check ‘em out:

    See the little slit in the wheel?
    Yeah, that should work!

    I cannot imagine making this hopper more efficiently than they have, when you consider that it’s nearly free. That said, the screws that hold it together grip only to plastic. Even the legs rely on plastic to lock open and closed.

    Have a look:

    Yeah, man; those legs are locked, that’s for sure!

    It’s super light duty and made with cheapness firmly in front of mind, but it works as intended.

    I love that phrase and it applies perfectly here. Oh wait. I do have one more niggling complaint. Every time I take the Ballport Deluxe out of the trunk one or more balls have gone rogue and made a break for it!

    There goes another one! Grab it!

    Two-piece wheels, all-plastic construction and escape-prone balls notwithstanding, I just loves my Ballport Deluxe.

    Tt

  • The smaller the ball the better the (sports) writing.

    I’m not sure who said that but I am fairly sure it’s true. The best sports writing is about golf, of this I think there’s little doubt. The reason for that is simple. Golf writing is either about hero worship, which never gets old, or tragedy, which also never gets old or both.

    Think about the boredom of writing about ordinary good golf:

    “And then our hero hit another ball into the middle of the fairway. Then he hit another ball into the middle of the green. Then he made another putt.”

    Now try this: “Our hero was nervous as he stood on the 10th tee, a tricky dogleg left. Memories of snap hooks into the woods bedeviled his mind as the wind swirled from right to left. He was already three shots behind the leaders with the hardest holes on the course still to be played. He hit a towering drive that was no more than ten feet left of his target line, but the wind freshened right at contact and the ball drifted left of the tree line before it vanished from view. Ten minutes later after having to strip down to his underwear in order to play his second shot from a pool of swamp water, the resulting ball miraculously caroming off a greenside tree into the center of the green, our hero unceremoniously sunk a ten-footer for birdie.”

    A tennis ball is a bit larger than a golf ball and my early reading suggests that writing on tennis is Ok, but surely not to the level of good golf writing. One problem, I think, is the nature of the action. Too little describable time passes between tennis shots to delve into a player’s mindset. But now I am getting caught on a tangent.

    I’m reading these three tennis books. In a couple weeks, I’ll review them. Technical Tennis is the most interesting, surprisingly, though the writing of David Foster Wallace’s String Theory is undeniably excellent and the story of Pancho Segura’s life in Little Pancho is as improbable as it is true.

    Tt