Friday, August 26, 2011

What Wood Happen?

Didn't even hear about this Old School Challenge yesterday out at the 69th Regiment Armory, but what a riot to see an always-wooden Pete Sampras playing with a Donnay Allwood and the Bryan brothers learning their way around a Dunlop Maxply Fort. Longtime fans of the game often wonder how today's stars would measure up with the technology of the '70s and '80s -- I'd be curious to see a speed gun on Pete's serve or see how effective the doubles teams are when they can't power their way into the net. I'm not sure what Ivan Lendl's playing with -- he was already using a composite (Kneissl) when he came on the scene in 1980 -- but perhaps they thought it only fair to let him use something more modern seeing as he's older than the rest of the guys. Here's hoping it on TV sometime soon -- but with DirecTV as a sponsor, I'd say I'm shit out of luck!

Read my history of tennis rackets HERE.



1 comment:

BW said...

They timed Philippoussis (and Sampras?) several years back and found that serve speed wasn't affected much when they used wood. You'd have to find the sweet spot, though, and so serves wouldn't be *consistently* so fast. Returners would be hurt more, for sure.

Groundstrokes are what have really changed, and my theory is that the new rackets showed people what is possible with grips and spin and so they brought about a kind of evolution. A Roddick could probably grab a Dunlop Maxply and still hit his krazy-grip forehand, but that forehand might never have evolved with the old equipment.