Tennis is in a slightly “dead” period at the moment with many players traveling to the Rio Olympics to try to win a medal for their country. News reports from the games have mostly talked about Brazil’s flimsy economy at the moment, the players’ rough accommodations and every other article is another tennis player withdrawing from the tournament (5 out of top 10 ATP so far). I have a feeling the interest around the olympic tennis medal won’t be very strong considering.
In other news, Novak Djokovic broke the record for number of Masters titles (30). It wasn’t the strongest Roger’s Cup ever, Murray, Nadal and Federer were all out of commission, but with the way Nole has been tearing up the tour this year, I’m not sure it would have mattered. Is the US Open title certain? Well, of course not, but I’d keep him as the overwhelming favorite.
That might as well go for the Olympics of course, where he doesn’t have a medal.
Personally, I acquired two beautiful new sticks, Babolat Pure Drives from 1995. Here is one of them with some lead at 3 and 9. These have an astonishing (for Pure Drives) stiffness level of RA 67 unstrung which make them relatively flexible, especially considering modern Pure Drives
have unstrung RA numbers around 73-75.
I’ve sometimes given Babolat crap for the way their stiff and light racquets contribute to tennis elbow, but I must also say that playing with this racquet makes tennis feel easy. And with the proper technique and strings, hopefully my elbow will be fine. The lower RA should definitely help in this aspect. First test off the stringer is my go-to string Solinco Hyper-G
and RS Lyon. Will keep you posted.
Since I’ve acquired a few new sticks, a couple needs to go so I don’t get my own new TV show called “Racquet Hoarders”. You will always find my current racquets for sale here. What I’m selling at the time of writing is one beautiful Prince TeXtreme Tour 95 and one Tecnifibre Speedflex 315. Let me know if you’re interested.
That’s it for now folks. Don’t forget to play tennis.
