For years, you could walk into a tennis shop and say: “I want Federer’s racket.” The shop assistant knew what you meant, picked up a Pro Staff, perhaps asked what grip size you wanted, and that was that.
In 2014 Wilson went one step further and put the RF97 Autograph on sale, developed with Federer: 97 square inches, 340 grams unstrung, a big heavy black thing that made very few concessions to whoever bought it. And it had Roger’s signature on the frame. Above all, it had one quality that cannot be taken for granted in sports marketing: it really did resemble what it claimed to be. You might then play with it and discover that perhaps Federer’s racket was best left to Federer, but that is another story.
Let’s start here: Federer had already had quite a few Federer rackets. First the 85, Hyper Pro Staff 6.1 95″, then the 90, finally the 97. At that point you might well wonder what all those people who had walked into shops over the years making that peremptory request had actually been buying. A Pro Staff, of course. But, as in the Ship of Theseus paradox, which part of the Pro Staff has to stay the same for it still to be that Pro Staff? This is where the trouble starts, because from the outside a racket is a fairly simple object: a coloured oval with a recognisable graphic design, a handle, some strings — and the strings are already another matter. Inside, it is a different story.
According to Thomas Aquinas, not even God’s omnipotence can make a rectilinear triangle have interior angles adding up to more than 180 degrees. Right, fine. But a racket manufacturer can orient the same sheet of carbon fibre differently and obtain more power and more control at the same time — and, according to some advertising campaigns, forgiveness of sins as well.
In Kennelbach, Austria, HEAD showed how a Speed MP is made. Ralf Schwenger, who works in racket research and development, starts with fifteen pieces of prepreg: sheets of carbon fibre, of a particular type, already impregnated with resin. They cut them, arrange them, then put them into the mould. The shape of the Speed stays the same, and so does the material it starts from. Change the direction of the fibres and you change the way the frame behaves. HEAD calculated how many different lay-up combinations can be obtained simply by playing around with those fifteen pieces.
More than 420 billion.
Billion. Don’t try to picture the number. It’s pointless.
Not bad for a racket that, viewed from a few metres away, always looks the same. Schwenger says they could be identical from the outside. Bless him. The carbon inside, however, is not, and the frame can flex differently and give completely different sensations. This is also why pro stock enthusiasts spend evenings discussing PT, TGT, H22 and H19 codes, looking at photographs of rackets taken during changeovers and recognising a grommet the way other people recognise the church tower in their home village. From the outside, it looks like a curious pastime, a rather expensive pastime. After the 420 billion, perhaps a little less so. Or perhaps even more.
And so far we are still only talking about the design of the racket. But a racket actually has to be built. I’ll let you in on a secret: the magic word is “tolerance”. A factory does not churn out clones.
For the 305-gram Pure Aero 98, Babolat specifies a tolerance of seven grams above or below the stated weight and seven millimetres in the balance point. Let’s say seven is their magic number. You can buy two identical rackets, both perfectly “within spec”, and find yourself with two different objects. Most of us could probably play with them for years without noticing. Albert Ramos-Viñolas could not: he would hit you over the head with one while shouting, “Cabrón!”
Yannick Bizzotto, the Babolat technician, tells of once preparing three rackets for him with a difference of one ( one ) gram between one and the next. He put them down in front of him and Ramos arranged them from lightest to heaviest. Fine. They did it again. Right again. Bizzotto says many other professionals cannot feel three or four grams, fortunately for them and especially fortunately for whoever prepares their rackets.
Because then some poor sod has to sit there and make them all match. Every year Babolat prepares between forty and sixty frames for each player on its team: they measure and weigh them, then make adjustments to the handle and underneath the bumper. At the end they check them all again. Why this madness? Well, when a player breaks a string and takes another racket out of the bag, it should not feel as though they have changed equipment. It seems obvious until you discover that the first frame weighs three grams more than the second, the third has a slightly different balance, and there is always a Ramos-Viñolas who notices.
Weight, then, is a word that says very little on its own. Put three grams near the bottom of the handle or three grams at the top of the racket and the scales will still tell you three grams. The player feels something else. And this is almost self-evident, but let’s hear what Andrea Candusso (whom we have already met here) said about Sinner.
Jannik wanted more stability.
“Swingweight is important because, simplifying the concept slightly, it is the dynamic weight the player has to move when playing… …on Jannik Sinner’s racket we worked mainly on that aspect, because after several attempts at finding the right set-up we agreed that it would be the best way to achieve the greater stability the player was asking for.”
They held a session with cameras, various radar systems and an accelerometer on his wrist. They tried different solutions and in the end some of the mass was moved from the tip towards the sides of the head, roughly at three and nine o’clock. He did not want a heavier racket, but those grams had to be somewhere else. Candusso explains that a difference of a few grams — the sort allowed by the tolerance — can become much larger when you look at swingweight, because where those grams have ended up matters. Not all grams are created equal. (SuperTennis)
And then there is Djokovic: the case where moving something around is not enough and you more or less start again from scratch.
Djokovic has an interesting history when it comes to rackets. When Agassi was coaching him, he and Roman Prokes, who had spent years preparing Agassi’s own rackets, had a tricky problem on their hands: Nadal. On clay, incidentally, they never really solved it. Anyway, the Spaniard’s forehand pushed Djokovic a long way out; the ball came high and heavy, and Novak found it harder to get the racket head through quickly enough to find certain angles. It was not that he could not reach the ball: Djokovic reached balls after everyone else had already stopped running. But Prokes had the sense that his racket belonged, to some extent, to an earlier kind of tennis:
“The game had outgrown his racquet.”
Together with HEAD they prepared three sets of eight prototypes: twenty-four numbered rackets. Djokovic got to number 12 and that was enough. The racket was about eight grams lighter, had one fewer cross string, going from 18×20 to 18×19, and was one sixteenth of an inch longer. That must be quite a bit longer, you think. Not really: just over a millimetre and a half. Eight grams off to make it easier to get the racket moving, with the string bed just a little more open. That tiny bit of extra length was there to recover something. Prokes says that at that level every millimetre counts. We believe him.
Twenty-four rackets for a millimetre and a half might seem like madness, but we are talking about Nadal’s ball, which Djokovic could not play quite the way he wanted. So we are somewhere between myth and obsession. You decide which is which, and what is what.
Nadal was less interested in playing the little chemist. In 2011 he asked Babolat for a little more weight on the ball and they put three grams in the upper part of the frame. In 2016, another two. Guillaume Cambon, one of the technicians who worked on his rackets, has said that apart from those strips of weight there was very little to change. Five grams at two different moments in an entire career. I’m not surprised.
Fine for Nadal, but what about the mugs who want “Nadal’s racket” in our usual shop? Oh no, no. For them, it changed in all sorts of ways…
According to an account that in the racket world is almost as old as the racket itself, beneath the various paint jobs Nadal continued to play with the AeroPro Drive Original he had adopted in 2004. So far, so good. Except the AeroPro Drive changed: along came Cortex, then GT, then the name changed too and it became the Pure Aero, while good old Nadal appeared on television every time in the new colours. The specialists recognised that old racket partly by what was missing: for years, underneath the Cortex paint job, there was no Cortex. This by way of example, not as an exhaustive account. Babolat has never said, “Well yes, lads, they were paint jobs.” No. Instead it describes the technical evolution of the Aero family and calls Nadal’s racket “essentially the same” as the retail line. Perhaps they too are appealing to Thomas Aquinas: “Essence is what is expressed by the definition”, and if Nadal’s racket is “essentially the same”, all that remains is to work out what they mean by “same”. This whole business caused very little embarrassment for years.
Then in 2023, however, came the plot twist! Babolat put the Pure Aero Rafa Origin on sale and presented it as the closest possible thing to the racket Nadal actually used. 317 grams unstrung, a 330-millimetre balance point, a stiffness rating of 73; and in the press release it even specifies the lay-up. Exactly: the arrangement of the carbon fibres, the fifteen pieces in Schwenger’s Speed, the story of the 420 billion possible combinations. For years it was enough to look at the paint and say, “That’s Nadal’s racket”, but when Babolat decides to sell something genuinely close to Nadal’s racket, it has to give you the definition too, just as Tommy Aquinas demands. So now, reasonably speaking, you can have “Nadal’s racket”. Of course, you might also want Senna’s McLaren and then drive it to the supermarket car park… Oh, and don’t forget the tolerance. Probably, if you want “Nadal’s racket”, you should ask Nadal. If I know him, he will look at you, raise an eyebrow and give you a little grin while thinking, “People are mad, they want everything that doesn’t matter.” He might even give you the racket.
Perhaps with Alcaraz the story is a little different, fortunately, because otherwise after a while you would start to think that every professional has a secret racket built by Bruce Wayne in the Batcave. Jean-Christophe Verborg, who is Babolat’s head of sports marketing (so trust him…) has said that Carlos plays with a model you can buy in a shop, then of course selected and set up for him. For years he had used the same platform as Nadal (which one?!) but when his ball became the ball we admire today, he went looking for more control and changed. That’s it. No industrial archaeology.
And that is what makes the question “Do professionals really use the rackets we buy?” rather pointless. Some do, or use something very close, while others play with a frame designed many years earlier and repainted. Djokovic had twenty-four prototypes; Nadal, five grams. Federer ended up putting on the shelves a racket that customers really could buy and that, I suspect, many customers would have been better off not buying. Then again, he really did play through geological eras, so his first racket today would probably be even more complicated for that Land Registry clerk we all end up embodying perfectly well on court.
Meanwhile, the companies have to sell new rackets: obviously. A new Speed or a new Pure Aero or yet another new Pro Staff, and so on… The names of the technologies more than occasionally sound as though they were chosen by the same department that names vacuum cleaners. The actual professional player may have very different ideas, or more to the point may not give a damn.
In 2024 Andy Murray said he had essentially played with the same racket for twenty years. Then, aged thirty-seven and sidelined through injury, he did a very islander thing: he went out and bought himself about ten frames, along with a machine for measuring weight and balance and some lead tape. He started experimenting on his own. Twenty years with the same racket, or nearly, while the wall in the racket shop had changed at least forty times — mainly in colour, because… because it had to change.
Perhaps the shop assistant who pointed to the Pro Staff without asking any questions had understood everything. Some bloke wanted Federer’s racket and he sold it to him.
Then, if you start getting picky, out come Thomas Aquinas, Ramos, Roman Prokes and the 420 billion rackets.
Roger’s arm, on the other hand, has always remained strictly not included, and always will.
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