“You refuse to go modern, I see,” the grayhaired man on the next court called out to me with a laugh. He and his wife, their hitting session over, had spent the last 20 minutes on a sideline bench watching me and my opponent rally. It wasn’t the quality of our play that kept them rooted there. It was the sight of the tiny, tan, prehistoric weapon in my hand.
A wooden tennis racquet will do that to people. Little kids in clinics giggle when you pull one out of your bag. Grizzled teaching pros squint from two courts away as you warm up, trying to stave off flashbacks to the glory days of their misspent youths. Even blank-eyed subway riders in New York turn into chatty neighbors when they see you holding one.“How old is your racquet?” a woman asked me of the Jack Kramer Autograph I was spinning in my hand as I traveled to a club in Manhattan. “I used to have one just like that.” She seemed to be transported back to another, forgotten lifetime.
The wood frame is the sporting world’s vinyl record, an appealingly quaint, hipsterish talisman from the technological stone ages, before the rise of the jumbo racquet and its futuristic, atomically manipulated ingredients. Among some older players and fans, there has been a nagging sense that tennis should never have forsaken wood, the way Major League Baseball never traded its Louisville Sluggers for aluminum bats. John McEnroe has lamented that the game has been robbed of the finesse needed to succeed with wood. Others note that the decline in tennis’ popularity coincided with the switch to the power racquet in the 1980s. Once the pros could hit with such blistering pace and shot-bending spin, how could the average weekend warrior relate?
I was a product of the wood years, having picked up the game as a kid in the late 1970s. I stayed true to my standard-size Donnay Borg Pro until 1983, when I joined the mass shift to graphite. In the ensuing years, I developed the topspin-heavy, net-fearing style that characterizes the sport today. But my version of power-baseline tennis contained a flaw: A two-handed backhand that became wristier and less reliable over the years. By necessity, I began to take a hand off the grip and use a safer, but much less intimidating, one-handed slice.
Compared to the brisk, low-to-high cuts I’d always taken, the slice was a pleasurable novelty. Sweeping smoothly under the balland buzzing it a few inches over the net felt like an elegant way to play. It felt wood era. Was McEnroe right, could a wood frame teach me something new about the sport?
After a surprisingly long search—the woody no longer seems to be a staple of the average family attic—I eventually obtained two of them. Wilson sent me the above-mentioned Kramer Autograph, and TENNIS Magazine’s gear editor unearthed something called a Club Champion, also once manufactured by Wilson, in his basement. He tossed it onto my desk with a grimace. “Here it is. It’s a piece of junk.”
At first glance, he had a point. It was not an impressive instrument. The wood on the head was scuffed and the white painton its throat dulled. Picking it up, it became clear that the emphasis was on “club” rather than “champion.” While the racquet weighed 13.4 ounces—almost two ounces more than Wilson’s new Pro Tour BLX—it felt much heavier than any modern frame.
Not wanting to risk wasting my regular tennis partners’ time, I started by hitting against a backboard. The first thing I noticed was the sound; at contact, the wooden sticks reverberated with an old-fashioned thwock that lasted longer than the brief ping you get with a graphite. The second thing I noticed were the vibrations shooting up and down my forearm. I began to understand how Rod Laver had grown his tree-trunk left arm.
I gave myself a break by alternating between the Kramer and a contemporary frame. With wood, it was essential that I hit the ball out in front, but when I did, the ball carried farther off the wall than it did with graphite. On the other hand, creating spin was much easier with the midsize. After a few minutes I began to notice small changes in my strokes as I switched frames. While I could still use my Western grip, the wood racquets worked best when I shifted my weight forward instead of employing an open stance—hitting off my back foot seemed like a good way to separate my shoulder, not play tennis. On my slice backhand, I had to take the stick back earlier and extend my follow-through to generate pace. I even found myself watching the ball more closely, because there was so little margin for error. Anything hit outside of the sweet spot made the frame wobble. When I went back to the graphite, I felt like a baseball player taking a metal doughnut off the barrel of the bat. Swinging it was, almost literally, a breeze.
Like a vegetable-heavy diet, playing by the old rules—racquet back early, make contact out in front, get your weight moving forward—proved to be good for me when I took the woodies to the court. While the first swings of the warm-up never ceased to jar my arm, I hit the ball well when it was in my strike zone. With my shortened swing, I couldn’t hook shots out wide as easily, but the ball moved through the court more quickly. My extended follow-through gave my slice more bite. Was it the racquet’s material, or the fact that I paid closer attention to form when playing with wood, that made the difference? I couldn’t tell.
What I could tell was that when the ball found the sweet spot, which was not all that often considering that it was approximately the size of a small grape, it felt sweeter than any shot hit with a modern racquet. The ball exploded off the strings. At the same time, shots outside my strike zone, especially ones where I had to stretch forward, were challenging-to-impossible. With a midsize, I can create some pace even without a proper backswing. But when I reached forward for a short ball with one of the woodies and tried to flick it up and over the net, it dropped off the strings without ever getting airborne.
As for shots above my head, there was little change in my serve. I generated similar power on my first delivery and got the ball to kick on my second. It was a different story with the overhead. Every smash was an adventure. Finding the sweet spot was very difficult, and not hitting it perfectly meant not getting it in the court. Even solid contact was rarely enough to put the ball away. The modern racquet may have had a bigger effect on this stroke than any other.
After two months, I was ready to play a set against a regular opponent of mine, Adam. I plucked the Club Champion out of my bag, braved the stares from the courts around me, and sent my first serve fl ying over the baseline. The next two games went by in similarly erratic fashion, but once I got used to the racquet’s force, our points fell into the usual patterns we’d developed in earlier matches.
In the latter stages of the set, Adam began to work the rallies so that I was forced to hit as many running forehands as possible. With my normal racquet, I can get enough on these shots to send them crosscourt and deep. But with wood, I could barely get them to the net, let alone over it. Stretched wide, I struggled to generate pace. This may explain why, at the pro level, the rise of the power racquet has paradoxically brought with it a rise in defensive baseline tennis. Yes, the players can now crack 140-m.p.h serves, but the racquets also allow them to hit with pace, depth and accuracy from anywhere they like, even 10 feet behind the baseline.
How did I do against Adam? He and I play a lot of sets that end up 7-6. When I faced him with the Club Champion, our set ended up . . . 7-6, in his favor. I was stunned at the result. I was also stunned at how sore my arm was afterward.
Since picking my midsize back up a month ago, I’ve missed the depth I got with wood, as well as the added alertness I brought to watching and moving for the ball—both of which have since mysteriously vanished. But I haven’t missed the sight of my overheads bouncing off the tip of my frame and heading skyward. If oversize frames have dumbed tennis down, they’ve also made it more democratic—being bad at it doesn’t seem quite as humiliating.
What the wood racquets taught me is that, for better or worse, I like hitting off my back foot and whipping recklessly through my topspin strokes. I like making contact outside the sweet spot and still getting the ball over the net. I like curling a ball into the corner with sidespin.
I need all the help I can get on a court; I might as well get a little from my racquet.
Originally published in the April 2010 issue of TENNIS.