Princely Folks

Afternoon, everyone. Sorry to be away most of the day, but it's officially. . . holiday season!This will be your Watercooler post for the rest of the day and early tomorrow, feel free to discuss the oeuvre of Rick Astley, Prince Recoil strings, or any other topic you like, in the Comments. Also, looking ahead, get ready for Part 2 of Andrew'sRed State Road Trip, which will include a Battlefield Report*. Also tomorrow, I am going to throw out a pretty controversial idea, having to do with the Grand Slam singles title record.] *

Today, a big contingent from Prince came to New York City to take on the Tennis magazine staff in a casual doubles tournament. I made one of my once-in-a-blue-moon forays onto the court (I think I played in August, too, but I forget). We got together and played at the Roosevelt Island Racquet Club.

The Princelings brought along a pile of rackets, mostly from their 03 line. That's not a reference to a year, but toa technology with which many of you players are by now familiar. I'm not a techie, but the big selling point of the "O" rackets is that instead of having traditional, tiny holes (or grommets) drilled into the frame, the racket has very large O shaped holes for the strings - a patented technology that is both obvious to the naked eye and difficult to knock off (partly because the enlarged grommets that hold the strings are not drilled into the frame  - the frame is actually made of two longitudinal halves). Steve Davis, who's in charge of the O technology (it has applications in other sports) was with us, too.

We also got to play with a bunch of rackets, including the new 03 Speedport Black, the one used by the Bryan brothers, and we tried Prince's new "Recoil" string. This may be of great interest some of you tennis geeks. Recoil is, according to the enthusiastic Prince minions, asui generis string - neither polyester nor synthetic gut. It was developed in partnership with WL Gore (the company that gave us Gore-Tex). The string is built on a thermo-plastic core with Gore micro-web technology, and the big selling point is that the strings automatically realign after each shot - and not just for the first ten minutes of play after a new string job. I wonder what a self-respecting ATP or WTA pro will do if this string catches on, and burying  your nose in the frame as you meticulously pick at and realign errrant strings is no longer an option?

So there I am, armed with the same racket that won the Davis Cup and using strings developed partly by the same guys who make my hunting jacket waterproof and I STILL can't hit a forehand service return into the court! We have serious tennis-stud material on the staff - Jon Levey, Steve Tignor, James Martin, Jeff Williams, Tomahawk  Perrotta, and David Rosenberg, a photo editor who is always looking to kick a little booty. . . but the Prince contingent was loaded, too. Caylan Leslie, one of their marketing specialists, learned the game from Phil Dent (he dumped her when his son Taylor decided to get serious about his tennis) and earned All-American honors at Notre Dame.

One thing that seems to remain the same in tennis, always, is that everyone really does have a unique game, even if it may appear conventional, or similar to the game of others, at a first or casual glance. We played six-game sets, rotating partners. The idea was to report how many games you won in each of your three six-game sets; the person with the highest games-won total won the tournament. In my first match, one of my opponents was Prince's George Poulos. He's a heavy guy who clearly was not going to be a great mover. As it turned out, he didn't have to be. His game was based on uncanny precision, both in his picture perfect, economical stroke-production and shot placement. His shots went off as crisply  and, well, inevitably as a fine Swiss cuckoo clock, chiming the hour.

In anothe of my round-robin battles, I played with Prince's Zach Perles against Steve Tignor and another marketing lady from Prince, Peg Connor. She was sporting this big, civil-war grade bandage on her arm and her face was a little flushed from her previous 6-game match, so I made some comment to Zach about how we would "go easy" on the girl. Unfortunately, the danged girl didn't go easy on me. Her sharp volleys and consistent groundies got the better of me, time again. What do you want from me? She works for Prince - she has access to all this Recoil and O-ring stuff!

Ultimately, everyone had a great time. My personal highlight was hitting a second-service ace on the sudden-death 3-3 point (we were using no ad-scoring) against he who some call The Beast of Brooklyn, Tignor himself. I thought the end-zone dance I did after that one was pretty kickin', too. The big winner at the end of our event was Poulos, which kind of figured.

After the tournament, we all took the tram from Roosevelt Island to Manhattan and had pizza at a place I've always liked, Patsy's . I sat next to Sarah Unke, a fellow editor at Tennis, and when that ghastly Rick Astley song, *Forever and Ever*, came on, Sarah bragged about how she had learned to play that song (and sing along) on a little Casio electronic keyboard.

"You," said Sarah Thurmond, rather regally, "Are such a dork."

It was an altogether fine way to officially begin the holiday season.

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