The Big Technological Tennis Upset
INNOVATIONS IN EQUIPMENT HAVE dramatically reshaped many sports, often in very unexpected ways. In the 1980s aerodynamic engineers redesigned the javelin so that with a precise, technically perfect throw, it would fly farther than the strongest athletes had ever thrown it before. In the hands of techniqueoriented athletes it set new records, but it proved dangerous, too, when it landed in a judges’ tent at the 1984 Olympics. Authorities returned its center of gravity to its original position, and the most powerful athletes became the champions once again. In skiing, new plastic boots and bindings have replaced metal and leather ones, and ski patrols respond to fewer broken legs but many more knee injuries.
Such consequences of technology are hardly new. Way back in the 187Os the introduction of the sliding seat in rowing transformed a choppy upper-body sport into a graceful full-body exercise. In football the rise of the plastic helmet in place of leather, around 1950, allowed the sport to become more brutal, more than tripling the number of neck injuries and doubling the deaths from cervical spine injuries. Changing technology affects the nature of a game, the kinds of athletes who succeed, and how everyone gets hurt.
In tennis the first new technology to upset the status quo was the racket itself, which appeared around the fifteenth century. Playing tennis with the hand was considered excellent exercise, and the racket reduced effort and sweat. Not only that, but for the Renaissance nobility to which the game belonged, grace and elegance were more important than the power and efficiency the racket could provide. Most players chose simply to ignore it.
The racket came to dominate very slowly—over more than a century—as tennis changed from a game of handball, jeu de paume . First players adopted gloves to protect their hands; this gave way to rope woven around the hand and then to wooden bats. The first rackets were short by modern standards, and their makers experimented with various stringing patterns.
In the late nineteenth century governing bodies began to regulate tennis balls, eventually specifying their size, weight, compression, and performance, but completely ignored rackets. Until 1978 a player could legally use absolutely anything. Yet until almost that time, wood was the only material good enough to make a decent racket, and wood’s limitations minimized the amount of useful innovation possible. A large-head racket had been briefly introduced in 1885, but it couldn’t withstand the tension needed to string it.
In 1965 René Lacoste, the French champion, patented a stainless steel racket frame inspired by steel-shafted golf clubs. It was significantly lighter and more aerodynamicalIy efficient than wooden ones, its hollow handle and decreased weight permitting increased velocity and thus shot power. The Wilson Sporting Goods Company marketed it as the Wilson T-2000 and put it into the hands of top players like Jimmy Connors. In 1968—the year tournament tennis turned professional, thereby attracting a flood of new money—Spalding marketed the first aluminum racket. The new metals provided more power, essential for the recreational player, but most of the top tournament players continued to prefer the feel of wood. By the 1970s manufacturers were developing composite materials that offered not only power but also a feel that challenged that of wood.
In the mid-1970s Howard Head, a recreational tennis player frustrated by his off-center shots, did what many weekend hackers do and blamed his racket. Unlike all the others, though, he did something about it. Twenty years earlier his frustration on the ski slopes had provoked him to launch a revolution in ski materials and manufacturing; now he used his engineering ingenuity to design an aluminum racket that wouldn’t twist when hit off-center. He widened the racket’s face to increase its resistance to angular motion; this produced both a fourfold enlargement of the “sweet spot” target area and a reduction in the vibrations that cause tennis elbow.
The traditionalists reacted with skepticism. The rules of the game still did not define a racket, and one could even use a broom, as the eccentric star Bobby Riggs was said to have once done. But this racket, marketed by Prince, looked ridiculous. The New York Times jokingly complained that it would bring men “a definite loss of machismo” and women “a loss of grace under pressure.” Even worse, it appeared to offer a substitute for skill and practice, undermining the virtues of the game.
Many recreational players loved how the new Prince racket offset their lack of talent, but it did not offer any clear advantage to the truly skilled. Professionals didn’t need the larger sweet spot; they already hit accurately. Moreover, the frame was more flexible, so conventional stringing tensions produced a trampoline effect.
With the introduction of a stiffer aluminum frame, permitting a 20 percent increase in stringing tension, the racket began to show its full potential. In 1978 Pam Shriver reached the final round of the U.S. Open using an oversize Prince, and Gene Mayer used one to climb from 148th in the world to 4th. By 1982 oversize rackets were the hottest items on the Wimbledon courts.
SUCCESS AND ENDORSEMENTS AMONG THE BIGGEST names in tennis complemented a comprehensive marketing campaign. Prince targeted the racket at the top junior players, into whose still-developing games it injected much-needed power. Older players loved it because the power it offered added to their playing years. It also changed the game itself, by eliminating longer, fluid strokes in favor of shorter, choppier ones and a more aggressive style of play. For weekend players it simply carried them to the next level.
Although the racket was changing the game, the International Tennis Federation (ITF) continued its tradition of allowing any and all racket innovations. That stopped in 1977, when a more subversive novelty came along.
In the spring of 1977 Georges Goven, of France, and Erwin Müller, of Germany, two unexceptional touring pros, began using rackets with a new system of double-stringing and upset favorites throughout Europe. In May of that year the Swiss Tennis Federation asked the ITF if the stringing was legal. Since the ITF had no rules about rackets, it was. At the U.S. Open that September, Michael Fishbach, ranked 200th by the Association of Tennis Professionals, upset the 16th-seeded Stan Smith. The new double-stringing system was producing huge upsets as the Prince racket hadn’t. It appeared to wipe out natural talent and years of practice and turn below-average pros into Björn Borgs.
What double-stringing did was to grab the ball and hold it longer, putting Borg-caliber spin on balls hit with an average topspin stroke. Traditional stringing used a single set of main strings interwoven with a single set of cross strings, all on one plane; the double-strung system had three planes of non-intersecting strings, and the strings had a plastic protective coating that made them look like uncooked spaghetti. This gave the system the popular name “spaghetti strings.” The United States Tennis Association argued in court that it added 30 to 60 percent more spin to the ball; an Italian laboratory calculated the increase at 16 percent.
Fishbach’s performance at the U.S. Open sent the tennis establishment into an uproar. Then Goven beat Hie Nastase in the first round of a Paris tournament using the new strings. Within a week Nastase himself adopted spaghetti strings, beat Guillermo Vilas in the first two sets of a match, and watched Vilas storm off the court. Nastase with his spaghetti strings had ended a fifty-match winning streak for Vilas.
The racket was turning predictable shots into wild, unreturnable ones. The fury led the ITF to temporarily ban it on October 3, 1977, only five months after it had first appeared. This was followed by a permanent ban and, finally, after all those centuries, a rule-book definition for the tennis racket.
Creative people, seeking either profit or a better chance at the game, won’t ever stop trying to come up with new sports technologies. How does, or should, a sport’s governing organization formulate regulations that will preserve the integrity of the sport without inhibiting its growth? It comes down to a matter of balancing athletic challenge, tradition, and innovation.
Athletic challenge means the test of skills and talents that the sport provides. Golf, for example, tests driving distance, accuracy, and putting precision. Bernard Suits, a professor of sports philosophy, defines a game as an activity requiring inefficient means to accomplish a goal for which the means and ends are inseparable—that is, the inefficiencies are accepted purely for the sake of the activity they necessitate. It obviously would be much more efficient to carry that little white ball four hundred yards and drop it in the hole than to stand all that distance away and whack at it with a stick. In making decisions about new technologies, sports organizations need to be sure that the result will not minimize that test of skill.
Tradition is important because a sport provides a continuously unfolding story. Achievement is measured in terms of past accomplishment, and if progress could not be assessed, each event would exist in a vacuum. Aluminum baseball bats would rewrite sacred statistics and upset the precise balance between pitching and hitting. Further modification of the game might re-establish that balance, and moving back the fences might restore the challenge of hitting home runs that would have been lost, but these changes would forever distance baseball from the game that Americans have followed for a century and a half. No matter what was done, the technology would have delivered an irreversible blow to an invaluable tradition.
Preserving challenge and tradition does not, however, mean a simple refusal to accept anything new. Technological innovations can democratize a sport and encourage its growth by assuring each athlete the opportunity to express his or her talent.
The conditions of competition must be equal to guarantee that the winner will be the one who best meets the challenge. Nobody wants the winner simply to be the one with the most money and the best engineering team. But how do we guarantee equality of competition? We could give everyone the exact same golf club, tennis racket, or rowing shell, and any difference at the end of the game, match, or race would reflect athletic skill. Or would it?
Not necessarily. The winner could simply be the person with the physique and skills best suited to the specific technology in use. In that case allowing athletes to select from some range of technologies might expand the equality of opportunity, in effect creating a more level playing field. After all, imagine making every golfer use clubs of the same length or making every baseball player, big or small, slugger or contact hitter, swing the same bat.
The Polara golf ball, which has shallower dimples on the poles than around the equator, reduced hooks and slices. The United States Golf Association decided that such a technology would compromise the virtues of skill and practice; many duffers loved it. The Los Angeles Times editorialized that golf should be easier anyway: “It’s a perverse, frustrating game. It provokes coronaries, broken marriages and bickering that destroys lifelong friendships. … A golf ball that always flies straight would do more to increase the life expectancy, reduce the divorce rate and improve the mental health of Americans than all the doctors, marriage counselors and psychiatrists put together.”
In the 1950s, when Howard Head altered a sport with his introduction of metal skis that warped less and were easier to manipulate than wooden ones, professional skiers decried their use as cheating, but recreational skiers swarmed to the slopes. Just in the past two years the Big and Hourglass skis have transformed expert powder slopes into terrain for many more skiers. As these examples suggest, if sports organizations are to maintain their traditions and standards of difficulty while facilitating the expression of athletic talent, they must evaluate new equipment not only technically but also philosophically.
Was banning spaghetti strings really the right thing to do? Were they all that dangerous to tennis? The answer is not obvious. The racket made a very dramatic debut, of course, but if players had had the opportunity to adjust to playing against it, its initial advantages might have vanished. Its manufacturers wanted a trial period. They argued that the racket should be allowed for a year, and then a study made of how it had affected the game. A commentator for the London Times agreed. He wrote, “Already there is evidence that players, initially baffled by the effect of the new stringing method, can make the adjustment necessary to overcome it.”
Although the racket appeared to make the game less of a test of skill, the truth of the matter was more complex. Spaghetti strings did add spin to the ball, but more spin meant decreased speed and power. Players began to hit more like Björn Borg (with heavy topspin) and less like Jimmy Connors (with commanding power). Thus the technology mainly helped players who relied on topspin but had not mastered the skill. It hurt good power shooters, but it also did no good for those who didn’t know how to hit a topspin shot at all, and it was little help to those, like Borg, who already had excellent fast-spinning topspin shots. Although the ITF was certain that the racket simply allowed average players to buy victories at major tournaments, the reality was not nearly so clear-cut.
THE REASON LARGE-HEAD RACKETS WERE AL lowed while spaghetti rackets were not may have less to do with their effect on the game than with how they arrived on the scene in the first place. Prince slowly took hold in the recreational market and only then began winning games on the professional tour, taking six years, from 1976 to 1982, to come to dominate top tennis. In this slow invasion its popularity grew steadily, making it difficult to proscribe. Spaghetti strings, on the other hand, hit the professional tour before ever reaching the public. The typical weekend player had no opportunity to get to know and depend on them. Worse still, their initial effect was tumultuous. Unlike metal and composite rackets, whose benefits could be realized only as manufacturing refinements gradually modified the equipment, the spaghetti strings shocked the tennis world at the outset. The London Times commentator opined that “the International Tennis Federation has panicked and made an ass of itself by the banning of what in my opinion was a seven-day wonder.”
Fertile imaginations and engineering ingenuity are continuing to give tennis’s rule makers headaches. Right now many short tennis players are turning to longer rackets to compensate for a lack of height and power and are especially improving their serves. Do their long-body rackets go too far in seeking a technological solution for problems of physique and skill? The ITF already needs to deal with the ever-increasing power game brought on by new racket materials and designs. Somehow the power game must be curbed without eliminating the technology that has brought the women’s game to prime time and allowed seniors to play for many more years.
The fact is that technology shapes our games, and regulating that technology is a daunting job. Once new equipment enters the courts, fields, or links, and manufacturers and players have a great deal invested in it, removing it becomes next to impossible. And no one can anticipate what that new equipment will be. One solution might be to regulate the performance allowable from equipment rather than each individual piece of equipment that comes along.
Returning to wooden rackets is hardly feasible, but curbing the power-serving, backcourt-slamming men’s game may be necessary for retaining fans’ interest. Limiting the amount of power a racket can yield, rather than regulating its design, might protect tennis—and forestall the next big technological tennis upset.
