Was the DUNLOP MAXPLY MCENROE used by Mac in 1982 just a paintjob?

vsbabolat said:

There has been quite a bit variation to the color of the wood on the Maxply McEnroe. I have had some that has been very light in color and some that has been very dark and in between.

1982 Wimbledon is using the lighter color wood reinforcement above the grip. At other times Mac is using a racquet with much darker wood reinforcement. I have found that there has been a wide variety in wood color used there.

A couple from my collection to show the difference

I firmly believe that McEnroe actually used the Maxply McEnroe and that he won the 1981 Wimbledon and US Open with a Customized Maxply Fort.

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paoloraz said:

I agree with vsbabolat, at wimbledon 1982 he was using the retail version, or something very very similar... But at the end of '82-beginning '83 he was using something different... to me, the reinforce above the grip is dark and it seems either a piece of graphite or just painted. The pics below are taken at the davis cup final '82 and at the master '82 (january 83).

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gavna said:

The 2nd generation of Maxply McEnroes had a different type of wood in the flake that ran from the handle to mid-shaft. McEnroe wanted a different feel and they started testing different wood layups. The dark wood you see in late 82 and part of 83 was African Blackwood or Black Walnut.

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paoloraz said:

I don't know...to me, the dark reinforce is just painting, not the colour of a specific kind of wood, althougt pics taken indoor may make colours more "glossy" and artificial than they are.

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paoloraz said:

I don't know...to me, the dark reinforce is just painting, not the colour of a specific kind of wood, althougt pics taken indoor may make colours more "glossy" and artificial than they are.

The second point is that (see below) that maxply mcenroe is much more "beefer" than the standard one in the throat...the retail mcenroe has just a thin reinforce in fiberglass, and the section of the wood in the throath is very similar to the top of the head... here the throath is much more thicker, which is what you have with the standard maxply, where the reiforce is in wood...and here the reinforce itself seems somehow thicker thand the retail version...it is "curvy" where it begins in the middle of the head, exactely as in the standard maxply fort...

(Or maybe it is just a customised racquet, with a much more beefer wood throath and a thicker fiberglass reinforce...)

In the end, I think that jimbo might be true, i.e. that at some point mac started to use again a standard maxply fort paintjobbed as a maxply mcenroe. Remember that the mcenroe is much more stiffer than the fort, and that mac developed shoulder problems which made him switching to the 200g in march '83. In his autobio he says that when he tried the 200g he was practicing with his "trusty" maxply...

Don't know, really, I have not "the" answer, my feeling is that it is either a fort paintjobbed as a mcenroe or a customised version, but I might be wrong, of course! ;-)

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ChicagoJack said:

I'm no vintage racquet sleuth, but I do know something about color correction and the print/photography industry of the early 80's. If you look at Mac's eyes, the shadow areas of his hair, and the inside of mouth, all you see is black, no shape, no detail, just black. The color has shifted, the subtle shadow tones have compressed, from dark brown to black everywhere in the photo, not just the dark wood. If you look closely at the tip end of the V-shaped dark wood reinforcement in the photo above, you can see that, despite the awful tone compression, there is still a little wood color managing to show through. It's not quite as dark as the area that is a true black, the part in the throat that says "Maxply McEnroe" Notice this occurs with all of the images here in the thread that are scans of 80's printed material, where as the images that were never printed, the images that are original raw photography, look completely different. It is about the printing process, not the racquet.

In an effort to keep the total amount of ink hitting paper low, (too much ink, especially on crappy paper, creates a big mess) it's a common practice today to do what is called under color removal, and or grey component replacement. What this means is that in dark shadow areas, you remove a percentage of cyan, magenta, and yellow ink and replace it with black ink. Back in the 80's, the pro color jockeys did color separation by hand, by cutting masks and what not. It often yielded a result which, at the end of the day, was not an accurate depiction of real life color. This was especially true if the person working on the job, had no idea what the actual color was supposed to be (which I think is highly likely in this case).

Today we have computers and icc profiles to manage color from raw photography to press, and while the objective is the same, (keep the total amount of ink low, and appropriate to paper quality) the colors are much more true to life. But color management for press back in the 80's was highly inaccurate, more art and intuition than science for sure.

-Jack

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