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Probably another instance of having multiple contractors making more or less the same racquet, or making a distinction between two near-identical frames made by the same contractor. What are their butt cap codes? The "G" in GKS indicates 1984 manufacture; "S" is for SanHoSun. Long-Y frames...

The blue bumperless PWS-featuring "Sting 2" was made by SanHoSun, alongside the regular "Sting Mid", between 1984 and 1986. It is not common at all in the US. The red bumpered PWS-free "Sting 2" was made by Long-Y, also alongside the regular "Sting Mid", during the exact same period. It is very...

Outstanding stuff! Bussey's patent and that of Quiggin et al predate William Hillman's patent by half a dozen years! So Hillman was not the first to incorporate these ideas into a racquet design after all, though perhaps he was a lot more successful than his predecessors at bringing his product...

Hartley MUST have known about St. Leger's infamous crime decades earlier when he reminisced about their encounter in 1933, yet there is no hint of that awareness in that Yorkshire Evening Post article. Man of God overcomes improbably tight travel schedule to defeat notorious future murderer...

Very interesting article. So the average Victorian Field reader not only had a solid command of Greek and Latin, but knew by heart the size of F strings on a harp? Today, this 1500 word treatise would have been written as "Tension: hand tight; Pattern: 18x26; Start M's: Top; Mains skip: None"...

Before the 1930s, a stringing kit consisted of some pliers, a bunch of awls, and - if the stringer was serious - a fixture to support the racquet head during stringing. The string is tensioned after it is pulled through the hole, either with weight, or by leveraging the pliers against the...

Very interesting illustration! This type of stringing only survived in the form of decorative trebling later on (generally without the alternating reversals in the loops), yet the two trebling-like strings at the top of this drawing show a standard basket-weave - the exact opposite of the...

I didn't want to run afoul of TT's no-ad rule here, so I left out the top portion of the listing. Their asking price is 50. Not a bargain by any means, but certainly better than what you are seeing in STL. It's been sitting there for a month now, so demand for this perennial crowd favorite may...

Anyone having incontinence issues? :)

A surfeit of inspired writings in these articles, as always. The sight of Byronic necks and hairy ankles did not set these English roses aflutter inside their bustles? So while the sweat-soaked gents were visually peeling away layers of muslin frills and silk taffeta from the forbidden flesh...

I am always intrigued by the sight of male players wearing these ankle-length greatcoats or dusters right before or after their game, when no one around them was so warmly dressed. My understanding is that they were called "wait" coats. Here is another photo from the 1910s: The wearing of...

The NXG uses Prince's MORE technology, which fused two tubes together to form the frame, with spacers inserted between the tubes during the molding process to form the string holes. The design team behind this was headed by Rich Janes, the same Janes who was responsible for multiple interesting...

This is a perfectly reasonable assumption. In any case, Wilson had the resource to experiment with multiple molds simultaneously, and would have for sure tested multiple layups concurrently for each of these molds as a means to speed up development. For finalization, they only needed to settle...

Only people working for Wilson at the time would know when the mold was finalized, and their memory isn't always reliable after all these decades, just like my own! I have interviewed quite a few people who worked in the industry at the time; errors, contradictions, and discrepancies are common...

No one is asserting that Wilson is "lying". They began working on the PS series in 1981. It's entirely possible that based on their internal criteria, the design and production protocols for this series of racquets were finalized by the end of 1983, hence the commemoration. However, their...

@vsbabolat is correct, the commercial launch of the entire PS line took place in 1984 at the Miami trade show, as reported by Stringer's Assistant. Wilson might have finished development in '83 and used that to mark the birth of the PS, but even the prototype that was seen in Connors' hand as...

Finally something I have in common with any of the people you have written about so far! Only in my case the thief didn't work nearly so hard to stay hidden. If I understood the articles correctly, Gore's Wimbledon prize was just over 13 £, while the fraudster wrote himself a 620 £ check...

Rod is the renowned collector behind Australian Tennis Historical Society and several FB groups catering to collectors. He is only after hens’ teeth these days.

If you are interested in the history of Dunlop and Slazenger, you should locate a copy of Brian Simpson's exhaustive monograph "Winners in Action". The section you should read starts on page 158. Any attempt to summarize the complex history of these companies here would be little more than a...

Wimbledon is not an OEM ODM situation, it's a licensing matter, just like WCT, ATP, etc. Kunnan Lo bought the exclusive right to market racquets using this brand. All design, production, marketing decisions were made by his people; AELTC collected a licensing fee from Kunnan, but had no input in...

I don't know if there is a version of our "Jeopardy" game in the UK, but if "Jeopardy" were to come up with a tennis edition, and one of the categories was "In the beginning...", this thread is where all the clues and answers for that category would be mined. As far as the film idea goes, I am...

If they had skipped the radiused molding every other hole, there would have been left-right asymmetry, and you would have had to pay attention from which side to start your crosses when stringing the racquet. If you were doing a one-piece and started your crosses on the wrong side, you'd end up...

Yes, it is. When I first saw the racquet, I had assumed that it was strung using rawhide lacing, but it turned out to be rather thin and soft leather. In their present state, there is no way these leather "strings" could survive a semi-serious collision with a fast-moving tennis ball, but who...

Considering the fact that many of these ladies had no access to half of their natural lung capacity, were burdened by permanently deformed ribs and spine, and their liver and kidneys had been systematically extruded to their pelvis, it's a miracle they could chase after any balls at all without...

My first reaction was that it’s a typo, but they repeated it 3 times! Perhaps what they meant by “breadth” was the actual (vertical) width of the physical net? In this context, the width of the net after it has been set up for play would be its physical “length”. This way they can be sure that...

So much good stuff! English stiff wrist vs American wrist snap; topspin-happy baseliners vs serve-and-volleyers; the triumph of all-court players; even the bane of moon-ball pushers! Plus ça change... I assume the "Larned" mentioned on page 12 of the Harper's Weekly article is William Larned...

A soupçon of verba and λόγια a day, keeps the lumpenprole at bay! :) Public school education prior to the arrival of time- and resource-consuming STEM curriculum surely increased the language barrier between social classes? I wonder if the demotion of Wingfield to Captain (on page 20 of the...

Did Jaculum also come from jeux de paume? Yes, I am very, very ashamed… Also, why was “Cavendish” always in quotes in these letters? Will readers find out in future instalments who was hiding behind that name? Or was there a style guide convention that prescribed this? Out of curiosity, I...

Per Wingfield's own patent descriptions, his invention consisted entirely of that funky portable court, which "simplified" the "ancient" game of tennis and allowed the latter to be played almost anywhere outdoors. He never asserted that the game itself was patented by him, though some of his...

Before there was electricity, before photographs became cheap, before radio and movie and TV sought to make reading obsolete, people busied and entertained themselves with the written word! Modernity may not have the time, dedication, and patience for this anymore; which is quite a loss in some...