(warning, long post, skip it with my blessing, totally belongs in another forum except that it is no more of a derail than many of the others that have come to define this thread...this one's just ludicrously long
I'm a 34 y/o 5.0, and have been using the PS97s exclusively for the monthish since it came out, demoed it the day my local store got it, didn't want to like it so much, because I was Really getting settled in with a pair of Blade 98 18x20s, but had a nagging feeling for the months approaching the release that this racquet's specs were nearly perfect, better for me than for Dimitrov, and that I would probably be seduced, expensively, should I dabble. So, sure enough, I bought one after the demo, just to see, you know, just to test the waters, secure that the 18x20s would be there, solid and consistent should this gimicky 18x17 jazz turn out to be Madison Avenue hoosefudge. I put three grams of lead tape around the buttcap to weight/flare it more and make up for switching out the thin Wilson leather grip for a Babolat Gel Excel (sp?) replacement grip and covered that with Tourna Tac (white, as inquiring minds demand to know...). I also glued a 3.5g $1 coin to the W on the buttcap (looks gold, looks great
which brought the racquet to 12oz without a dampener, which I use all the time, a thinnish green and black dunlop wafer, 1ish grams. This all makes it a few points headlighter, but not much. I haven't measured it all out; will do this week as I try to spec-match it with the new one I bought today...
...To reply to a poster somewhere above...I have to say that in the remarkably varied bevy of offerings on the market, this is unique, and for fetishists of a certain ilk, this may indeed be The Grail. It has not aggravated my sensitive elbow at all, though it felt shocky on my wrist until I switched the leather grip out for the cushy replacement grip. I have played it with a full bed of 16g Revolve at 60lbs (demo), 16g synth Tourna Armor mains with 17g Tourna BH Silver crosses at 50/46lbs, 48/43lbs, 17g Tour Bite mains with Tourna BH Silver crosses at 50/46lbs, my probable favorite: 17g Ytex Square X mains with Tourna Armor crosses at 51/56lbs, and that brings us up to today, where I played for over three hours with 17g Luxilon Element mains and Tourna Armor crosses at 51/56lbs. I've been stringing all these on a dropweight tabletop Alpha CX machine, and interestingly (?) where my string jobs were consistently reading out on the Racquet Tune app at dead even with the target tension with the Blades, they have consistently been 5ish lbs over the averaged set weight Every time I've strung the 97s. I think it has more to do with how the app processes the pitch being tapped on an 18x17 pattern than anything else, but I don't know, and the app designers claim that it's better for gauging relative tension loss than absolute starting tension reads anyway. The 97s also appears to take about 21.5 feet to 'safely' string the mains with non-stretchy polys, more like 17.5 for the crosses, which is fine when you're working with reels but annoying/expensive if you want to split up sets to get two hybrid jobs. I am still a very new stringer, by the way, maybe 3ish months in, but a professional guitar stringer, and while I am totally willing to believe that user error is responsible for much of my experience, today just to see if I'm incompetent/crazy I had my local shop's seasoned stringer guy measure out what would be necessary for him to do a set of mains and iirc it came out to 21ft.
Anyway!! tonight I went and played pickup tennis at a local park, played a total stranger for hours, a 50 year old guy in great shape who was just pummelling the ball with his 93sq in Yonex leaded up above 14g, just getting massive spin and weight on his shots. His balls made the 97s flutter and buck in my hand, made it feel like a cheap toy, but I steeled myself to run better and began to swing harder and faster, and the quicker I whipped the Dimitrov through the air the more control I had over reversing his spin and really grabbing the ball and dipping it and knifing it wherever I wanted. NOTE: I really do not like Element in the mains in this hybrid, but it was the first time I'd ever used it, so who knows how i'd like it in a full bed or at different tensions or whatever. I played better with it than with any other string set yet in the racquet, but attribute that entirely to my own growing relationship with the racquet, as the strings felt like they did not add nearly anything in the way of spin and control, just maybe a little extra power which made balls want to sail on me for the first hour until they lost a lot of their elasticity, died a little, and then I was able to kill the ball flat with precision, which was enjoyable in spite of having somewhat sub-par access to spin/more string displacement with the Element compared to the shaped Ytex Square X. These are actually my main compliments for the racquet: phenomenal aerodynamics, knifes through the air, and it acts like a tight pattern when you block or kill the ball flat but as an open pattern when you really rip into a topspin or slice. This is exActly what I wanted out of the racquet when I read about it for the months before its release, but it's pretty amazing how the specs all came together. It feels like a magic wand, which is my highest praise for a racquet since the Aero Storm, my favorite Babolat ever. Playing against a Pure Aero or an RF97 you can feel that their balls are coming with more weight and zip than yours, but for me the sheer pleasure of play is incomparably higher with this racquet, and for me that is really the point of tennis: experiencing joy in executing some fraction of my delusions-of-grandeur art shots rather than playing at the highest objective level the most consistently for the express purpose of winning matches.
My next goal is to tailweight it enough to allow a little extra lead at 3 and 9 to see if increased power and stability can coincide with increased maneuverability...
#platformracquet #grail #wand
fin
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EZ Ace Machine,
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