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THE TENNIS TACTICIAN, LLC

Themed Cardio Tennis Clinics in the Fort Lauderdale Area

cardio tennis workout Tarpon River — the Dunlop Grand Prix Extra Duty Hard Court Tennis Ball Case combined with the national flag of Ethiopia
cardio tennis workout Tarpon River — Northern Stelae Field in Axum, A field of enormous carved granite obelisks, some standing and one shattered across the ground, their faces cut with false doors and rows of storey-windows, set on a grassy terrace above the town
cardio tennis workout Tarpon River — Church of Our Lady Mary of Zion in Axum, A compound holding a domed twentieth-century basilica and an older rectangular battlemented stone church on a raised platform, with a small fenced chapel standing apart beneath a grey dome
cardio tennis workout Tarpon River — Dungur (Queen of Sheba's Palace) in Axum, The low stone footprint of a large ancient mansion, its stepped monumental staircase, thick basalt wall courses, and grid of small rooms exposed to the sky on a dry plain outside Axum
cardio tennis workout Tarpon River — Ezana Stone in Axum, A tall grey granite slab standing under a simple protective shelter, its flat face densely covered with three blocks of ancient inscription in different scripts, in a walled enclosure among fields
cardio tennis workout Tarpon River — the Dunlop Grand Prix Extra Duty Hard Court Tennis Ball Case combined with the national flag of Ethiopia

Dunlop Grand Prix Extra Duty Hard Court Tennis Ball Case

Axum, Ethiopia  ·  Balls > Regular

Dunlop Grand Prix Extra Duty Hard Court Tennis Ball Case

This is the American club standard by the case — 72 extra duty hard-court balls in 24 cans, ITF approved, enough to run a season rather than a Tuesday. It will not release a single can until you have visited Axum with it: a field of fallen obelisks, a chapel nobody may enter, and one king's declaration cut in three scripts.

↓   Tour Axum, Ethiopia

Four stops before the checkout

Axum, Ethiopia
01
cardio tennis workout Tarpon River — Northern Stelae Field in Axum, A field of enormous carved granite obelisks, some standing and one shattered across the ground, their faces cut with false doors and rows of storey-windows, set on a grassy terrace above the town
Stop one

Northern Stelae Field

Dunlop Grand Prix Extra Duty Hard Court Tennis Ball Case: Normally Tesfaye takes this field, and he does it far better than I'm about to, so please bear with me. These are the monumental granite obelisks carved by the Aksumite kingdom in the third and fourth centuries as royal grave markers. The Great Stele is over thirty metres long and lies broken where it apparently fell during erection — the biggest single block of stone ever quarried in the ancient world, and it never once stood. The faces imitate multi-storey buildings: false doors, lock plates, rows of beam-ends. The 24-metre Obelisk of Axum was taken to Rome in 1937 on Mussolini's orders, returned in 2005 in three sections and re-erected in 2008. Rock-cut tombs lie beneath us.

02
cardio tennis workout Tarpon River — Church of Our Lady Mary of Zion in Axum, A compound holding a domed twentieth-century basilica and an older rectangular battlemented stone church on a raised platform, with a small fenced chapel standing apart beneath a grey dome
Stop two

Church of Our Lady Mary of Zion

Dunlop Grand Prix Extra Duty Hard Court Tennis Ball Case: I'm only filling in today, so I'll take this one carefully. This is the most sacred site of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church, traditionally held to have been founded in the fourth century under King Ezana, after Christianity became the state religion of Aksum. The older rectangular castellated church was raised by Emperor Fasilides in the seventeenth century on earlier foundations; the large domed cathedral was added under Emperor Haile Selassie in the 1960s. Between them stands the Chapel of the Tablet, built to house what the church holds to be the Ark of the Covenant, seen by no one but a single appointed guardian monk. Ethiopian emperors were traditionally crowned here.

03
cardio tennis workout Tarpon River — Dungur (Queen of Sheba's Palace) in Axum, The low stone footprint of a large ancient mansion, its stepped monumental staircase, thick basalt wall courses, and grid of small rooms exposed to the sky on a dry plain outside Axum
Stop three

Dungur (Queen of Sheba's Palace)

Dunlop Grand Prix Extra Duty Hard Court Tennis Ball Case: Everyone calls this the Queen of Sheba's Palace, and I am certainly not the man to argue with an entire town — but the dating places the building around the sixth or seventh century, far too late to have anything to do with the biblical queen. The name stuck regardless. Excavation in the 1950s under Francis Anfray revealed a large elite residence: a central pavilion set on a podium, dozens of service rooms, courtyards, kitchens with ovens, drainage channels. The technique — alternating courses of stone, recessed and projecting wall faces — is characteristically Aksumite and echoes the carving on the stelae. It remains one of the most visited monuments in Axum. The name is doing some of that work.

04
cardio tennis workout Tarpon River — Ezana Stone in Axum, A tall grey granite slab standing under a simple protective shelter, its flat face densely covered with three blocks of ancient inscription in different scripts, in a walled enclosure among fields
Stop four

Ezana Stone

Dunlop Grand Prix Extra Duty Hard Court Tennis Ball Case: This is the one I would have led with, if the tour were mine, which it isn't. The stone records the military campaigns and religious allegiance of King Ezana of Aksum, who ruled in the fourth century and made Christianity the kingdom's official religion. The inscription is trilingual — Ge'ez, Sabaean script and Greek — and it is one of the key documents for the political history of the ancient Horn of Africa, describing campaigns against neighbouring peoples and, in its later portions, invoking the Christian God rather than the older pagan deities. Farmers found it in the twentieth century. With related inscriptions it is the firmest evidence for the conversion of Aksum, matched by Ezana's coinage replacing disc and crescent with the cross.

The Axum, Ethiopia track

Dunlop Grand Prix Extra Duty Hard Court Tennis Ball Case

Written for this world alone.

May it please the court. The exhibit is a full case of Dunlop Grand Prix Extra Duty: 24 pressurised cans, 72 balls, ITF approved, wearing the heavier extra duty woven felt specified for hard courts. Grand Prix has been the standard club ball on American hard courts for decades, and the case is the format clubs actually order, because a case runs a season and a can runs a Tuesday.

My submission on the felt is short. Extra duty is woven densely and sits looser on the ball, so gritty asphalt and concrete wear the nap down evenly instead of shredding it, and the ball keeps its speed and its flight while a lighter felt would have gone soft and grey by the second set.

Put the same ball on clay and it loads up with dust and turns heavy — which is not a defect in my client, it is a defect in the choice of surface, and I will not have the two confused. Seventy-two balls drawn from a single batch also means a coaching basket that behaves the same way all the way to the bottom, which is the only honest basis on which to run a drill.

Now to Axum, where the evidence has been in writing for seventeen centuries and the town keeps better records than most defendants. The Ezana Stone is a single granite slab carrying three blocks of inscription in three scripts, Ge'ez, Sabaean and Greek, which is a fourth-century king anticipating the objection that nobody present could read his account. I approve entirely.

I have never met a document so determined to be admissible.

The same thoroughness runs everywhere from the granite obelisks on the northern terrace to the low walls of Dungur out on the plain.

The Great Stele lies broken where it apparently fell during its own erection, over thirty metres of it, the largest single block ever quarried in the ancient world; the twenty-four-metre Obelisk of Axum was carried off to Rome in 1937 on Mussolini's orders, returned in three sections in 2005 and re-erected in 2008, which stands as the longest adjournment on record.

It is also perfect for anyone who enjoys a case where the claim is enormous, the proof is physical, and the ground itself has been entered into evidence.

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