Everything I make begins with a firm grip on a long steel pipe and ends the instant that grip slips. There is no partial credit in my trade. So yes, I have opinions about overgrips, and yes, I buy them sixty at a time.
Head Xtreme Soft is a tacky polyurethane overgrip about 0.5 mm thick. This is the 60-pack — the bulk box, the one for a coaching programme, a family of four players, or a single obsessive who changes grip every session.
The tacky surface grabs the hand rather than absorbing sweat, which is the right choice for players who slip rather than flood, and the thin cushioning removes a little shock at contact while leaving the frame's feedback intact.
It works everywhere from an indoor winter league to a dry summer afternoon on a hard court in Calgary, and it is also perfect for the coach who gets through more grips in a week than most players do in a year. Every grip includes finishing tape. Wrap from the butt cap upward with roughly a half-width overlap and light tension, and bin it as soon as it starts to gloss.
Calgary is a city built by people who wrote the numbers down, and I approve of it enormously. The Calgary Tower opened in 1968 at one hundred and ninety point eight metres — not about one-ninety, point eight — and it did not open under that name at all. It was the Husky Tower until 1971.
It went up as a centennial project by a petroleum company and a railway company in partnership, which tells you exactly what built this place, in exactly the right order.
The city arranged itself around Fort Calgary, a North-West Mounted Police post put up in 1875 precisely where the Bow and the Elbow meet, and it took its name from a small bay on the Isle of Mull. A prairie city named after a Hebridean beach. People will tell you the name means clear running water; I cannot certify that translation and it keeps me up.
The first Stampede was 1912 — not 1911, not the early teens. An American trick roper named Guy Weadick could not fund it himself, so four Alberta cattlemen backed him at twenty-five thousand dollars each. Four times twenty-five. One hundred thousand, exactly, and history rounds that cleanly almost never.
And on the same grounds stands the Saddledome, built for the 1988 Winter Olympics, whose roof is properly a hyperbolic paraboloid: the curve is what lets it span an enormous floor without a forest of columns holding it up. Form following mathematics, in a city that would have insisted on the saddle anyway.
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