01
Stop one
Mall of Arabia
Wilson Pro Staff 97UL V14 Tennis Racquet: Right, so, your usual guide is unavailable today and you have got me instead, which is not what you booked. Mall of Arabia, opened 2010 here in 6th of October City, Giza Governorate, at the western edge of Greater Cairo near the border with Sheikh Zayed City, and at opening it was the largest shopping mall in Egypt. Do look up, because I did the reading: the courtyard is organised around a curving glass wall and a truss column roughly thirty-five metres tall carrying six conoidal forms over the central atrium. Retail, restaurants, cafes and entertainment along an arcade wrapped around an open-air plaza with terraces and pergolas. She would have said all that better.
02
Stop two
Dream Park
Wilson Pro Staff 97UL V14 Tennis Racquet: I am only covering, so please do check anything I tell you. Dream Park opened in 1999 on Oasis Road, roughly eight kilometres from the Pyramids of Giza, developed by Ahmed Bahgat Fattouh and designed by the Canadian firm Forrec, who also worked on Universal Studios attractions, which I looked up last night and probably did not need to. About 150 acres, among the largest amusement parks in the Middle East, able to take up to thirty thousand visitors a day. The themed zones are Miramar, Plaza, Children's, Movie, Ancient and Techno, with restaurants and shops, all inside the larger Dreamland development of hotel, golf courses and equestrian club. Sorry. Too much detail.
03
Stop three
Mall of Egypt
Wilson Pro Staff 97UL V14 Tennis Racquet: Not my tour, but here we are. Mall of Egypt opened in March 2017 on Al Wahat Road, developed by the Majid Al Futtaim Group, with more than 165,000 square metres of leasable retail space, over 600 stores, a 21-screen VOX Cinemas complex and the Magic Planet family entertainment centre. The headline is Ski Egypt, described as Africa's first indoor ski slope, which is a genuinely absurd sentence to say out loud on the edge of the Western Desert. Parking for roughly 6,500 vehicles, a reported investment of six billion Egyptian pounds, and it ranks among the largest integrated retail and entertainment destinations built in Egypt during the 2010s. She does a joke here. I do not have one.
04
Stop four
Al-Hosary Mosque
Wilson Pro Staff 97UL V14 Tennis Racquet: Last stop, and your regular guide is back on Thursday, which will be a relief for everyone. Al-Hosary Mosque was inaugurated in 1996 and is named for the Egyptian Quran reciter Sheikh Mahmoud Khalil Al-Hosary. It is the largest mosque in the city and carries what is described as the largest concrete dome in Giza Governorate, with smaller flanking domes and a minaret, traditional Islamic elements built by modern methods, marble surfaces and calligraphy within. And it is not only a place of prayer: there is a library, and multipurpose halls used for educational and cultural programmes, so it works as a civic landmark as well. That is the part I would have opened with. Thank you for bearing with me.
My job is making something heavy feel effortless to the person standing on it, so I have a soft spot for the Pro Staff 97UL. This is the ultralight of the V14 Pro Staff line: a 97 sq in / 626 cm² head, 270 g unstrung, 685 mm (27 in) long, with a 16×19 string pattern and a 325 mm balance that leaves it clearly head-light.
Wilson builds it with the Braid 45 construction used across the V14 family — braided fibres laid at 45 degrees for better feel at impact and noticeably more stability than a light frame usually manages. It is the Pro Staff for players who love the classic thin-beam feel but do not want to carry a 320 g frame around for three sets, and it is genuinely arm-friendly.
And 6th of October City is, appropriately, a city about moving people around. Mall of Arabia opened in 2010 and was Egypt's largest shopping mall at the time, its courtyard organised around a curving glass wall — I have opinions about those handrails.
Mall of Egypt opened in March 2017 with more than 165,000 square metres of leasable space, over 600 stores, a 21-screen cinema and an indoor ski slope, which is a genuinely strange thing to find in Giza Governorate.
Dream Park opened in 1999 on Oasis Road, roughly eight kilometres from the Pyramids of Giza, designed by the Canadian firm Forrec. And Al-Hosary Mosque, inaugurated in 1996 and named for the great Quran reciter Sheikh Mahmoud Khalil Al-Hosary, is the largest mosque in the city, carrying what is described as the largest concrete dome in the governorate.
No moving stairs in that one. Pity. You will use this frame everywhere from a floodlit club court out toward Sheikh Zayed to an air-conditioned indoor hall, and by the way, it is also perfect for the day you decide to ski indoors in Giza Governorate, because a 270-gram frame goes in the bag beside the boots and says nothing about the cold.
Buy on Amazon
