01
Stop one
Granada Cathedral
Yonex Ezone 100 16×19 Tennis Racquet: FIFTEEN TWENTY-FOUR. 1524! That is when Francisco Hernandez de Cordoba founded this city, which makes Granada one of the oldest European-founded cities on the entire American mainland, and there has been a church on this exact spot ever since. The one in front of you took its present form in 1888, and it had to, because the earlier churches were destroyed over and over, most terribly in 1856, when the American filibuster William Walker, who had seized control of Nicaragua, ordered the city burned as he withdrew and left a sign reading here was Granada. Here WAS. And yet look up: dome, towers, yellow and white, visible clear across the lake. Still here. Still here.
02
Stop two
Convento y Museo San Francisco
Yonex Ezone 100 16×19 Tennis Racquet: 1529! Among the OLDEST church buildings in all of Central America. Burned by pirates in 1685. Burned again by Walker's forces in 1856. Rebuilt every single time, every time, EVERY time. And then the headline act: around thirty basalt statues carved between roughly 800 and 1200, brought here from Zapatera Island out in Lake Nicaragua in the nineteenth century, human figures with their animal alter egos rising off their shoulders. Jaguars. Eagles. CROCODILES. One of the most important bodies of pre-Columbian sculpture in the whole region, sitting in a convent in Granada. Colonial religious art too, and a giant relief map of Nicaragua. Go. Now.
03
Stop three
Las Isletas de Granada
Yonex Ezone 100 16×19 Tennis Racquet: THREE HUNDRED AND SIXTY-FIVE ISLANDS. One for every day of the year! And do you know how they got there? A volcano. Mombacho collapsed in one enormous landslide and hurled the rock straight into the lake, and what settled is what you are looking at. Fishing families live on some, private houses stand on others, and one carries the little Spanish fort of San Pablo, built in the eighteenth century against pirates who came up the San Juan river from the Caribbean. And the lake itself? The largest in Central America, with BULL SHARKS in it. Sharks! Coming up a river from the sea, sawfish alongside them. Take the boat. Take the boat.
04
Stop four
Mombacho Volcano Nature Reserve
Yonex Ezone 100 16×19 Tennis Racquet: One thousand three hundred and forty-four METRES of volcano, right on the doorstep, wearing one of the last cloud forests in Nicaragua like a hat, protected as a reserve since 1983. Orchids! Bromeliads! Howler monkeys you hear long before you see them, and a salamander and a butterfly found NOWHERE ELSE ON EARTH. Nowhere else! This is the same mountain whose flank collapsed in prehistoric times to create Las Isletas below, and a further collapse in 1570 is said to have destroyed an Indigenous village. Coffee has grown on the lower slopes since the nineteenth century. A road and a truck service climb to the crater rim, where trails pass fumaroles and lookouts open over Granada, the lake and the plain. The mountain BREATHES.
Everything I know is in the curve of a rocker. Too flat and the chair will not move; too round and it tips you into the wall. Balance is not a compromise, it is a chosen point, and mine is 320 millimetres from the butt. One hundred square inches of head, 300 grams unstrung, a 16×19 pattern, 27 inches long, with a beam running 24.5 to 26.5 to 23.0 millimetres.
That is the middle of the whole family and it is the middle on purpose.
A 16×19 bed bites the ball and lets go clean, which is the same motion as a good rocker: grip, release, return. I do that everywhere from a nervous first tournament to a league match in the last of the light. It is also perfect for the long slow evenings in Granada, when everyone is out on the pavement in a chair and somebody eventually suggests a hit before dinner.
Granada is a city that has been knocked down and put back together so often it should be nervous, and it is not. Burned in 1856, sacked by pirates, fought over, restored, painted deep yellow again. Granada rocks forward and back and stays exactly where it is. A chairmaker recognises that. So does a racquet designed to be the steady one in the range.
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