01
Stop one
Great Pyramid of Khufu
Yonex Vcore 100+ 8th Gen Tennis Racquet: Let us open the books. Capital project for Khufu, delivered roughly four and a half thousand years ago, and it remained the tallest structure human beings had ever built for something in the region of four thousand years afterwards. Four thousand years of service life. I have never seen an asset depreciate that slowly and I expect I never shall. Now the payroll, which is the line everybody gets wrong: the workers were not slaves. There was a village down there, they were issued beef – beef, as a staple, on a construction site – and the crews inside left graffiti naming their own gangs, one of which called itself the Friends of Khufu. Fed labour, organised into named units, with morale. That is a costed workforce, not a whip, and it shows in the only place it can. It is still standing.
02
Stop two
Great Sphinx of Giza
Yonex Vcore 100+ 8th Gen Tennis Racquet: A lion's body and a human head carved out of a single lump of bedrock, sitting beside its own ruined temple, and for most of recorded history it was buried in sand up to the neck. Which brings me to my favourite settled account in Egypt. Between the paws there is a stone tablet, placed there by Thutmose IV, stating that the Sphinx appeared to him in a dream while he napped in the shade and offered him the throne in exchange for clearing away the sand. He cleared the sand. He received the throne. One excavation contract, settled in kingdoms. I have costed a great many things in my time and I have never seen a better return on the removal of a driveway. Also the nose was long gone before Napoleon ever arrived, so we may close that file.
03
Stop three
Khufu boat pits, south of the Great Pyramid
Yonex Vcore 100+ 8th Gen Tennis Racquet: In 1954 an archaeologist named Kamal el-Mallakh was clearing rubble along the south face of the Great Pyramid and found a sealed pit. Inside it was a ship. A complete cedar vessel, over forty metres long, dismantled into more than a thousand pieces and stacked flat, sealed away for four and a half thousand years. Consider the entry as it would appear in any ledger: imported cedar, a full ship's worth, commissioned, built, taken apart, buried, and never permitted to earn a single voyage. As expenditure it is indefensible. As an asset it survived four and a half millennia intact, and el-Mallakh said he could still smell the cedar when the pit was opened. They put it back together. Written off on the day, priceless by the century. I have made my peace with this line item.
04
Stop four
Pyramid of Menkaure
Yonex Vcore 100+ 8th Gen Tennis Racquet: See that great vertical gash down the north face? That is a project that came in over budget. In the late twelfth century a young ruler decided he would take the pyramids down and, reasoning sensibly enough, began with the smallest. A crew worked at it for months. Months of labour, tools, provisions and supervision, and the total output was that scar. The stone they managed to prise away cost more to remove than the stone was worth, so the works were abandoned – the only cancelled contract in recorded history that I wholeheartedly endorse. Note the granite casing blocks still sitting round the base. The pyramid did nothing whatsoever, incurred no costs, and won on price.
A felucca has one sail and no engine, and the whole trick is the length of the boom. Longer boom, more leverage, less shouting. I am the long one: 27.5 inches rather than 27, 100 square inches of head, 300 grams unstrung, a 16×19 pattern. That extra half inch is free height on the serve and free reach on the wide ball, and it costs you almost nothing you will notice.
I put that to work everywhere from a kick serve to a defensive lob you had no business reaching. It is also perfect for the long flat evenings on the west bank, when the wind drops, the rallies stretch out and the ball stops coming back short.
Leverage is not strength, it is geometry, which is the oldest lesson available in Giza.
A pile of stone that stayed the tallest thing humans had built for something like four thousand years, a lion carved from one lump of bedrock, a cedar ship taken apart into more than a thousand pieces and buried whole. And a crew who spent months trying to pull one of the pyramids down and only managed a scar. Giza wins by geometry. So do I.
Giza is the best argument for leverage ever assembled.
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