Themed Cardio Tennis Clinics in the Fort Lauderdale Area
Three overgrips in a pack, doing the least glamorous and most necessary job in tennis: restoring grip between fingers and racquet when the original goes slick. The script calls for poise here. I have abandoned it entirely for Malmö.
Babolat My Grip Tennis Overgrip 3-Pack: Before us rises the Turning Torso, 190 metres of stacked cubes rotating ninety degrees from bottom to top; please observe its disciplined drama. And now, off the official script: this overgrip is the small, absorbent hero preventing your racket from exiting stage left like a panicked museum intern.
Babolat My Grip Tennis Overgrip 3-Pack: Lilla Torg is a small cobbled square ringed by timber-framed merchant houses, an excellent place to contemplate commerce, craftsmanship, and sensible footwear. I was meant to discuss urban form, but look at this grip—so modest, so ready to rescue a sweaty forehand from historical embarrassment.
Babolat My Grip Tennis Overgrip 3-Pack: Malmöhus Castle is a moated brick fortress begun in 1434 and later used for centuries as a prison, which gives our stop a properly stern educational tone. Unofficially, I would also imprison any racket left ungroomed by this overgrip, though only in a very humane display case.
Babolat My Grip Tennis Overgrip 3-Pack: Ribersborg Kallbadhus is an open-air bathhouse on a pier where swimmers go year round, a fact that proves Malmö has both fortitude and towels. The approved lesson is resilience; my private lesson is that a fresh overgrip also faces moisture bravely, though with fewer goosebumps.
If you will gather round. This is an overgrip, and the exhibit is more important than it looks. An overgrip is a thin strip of tacky material wound over the factory grip already on your handle — spiralling up from the butt cap, each turn overlapping the last, finished with the tape in the packet. It does two things.
It gives your hand something to hold that has not yet been polished smooth by sweat, and it is disposable, so the good leather or synthetic grip underneath never has to be. This pack holds three, which for most club players is most of a season.
When it goes slick, you unwind it and put on the next one.
It will not add spin and it will not add a mile per hour to anything. It stops the handle turning in your hand at the worst possible moment, which is a duller claim and a truer one.
What it is not, I should say plainly, is a performance upgrade.
You will use these everywhere from a cold indoor court in Malmö in January to a humid outdoor court back home in August, and by the way, they are also perfect for a long fika, which here is not a coffee break but an institution, and requires both hands free.
As you can see from the window — and now I am rather off the script — Malmö has the Turning Torso, 190 metres of stacked cubes rotating a full ninety degrees from bottom to top.
Then Lilla Torg, a small cobbled square ringed by timber-framed merchant houses, and Malmöhus Castle, a moated brick fortress begun in 1434 that then spent centuries as a prison, which is the sort of career change our tour does not usually dwell on.
"Three grips in a packet. The least romantic object in the bag, and the one that decides whether the racquet stays in your hand."
