Themed Cardio Tennis Clinics in the Fort Lauderdale Area
At 100 in² and 280 g, this Prince Beast DB 100 rigs a broad sail with a gappy string pattern, made for shove and topspin; she tacks at a nudge when weather veers and never lumbers like a barge in harbor. I’d trust her over a landlocked chart from Mardin, Turkey.
Prince Beast DB 100 280g Tennis Racquet: That fluted minaret of the Ulu Cami rises over the honey-coloured houses like a mast over a stone fleet. I’d trust it in a gale, though this town is so landlocked it makes my compass sulk.
Prince Beast DB 100 280g Tennis Racquet: Built in 1385, the Zinciriye Medrese shows off twin ribbed domes and a courtyard looking down to the plain. Fine lookout, says I, though any place with no tide table is clearly hiding something.
Prince Beast DB 100 280g Tennis Racquet: At Kasımiye Medrese, the long pool is cut in steps to represent the course of a life. A clever chart, aye, though I prefer my life marked by ports, storms, and how many biscuits survived the rats.
Prince Beast DB 100 280g Tennis Racquet: East of Mardin, Deyrulzafaran Monastery still carries liturgy sung in Aramaic. That’s older than any sea shanty in my locker, and twice as likely to make a gull behave itself.
Sit down, mind your head on the boom. This one is rigged light and I approve of that more than I expected to.
A Beast DB at a hundred square inches and 280 grams. A hundred is midplus — a working sail, not a storm jib and not a spinnaker — and 280 grams is a light spar. It does not. It means the thing answers.
Now, landlubbers think light means weak.
A heavy frame is a schooner: magnificent, unstoppable once she is moving, and useless in a narrow channel when the wind shifts and you have four seconds to do something about it. You will feel that most at the net, on the return, and in the last half hour of a long afternoon when your arm has quietly stopped volunteering.
A light frame is a boat you can put about single-handed.
The string pattern is open, which lets the bed give under the ball and drag it into spin, so this is a rig set up for power and for shape on the ball rather than for flat, precise carpentry.
Mardin is the strangest landlocked place I have ever stood in, and I do not say that lightly, because I distrust anywhere you cannot leave by water. It is built in tiers down a hillside, honey-coloured house above honey-coloured house, and below it the plain runs out flat and yellow to the horizon like a sea with the water taken out.
The Ulu Cami puts its fluted minaret up over the whole stack. And the Zinciriye Medrese of 1385 has twin ribbed domes and a courtyard that opens straight onto that plain — you stand in the arch and the view goes on the way it does from a masthead.
You will use this everywhere from a hard court in the heat to an evening hit when the stone starts letting go of the day, and while you are here — the Kasımiye Medrese has a long pool cut in steps, and I am told the steps are meant to be the course of a life, running down from the beginning to the end of it.
I have known men to say the same about a voyage and be laughed at for it. Then out east to Deyrulzafaran, where the liturgy is still sung in Aramaic. Old languages survive in two places, in my experience: monasteries and ships.
"Light does not mean weak. It means she answers when the wind shifts and you have four seconds."
