Themed Cardio Tennis Clinics in the Fort Lauderdale Area
Blast blue, and entirely unashamed about being a bat. 270 g unstrung, a hundred in², 330 mm balance, an open 16×18 bed in the eighth-generation Ezone; nobody carries it off before Zarqa is seen, fort to railway station to river.
Yonex Ezone 100 SL: One does appreciate a fortification that has been guarding pilgrims since the Roman period — it lends the racquet a certain gravitas that one frankly cannot purchase at a sporting goods counter. Qasr Shabib stood sentinel over the Hajj road for centuries before anyone here had the audacity to call anything 'modern infrastructure.'
Yonex Ezone 100 SL: The Hejaz Railway, completed in 1908 to carry pilgrims from Damascus all the way to Medina, had its Zarqa station opened in 1903 — a date so recent I scarcely consider it history at all. I find it charming that the locomotive was once thought a marvel; I find it equally charming that this racquet, at a mere 255 grams, makes the whole enterprise feel positively weightless by comparison.
Yonex Ezone 100 SL: Built in 1904 by Chechen settlers who had fled the Caucasus and rather sensibly decided Zarqa was the place to begin again, this mosque was the very first the community raised — which one respects enormously, as first efforts go. One only wishes they had also immediately established a tennis club; 120 years is a terribly long wait.
Yonex Ezone 100 SL: The Zarqa River — whose name derives from the Arabic for 'blue' — gave this city its very identity, which I find poetic, as the Ezone 100 SL's Isometric head shape gives one's backhand an identity it previously lacked. The river is a tributary of the Jordan; the racquet is a tributary of winning, and I see no reason to rank their importance differently.
One does like a thing that knows what it is for. The Ezone 100 SL is the super-light member of the eighth generation of a very well-bred line: a hundred square inches of head, 270 grams unstrung, which is 9.5 ounces, balanced at 330 millimetres and strung in an open 16 by 18 pattern at 40 to 55 pounds.
Twenty-seven inches, as any civilised racquet should be, with a beam of 24.5 to 26.5 to 23 millimetres and grips from G0 to G3. Finished in blast blue, which one would ordinarily consider rather loud, and yet on this frame it is quite correct.
The construction is where the breeding shows.
High-modulus graphite with Minolon and 2G-Namd Speed through the layup, Yonex's vibration damping mesh in the handle, and that squared Isometric head which enlarges the string bed's effective centre — the practical consequence being that a slightly late ball, struck by somebody who was quite sure they were on time, still comes back with pace and dignity.
The Aero Shape and the liner construction are there to make the frame quick through the air, because a light racquet with a slow head is simply a bad racquet with a good excuse. What one gets, in sum, is depth for very little effort, and a frame that flatters an ageing shoulder without ever mentioning it.
Zarqa is where we shall be taking it, and one is quite aware that Zarqa is not the address people expect.
It is a working city, and one is not appalled by that in the least — the Hejaz railway station of 1903 was built here for the Damascus to Medina line, and there is nothing more thoroughly modern than a railway and nothing more thoroughly antique than a pilgrim road, and this town has both, one laid directly over the other. Qasr Shabib guarded that road in stone.
The river the city is named for gave it the only thing that matters in this landscape, which is water. One does find the honesty of that rather refreshing.
Light, forgiving and blue. One is not obliged to apologise for enjoying oneself.
