Yonex Ezone Alpha L Tennis Racquet

Agidel, Russia  ·  Tennis Racquets > Adult Racquets > Yonex

Yonex Ezone Alpha L Tennis Racquet

Comes strung, so nobody has to book the stringer. 100 in², 260 g, 355 mm balance, open 16×18, top-weighted, blast blue — and it wants Agidel first, an entire town raised for a nuclear plant that never switched on.

↓   Tour Agidel, Russia

Four stops before the checkout

Agidel, Russia
01
Fort Lauderdale high energy cardio tennis clinic — Yonex Ezone Alpha L tennis racquet propped against the decaying concrete shell of the unfinished Bashkir Nuclear Power Plant
Stop one

the unfinished Bashkir Nuclear Power Plant abandoned after Chernobyl

Yonex Ezone Alpha L: Yeah, it's just a big unfinished concrete thing, fine, I guess. Construction literally stopped in 1990 because of Chernobyl — like, the whole country panicked and just… walked away from it mid-pour — which is actually kind of fascinating from a sociopolitical standpoint — I mean, whatever, it's whatever.

02
Fort Lauderdale high energy cardio tennis clinic — Yonex Ezone Alpha L tennis racquet at the confluence of the Belaya and Kama rivers near Agidel
Stop two

the confluence of the Belaya and the Kama

Yonex Ezone Alpha L: Two rivers meeting, cool, fine, I guess. The Belaya is literally called Agidel in Bashkir, so the town is basically named after this exact spot, which is — okay that's actually a pretty elegant piece of etymology and I'm not even sorry for knowing that. Moving on.

03
Fort Lauderdale high energy cardio tennis clinic — Yonex Ezone Alpha L tennis racquet leaning on the rusting bollards of the disused Agidel river pier built for five-thousand-tonne vessels
Stop three

the disused river pier built for five-thousand-tonne vessels

Yonex Ezone Alpha L: It's an old pier, whatever. It was literally engineered to dock five-thousand-tonne river vessels, which means someone had extremely ambitious shipping plans for a town of forty thousand people — and now it just sits here being moody, which, honestly, same.

04
Fort Lauderdale high energy cardio tennis clinic — Yonex Ezone Alpha L tennis racquet in front of the Nur Mosque in Agidel, Russia
Stop four

the Nur Mosque

Yonex Ezone Alpha L: It's a mosque, it looks fine, I guess. Bashkortostan has one of the largest Muslim populations in the Russian Federation — like, Islam has been practiced in the Bashkir region since the fourteenth century — which is a really long continuous cultural tradition and I think that's — I don't know — kind of significant. Don't look at me.

The Agidel, Russia track

Yonex Ezone Alpha L Tennis Racquet

Written for this world alone.

Fine, I guess. It's a racquet. It comes strung, which means you don't have to do anything, which is the correct amount of things to have to do. Hundred square inch head. 260 grams, so 9.2 ounces.

Balance 355 millimetres — and okay, that number is actually the interesting one, because 355 is really head-heavy, which means the weight is out at the top, which means the racquet does the swinging instead of you. Open 16 by 18 pattern, 27 inches, beam 25.5 to 27.5 to 24, grips G1 and G2, blast blue. Anyway.

The reason a light head-heavy frame works for people who aren't strong yet is momentum. You get more mass arriving at the ball than your arm is actually supplying, so a short swing still produces a decent shot, and the square Isometric head keeps the sweet spot bigger than it looks so mishits don't punish you.

There's graphite with Minolon and Nanocell Neo through it and a damping mesh in the handle so the shock doesn't come straight up your arm. It is not a control frame and if you're the kind of player who hits flat and heavy you'll swamp it in ten minutes. I mean. That's just what it is.

It's built for juniors and people who've just started or come back.

So, Agidel. It's a town on the Belaya where it meets the Kama, and they built the whole thing — the streets, the flats, the river pier rated for five-thousand-tonne vessels — for the Bashkir Nuclear Power Plant.

Nobody's heard of it and that's genuinely the point.

Then Chernobyl happened in 1986 and the whole project got abandoned and the reactor buildings just stand there, unfinished, enormous, never switched on. So you've got a town with a purpose that never arrived and a pier for ships that never came. Which is. Yeah. It's a lot, actually. Anyway, whatever, the mosque is nice.

A town built for a reactor that never started. I said I wasn't interested. I was lying.

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