Themed Cardio Tennis Clinics in the Fort Lauderdale Area
Forty litres and six racquets in a PET shell that sheds rain, one racquet compartment, one main, one outer stash and a padded adjustable strap. Monrovia is the detour, and I want to talk about the longest odds anyone ever took.
Babolat Evo Court M Tennis Bag: Now here's a bet that paid off — 86 formerly enslaved Americans stepped onto this mangrove spit in 1822 with roughly a ship's hold worth of odds stacked against them, and they went ahead and founded a republic anyway. I've seen worse hands win smaller pots. You bring the racquets; they brought everything else.
Babolat Evo Court M Tennis Bag: The Ducor Palace opened in 1960 as the finest hotel in West Africa — somebody bet the house on Liberia's future and for a while they were winning. Then the civil war came along and the house called. Eight storeys of gutted shell now, but I'll tell you what: the view from Snapper Hill is still the best in the city, and the bag still holds six racquets.
Babolat Evo Court M Tennis Bag: Waterside Market is the kind of place where every transaction is a negotiation and every price is an opening bid — my natural habitat. Traders have been pushing goods down to the edge of the Mesurado lagoon here for generations, and anyone who folds on the first offer deserves to pay full price. The bag's got enough pockets to carry your winnings home.
Babolat Evo Court M Tennis Bag: The old Supreme Court building on Broad Street — now the National Museum — is where Liberia kept its highest-stakes decisions for over a century. Odds, precedents, who lives free and who doesn't: that's the table they were playing at. I'd have wanted a seat, but I also know when the house has been in the game longer than you.
Here is the wager everyone makes and nobody admits to: you take one racquet to the court and you bet, at odds you have not calculated, that no string will break tonight. Most nights you win. The night you lose, the match is over and you drive home. Six racquets is not extravagance. Six racquets is covering the field.
So, the holding. Forty litres. Up to six frames. One racquet compartment, one main compartment, one side pocket — and I have played enough hands to tell you that three compartments beats nine, because the more places there are, the more places a car key can hide.
Dimensions run 7.4 by 12.2 by 31.5 inches, which is 19 by 31 by 80 centimetres if you like your numbers the other way. The outer fabric is 100% recycled PET, tougher than what it replaced and water-repellent, so a downpour on the walk from the car costs you nothing.
An adjustable padded shoulder strap and carrying handles.
The lining is a colourless recycled PET, left undyed specifically to cut water use in manufacture — a house edge given back to the table, which almost never happens.
Monrovia. Providence Island first, the mangrove spit where the first freed settlers came ashore in 1822 — people who crossed an ocean on the longest odds anybody has ever taken and made landfall on a sandbar. Then the Ducor Palace Hotel on Snapper Hill: a gutted eight-storey shell with, by common agreement, the best view in the city, which is a fair summary of a lot of things.
Waterside Market next, spilling all the way down to the Mesurado lagoon, where the trade never stopped no matter what else did. And the National Museum of Liberia, housed in the old Supreme Court building on Broad Street — a collection that lost most of its holdings and reopened anyway, which is the definition of playing the next hand.
“They lost the collection and opened the doors again. You cannot win a hand you have folded.”
Six frames, forty litres, water off the shell. Stop gambling on the strings.
