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Themed Cardio Tennis Clinics in the Fort Lauderdale Area

cardio camps — the Babolat Xplore 17g Tennis String Set and the flag of Turkey combined by the model into a single photoreal composition. The red field fills the frame with the white crescent and five-pointed white star toward the hoist, the cloth hung so it takes a slow curve like a filled sail with the light coming across it, and the blue string set is composed into the arrangement so the fine coil of string runs along the inner edge of the crescent, with no lettering anywhere in the picture.
cardio camps — the Babolat Xplore 17g Tennis String Set photographed at Eğri Köprü, the Bent Bridge, in Sivas, Turkey. A long low stone bridge of many arches with a distinct kink in its line, crossing the wide shallow Kızılırmak with open valley on both banks. Camera near ground level on the shingle looking up at the arches, early morning raking light in spring with mist coming off the water: a shepherd walking his flock over the parapet line above, an angler working the slack water below the second pier, a boy skimming stones, a tractor crossing slowly. The string set lies on a worn stone step at the bridge foot in the near foreground, nobody holding or using it.
cardio camps — the Babolat Xplore 17g Tennis String Set photographed at the Great Mosque of Sivas in Sivas, Turkey. A long low cut-stone mosque with a broad flat roof, and near its southeastern corner a separate brick minaret on an octagonal base with a cylindrical shaft and turquoise glazed decoration, leaning visibly out of true. Eye level straight on in bright hard midday sun: worshippers coming out after noon prayer in a steady stream, men putting shoes back on at the rack by the door, a restorer up a scaffold tower against the minaret shaft, two women stopping to look up at the lean. The string set sits on an iron railing in the middle distance to one side, untouched.
cardio camps — the Babolat Xplore 17g Tennis String Set photographed at the Sivas Congress Building in Sivas, Turkey. A two-storey stone-and-timber former high school with a symmetrical facade and tall shuttered windows, standing on its own plot with a flagpole in front. Elevated camera looking down, wide, the building and the square dominating and the product small in frame, blue hour in early September with the facade floodlights just coming up: a school group being led out of the door in a line, a caretaker lowering the flag, families crossing the square, a wedding party on foot cutting past the railings with a photographer walking backwards ahead of them. The string set rests on a low stone parapet at the edge of frame, nobody near it.
cardio camps — the Babolat Xplore 17g Tennis String Set photographed at Şifaiye Medresesi in Sivas, Turkey. A low stone building around an open rectangular courtyard with arcades on all four sides, a deep carved portal on the street front, and tiled tomb work at one side. Close and intimate with shallow depth of field, snow falling after dark with lamps lit under the arcades: a courtyard tea house doing steady trade in the vaults, glasses steaming on low tables, a waiter crossing the open court with a tray held high and snow settling on it, students huddled under a brazier, breath and steam catching the lamplight. The string set sits on a tiled ledge in mid-frame with the carved portal soft behind it, nobody touching it.
cardio camps — the Babolat Xplore 17g Tennis String Set and the flag of Turkey combined by the model into a single photoreal composition. The red field fills the frame with the white crescent and five-pointed white star toward the hoist, the cloth hung so it takes a slow curve like a filled sail with the light coming across it, and the blue string set is composed into the arrangement so the fine coil of string runs along the inner edge of the crescent, with no lettering anywhere in the picture.

Babolat Xplore 17g Tennis String Set

Sivas, Turkey  ·  Strings > 17g

Babolat Xplore 17g Tennis String Set

This is the slenderest of the three: 1.25 millimetres of polyamide multifilament that pockets the ball properly and hands back every scrap of feel you own, at the honest price of string life. It wants a walk round Sivas before any money moves. A city that far from the sea, and I still found water in it.

↓   Tour Sivas, Turkey

Four stops before the checkout

Sivas, Turkey
01
cardio camps — the Babolat Xplore 17g Tennis String Set photographed at Eğri Köprü, the Bent Bridge, in Sivas, Turkey. A long low stone bridge of many arches with a distinct kink in its line, crossing the wide shallow Kızılırmak with open valley on both banks. Camera near ground level on the shingle looking up at the arches, early morning raking light in spring with mist coming off the water: a shepherd walking his flock over the parapet line above, an angler working the slack water below the second pier, a boy skimming stones, a tractor crossing slowly. The string set lies on a worn stone step at the bridge foot in the near foreground, nobody holding or using it.
Stop one

Çifte Minareli Medrese (Twin Minaret Madrasa)

Babolat Xplore 17g Tennis String Set: Big portal, two minarets, no building. That's the bit. Only the facade survives, so Sivas has been running the world's longest-standing entrance since 1271. Put up by Shams al-Din Juwayni, the vizier of the Ilkhanid Mongols who were running Seljuk Anatolia at the time. And here's the kicker: it was one of THREE great colleges erected in this city in that one single year. Three. In a year. That is caravan-route money doing what caravan-route money does. The twin fluted brick minarets with the turquoise tile are now the emblem of the whole city.

02
cardio camps — the Babolat Xplore 17g Tennis String Set photographed at the Great Mosque of Sivas in Sivas, Turkey. A long low cut-stone mosque with a broad flat roof, and near its southeastern corner a separate brick minaret on an octagonal base with a cylindrical shaft and turquoise glazed decoration, leaning visibly out of true. Eye level straight on in bright hard midday sun: worshippers coming out after noon prayer in a steady stream, men putting shoes back on at the rack by the door, a restorer up a scaffold tower against the minaret shaft, two women stopping to look up at the lean. The string set sits on an iron railing in the middle distance to one side, untouched.
Stop two

Şifaiye Medrese

Babolat Xplore 17g Tennis String Set: Straight across the square, 1217 to 1218, built by the Seljuk sultan Izzeddin Keykavus I as a darüşşifa, a hospital and school of medicine, and one of the most important medical institutions in the whole medieval Islamic world. Then in 1220 the sultan died of tuberculosis and was buried in a domed tomb chamber built into the south portico of his own hospital, which is either devotion or the harshest review in history. Glazed brick, tile, elegant inscriptions, classic four-iwan courtyard, and the arcades are now shops and tea gardens. Best waiting room in Anatolia.

03
cardio camps — the Babolat Xplore 17g Tennis String Set photographed at the Sivas Congress Building in Sivas, Turkey. A two-storey stone-and-timber former high school with a symmetrical facade and tall shuttered windows, standing on its own plot with a flagpole in front. Elevated camera looking down, wide, the building and the square dominating and the product small in frame, blue hour in early September with the facade floodlights just coming up: a school group being led out of the door in a line, a caretaker lowering the flag, families crossing the square, a wedding party on foot cutting past the railings with a photographer walking backwards ahead of them. The string set rests on a low stone parapet at the edge of frame, nobody near it.
Stop three

Gök Medrese

Babolat Xplore 17g Tennis String Set: Also 1271. Same year as the other two. I keep saying it because somebody in this city clearly had a bet on. This one is from Sahib Ata Fahreddin Ali, the celebrated Seljuk vizier who endowed monuments across Anatolia, a man who could not walk past an empty lot. Gök means sky-blue, for the glazed tile on the twin brick minarets, and the marble portal underneath is reckoned a masterpiece of Seljuk carving: vegetal ornament, inscriptions, animal heads. Animal heads. On a college. Courtyard, iwans and student cells behind it. Restored recently, still showing off.

04
cardio camps — the Babolat Xplore 17g Tennis String Set photographed at Şifaiye Medresesi in Sivas, Turkey. A low stone building around an open rectangular courtyard with arcades on all four sides, a deep carved portal on the street front, and tiled tomb work at one side. Close and intimate with shallow depth of field, snow falling after dark with lamps lit under the arcades: a courtyard tea house doing steady trade in the vaults, glasses steaming on low tables, a waiter crossing the open court with a tray held high and snow settling on it, students huddled under a brazier, breath and steam catching the lamplight. The string set sits on a tiled ledge in mid-frame with the carved portal soft behind it, nobody touching it.
Stop four

Sivas Congress Building (Atatürk Congress and Ethnography Museum)

Babolat Xplore 17g Tennis String Set: Late nineteenth-century Ottoman secondary school. Ordinary building, right? Then September 1919 walks in. Mustafa Kemal, later Atatürk, and fellow nationalists sit in this hall from the 4th to the 11th and unite the regional resistance movements after the Ottoman defeat in the First World War, consolidating the earlier Erzurum decisions and setting the course to the War of Independence and the republic in 1923. All of that out of a schoolhouse. The congress hall and Atatürk's quarters are preserved as they were, and it's now the Atatürk Congress and Ethnography Museum. No notes.

The Sivas, Turkey track

Babolat Xplore 17g Tennis String Set

Written for this world alone.

Thinnest of the three, and thin has consequences, so let us be honest about them from the start. This is Xplore at 17 gauge, 1.25 millimetres, in a twelve-metre set. Multifilament construction, one hundred per cent polyamide throughout — filaments, matrix and sheath, no hidden core. Made in France on a solvent-free process.

A multifilament is a rope, not a rod. Hundreds of fine fibres bundled and bonded so the bed deforms around the ball instead of resisting it, which is where the comfort and the free power come from, and why it takes the shock out of impact before it reaches your arm. Take that construction down to 1.25 and you get the softest, liveliest, most talkative version of it.

The bed bites into the ball, the feel is enormous, the pocketing is deeper. What you give up is life. A thin multi will fray and go before a thick one, and anybody who tells you different is selling something.

So this is a string for a player who wants to feel the ball, who does not saw through a bed in a fortnight, and whose elbow has already had a conversation with them. Sivas is a fitting harbour for it.

The city sits at about 1,285 metres in the broad valley of the Kızılırmak, the longest river in Turkey, and it is about as far from any sea as a man can get in Anatolia — which does not stop the water running through everything here, under the Bent Bridge and out across the steppe.

You will get use out of this everywhere from an outdoor court in a Sivas summer to a hall in a winter that comes down off that plateau like weather off the North Atlantic.

And by the way, it is well suited to a town that carves the way this one does: the Seljuk stone here is cut so fine you can read it with a fingertip, and thin gauge is the string equivalent — everything in the detail.

String it fresh and play it. It will not wait for you in the bag.

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