01
Stop one
Monument to the Constitution and the former Arch of Neutrality site
Dunlop CX 400 Tennis Racquet: A marble arch on three legs, put up in 1998, and on the very top a gold statue of the president, Saparmurat Niyazov, which rotated through the day so that it always faced the sun. Not the city. The sun. I invite you to sit quietly with the procurement meeting at which that requirement was tabled and nobody in the room laughed. He died in 2006, and by 2010 the entire arch had been taken down and re-erected out on the southern outskirts, well away from the centre. A monument to permanence, relocated. No reason was given. No reason is ever given. Somebody was paid to move it, mind you, and that man is the only person in this entire story who did an honest day's work.
02
Stop two
Old Nisa
Dunlop CX 400 Tennis Racquet: Eroded earthen ramparts on a hill some eighteen kilometres west, a UNESCO listing, and underneath it a Parthian royal fortress over two thousand years old. The Parthians, for those keeping score, are the empire that fought Rome to a standstill in the east – they destroyed a Roman army at Carrhae in 53 BC, and Crassus, the richest man in Rome, did not come home. Magnificent. Heroic. Now: what did the excavations actually turn up inside the great fortress of that steel-spined warrior people? Ivory drinking horns. Wine vessels. Dozens of them. So between engagements with the superpower of the age, the garrison was on the drink. I have never been less surprised in my life, and I have never liked them more.
03
Stop three
Ashgabat Earthquake Memorial
Dunlop CX 400 Tennis Racquet: I am going to drop the tone entirely for this one. In the middle of the night on the sixth of October, 1948, an earthquake destroyed Ashgabat almost completely. The death toll was enormous, and for decades the true figure was not openly discussed; Soviet reporting of it was extremely thin. That silence is the part I will not be clever about, because a number withheld is a number of people. The city was rebuilt. The monument shows a bull shaking the earth, a mother falling, and a gilded child lifted clear, and the child is understood to represent the man who later ruled the country. Everyone knows this. Nobody says it. Stand here a while before we move on.
04
Stop four
Türkmenbaşy Ruhy Mosque, Gypjak
Dunlop CX 400 Tennis Racquet: An enormous mosque of white marble under a gold dome, four tall minarets, finished in 2004, and sited where, exactly? In the president's home village of Gypjak, with a family mausoleum alongside. The largest mosque in the country, in a village, and I would dearly love to see the site survey that arrived at that conclusion. Then read the walls. They carry Quranic verses and also lines from the Ruhnama, the book he wrote himself. His own prose. On the walls. Of a mosque. Not everybody was delighted, though remarkably few said so above a murmur, and he was buried there in 2006. Ask yourself who quarried that marble, who gilded that dome, and what any of them made of the literary selection. Then admire it, if you find you still can.
My whole job is knowing how much load a slope will take before it lets go. Racquets have the same threshold, and most people find theirs by exceeding it.
The Dunlop CX 400 sits on the safe side: a 100 square inch head, 285 grams unstrung, balance around 330 mm, a 24 mm beam, a 16×19 pattern, 27 inches, stiffness around 71.
That is a control-line frame tuned for players who cannot generate everything themselves — enough beam to return some depth to you, enough weight to stay put when the ball arrives heavy, and not so much mass that your arm is carrying the load by the third set.
Ashgabat is the most instructive failure I have ever studied. On the night of 6 October 1948 an earthquake took the city down almost completely, and for decades afterwards the true toll was not openly discussed and the Soviet reporting of it stayed extremely thin.
The Ashgabat Earthquake Memorial says it in bronze instead: a bull shaking the earth with the globe on its horns, a mother falling, and a gilded child lifted clear of it. Ground either holds or it does not, and everything built afterwards is a statement about what people decided to do next.
What they did next was marble. Ashgabat rebuilt itself white and enormous, and out at Gypjak the Türkmenbaşy Ruhy Mosque went up in 2004 under a gold dome with four minarets, the largest in the country, in the president's home village. Eighteen kilometres west, the eroded earthen ramparts of Old Nisa have held their line for over two thousand years without any marble at all.
A frame this stable gets carried everywhere from a dusty afternoon court out near the Nisa ramparts to a floodlit evening in the centre of Ashgabat, and it is also perfect for the player who wants a solid stick for the long flat drive back down the Gypjak road.
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