Themed Cardio Tennis Clinics in the Fort Lauderdale Area
Ten grams separates the two CX Teams, and in this catalogue ten grams is the whole verdict. Oulu will clarify it better than I ever could, and it has all winter to do so.
Dunlop CX Team 275 Tennis Racquet: Ladies and gentlemen, we now observe Kauppatori, Oulu’s market square, attended by Toripolliisi, the bronze market policeman unveiled in 1987. Please admire the racquet with suitable restraint—no, actually, look at it beside that squat little officer; this is the exact pairing of civic authority and baseline topspin I have waited years to present.
Dunlop CX Team 275 Tennis Racquet: We proceed to Oulu Cathedral, rebuilt after the 1822 fire to plans by Carl Ludvig Engel and completed in 1832. The script says “neoclassical dignity,” but I must add that this racquet looks so composed here it may be the only object in Finland capable of volleying politely.
Dunlop CX Team 275 Tennis Racquet: Hupisaaret is a park of small islands and waterways in the Oulujoki delta, linked by footbridges over lively channels. Officially, we are discussing urban landscape design; unofficially, I would like to nominate this racquet as curator of all bridges, because it has clearly mastered graceful crossings.
Dunlop CX Team 275 Tennis Racquet: Pikisaari is known for its old wooden houses and for the Sailor’s Home Museum, which preserves Oulu’s maritime past in an 18th-century wooden building. I have been instructed not to call the racquet “seaworthy,” so I will merely note that it appears ready to serve across the Gulf of Bothnia and leave the room with dignity.
If you will follow me — and please do not touch the frames, the oils on your hands do reach the paint — we come to the CX Team 275, which is where the tour gets interesting. Most visitors walk past this case entirely. Most visitors are wrong.
The object itself. The CX Team sits in Dunlop's mid-range, beneath the tour frames, and it belongs to the control side of the collection rather than the power side: a racquet designed to tell the player the truth about the contact rather than to add distance to it.
This is the heavier of the pair, and I want you to sit with that, because a ten-gram difference between two otherwise similar frames is not a marketing decision. Mass is stability. A slightly heavier frame holds its line better against a ball that arrives with pace, and it asks a little more of the arm in exchange.
Now — and here is the part I actually love — a light control frame is a genuinely difficult object to make, because the two words pull against each other, and every manufacturer in the world has to solve it in the layup. Every single one.
That is the entire trade, and the whole mid-range catalogue is built around it.
I could talk about layup schedules until they close the building.
We will move on, to Oulu. The docent's script says Oulu Cathedral, Engel's neoclassical church rebuilt in 1832, and the script is correct.
But go and stand at the Kauppatori market square instead, in front of the squat bronze policeman facing the water — the Toripolliisi — because that little figure with his heavy face is the most photographed object in the city and it was made as a joke about market inspectors. This town is honest about itself in a way most towns are not.
You will get use out of this racquet everywhere from a bright cold morning by the harbour to an indoor court back home, and by the way, the Hupisaaret park islands, footbridges thrown over channels of running rapids inside the city, are the single loveliest walk in the collection and nobody has ever written a script for them.
"Ten grams is never a marketing decision."
