Dunlop Synthetic Gut 17g Tennis String Reel
About Ibadan
This Yoruba city in southwestern Nigeria began as a war camp in 1829, after the collapse of Oyo power. It became the capital of Oyo State in 1976 and remains a large administrative and university city, with the University of Ibadan dating from 1948.
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Dunlop Synthetic Gut in 17 gauge, supplied as a 200-metre reel. Synthetic gut is the all-round nylon string, and 17 is the lively gauge in the family.
The construction is a solid nylon core wrapped in wear-resistant outer filaments. The core delivers the consistent response — the same behaviour at the hundredth ball as at the first — while the wraps take the abrasion where the strings saw against one another.
What changes between gauges is not the recipe but the diameter, and diameter changes everything a player notices.
Seventeen gauge measures 1.25 mm. A thinner string deforms further around the ball at contact and moves more freely between the crosses, which is why it produces more feel and more spin than the same string at 16. It also has less material to lose to abrasion, so it wears through sooner. That is the trade, stated plainly.
Ibadan sits in southwestern Nigeria, where a long wet season is followed by the dry months when the Harmattan carries fine dust in off the north.
Grit on a court is abrasive, and a thinner gauge is the first thing to feel it — which is the argument for buying by the reel rather than by the set.
Specifications
| Type | Synthetic gut, solid nylon core |
|---|---|
| Construction | Solid core with wear-resistant outer wraps |
| Gauge | 17 / 1.25 mm |
| Reel length | 200 m / 660 ft |
| Characteristics | Feel and spin ahead of durability |
| Approximate racquets per reel | 16–18 |
| Best for | Club players who value touch over string life |
| Brand | Dunlop |
Seventeen is the gauge most club stringers keep on the shelf alongside 16, since the two cover almost every request that comes across the bench.
LET Dunlop Synthetic Gut 17g Tennis String Reel SHOW YOU Ibadan
String: Dunlop Synthetic Gut 17g Tennis Strings Reel: Look, I have seen hilltop civic halls that would embarrass this one. But fine — Mapo Hall wins on nerve. The British colonial administration under Captain William Ross finished it in 1929, right on Mapo Hill in the heart of indigenous Ibadan, and the engineer Robert Jones — Taffy Jones, Welsh, no relation to good taste — had local labour raise that classical portico. Seven columns, which everyone ties to the seven hills Ibadan claims. Cheap trick. Worked. Colonial officers and then Nigerian leaders held forth from that balcony over the largest city in tropical Africa, and it is still the ceremonial centre. Restored this century, too. I resent how good it looks.
String: Dunlop Synthetic Gut 17g Tennis Strings Reel: Now this is where Ibadan gets smug, and I say that as someone who has climbed better towers in worse cities. Bower's Tower sits on Oke Are, one of the highest hills here, put up in 1936 by the Ibadan Native Authority for Captain Robert Lister Bower, the first British Resident of the 1890s and a famously stern imposer of colonial order. Taffy Jones designed it, same man as Mapo Hall, sixty-odd feet, forty-seven steps of spiral stair — they call it Layipo for the winding. And then you reach the balcony and the whole city opens up and, all right, I concede. Nobody does a view like this.
String: Dunlop Synthetic Gut 17g Tennis Strings Reel: Twenty-six storeys. In 1965. Tallest building in tropical Africa, and I have to stand here and admit it, which is not how I planned my afternoon. Cocoa House in Dugbe was paid for with cocoa money from Nigeria's Western Region, conceived under Chief Obafemi Awolowo and his successors purely to prove what farmers' produce could build — hence its name, Ile Awon Agbe, the house of the farmers. It housed the regional development corporation, survived a serious fire in 1985, got rehabilitated, and now keeps a heritage museum in the penthouse. Other cities built towers with oil. Ibadan built one with chocolate. Annoying. Better.
String: Dunlop Synthetic Gut 17g Tennis Strings Reel: Every city thinks its university is the important one. Ibadan happens to be right, which is the sort of thing I dislike conceding before lunch. The University of Ibadan is Nigeria's oldest, founded 1948 as University College Ibadan under the University of London and fully independent by 1962. The campus is a landmark of tropical modernism, much of it by the British partnership of Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew, whose pierced screens and shaded courtyards actually answer the climate instead of ignoring it; Trenchard Hall and the clock tower hold it together. Wole Soyinka passed through. So did Chinua Achebe. Fine. You win this one.
Jackson Phillips here. Owner of TTT. We are working hard every day to bring you the most useful product reviews in the business. Our goal is putting the right product in every hand. If you have time, shoot me an email at jacksonphillips@thetennistactician.com and tell me exactly what you think of your purchase. The more feedback we get, the better we can serve. Thank you for your patronage. And Burn, Laugh, and Learn.