Head Speed Pro Legend 2024 Tennis Racquet

Peqin, Albania  ·  Racquets > Adult

Head Speed Pro Legend 2024 Tennis Racquet

This one is cut and dressed to the millimetre, exactly like the town it comes from. An 18×20 bed, 100 in², 310 g, Djokovic's Legend lacquer, and no patience whatsoever for sloppy footwork. Protocol requires the full inspection tour of Peqin first: clock tower, clock mosque, Roman castle, dialect river. In order. Naturally.

↓   Tour Peqin, Albania

Four stops before the checkout

Peqin, Albania
01
cardio tennis clinic Rio Vista — Peqin Clock Tower in Peqin, A tall square stone tower, a little over 20 metres, standing immediately beside the mosque in the middle of the small town's old bazaar area. Plain masonry shaft, a clock face near the top and an open belfry stage above it; it is visible over every roof in Peqin
Stop one

Peqin Clock Tower

Head Speed Pro Legend 2024 Tennis Racquet: Oh, you are here for the tower. Sorry, I was not certain anyone would come. It was built between 1823 and 1841 in the Ottoman style, stands 20.6 metres tall, was founded by Mir Ismaili and was restored in 1987, and it is a listed monument of cultural heritage. And in the 1840s the Albanologist Johann Georg von Hahn described the centre of Peqin and wrote that its bazaar was distinguished by an elegant mosque and a clock tower, so somebody was already impressed by it long before I started talking, which is frankly a relief, because I do not think I would have persuaded you on my own. I can stop there, if you like. I usually do.

02
cardio tennis clinic Rio Vista — The Clock Mosque (Mosque of Abdurrahman Pasha) in Peqin, A stone mosque with a low pitched roof and an entrance portico dominating the town's main square, with the clock tower rising hard against its flank so that the two structures read from a distance as a single building
Stop two

The Clock Mosque (Mosque of Abdurrahman Pasha)

Head Speed Pro Legend 2024 Tennis Racquet: Sorry, this will only take a moment. The mosque was completed in 1666 in Ottoman style, and everyone calls it the Clock Mosque because of the tower attached to it, which I have always thought slightly unfair on the mosque, though nobody asked me. Four years after it was finished, in 1670, the Ottoman traveller Evliya Çelebi came through and counted: some four hundred dwellings, seven quarters, four mosques, two tekkes, seven masjids, three madrasas and seven mektebs. He counted all of that, and I can barely finish a sentence. Anyway. That is this town in 1670, written down by a man who was actually standing where you are. I will stop now.

03
cardio tennis clinic Rio Vista — Peqin Castle in Peqin, The remains of a fortress on the edge of the town: thick masonry curtain walls, in places still standing to a considerable height, enclosing a level compound. The Shkumbin valley and the low green hills of central Albania lie all around it
Stop three

Peqin Castle

Head Speed Pro Legend 2024 Tennis Racquet: If you can bear with me a little. The foundations are thought to be Roman, laid when the Via Egnatia was built, and Peqin is identified with the road station of Clodiana, on the stretch between Apollonia and Scampa, which is Elbasan now. The fortress was rebuilt and enlarged in the Ottoman period, when the local sipahi added a palace inside it. Evliya Çelebi wrote in the seventeenth century that the walls reached about twelve metres and that a dizdar and seventy soldiers were stationed within. Clay pipes found in the walls suggest water was piped in from outside, and tunnels are recorded running several kilometres out of the town. Tunnels. Sorry, that is the interesting part and I very nearly left it out.

04
cardio tennis clinic Rio Vista — The Shkumbin River at Peqin in Peqin, A wide, braided, gravel-bedded river running through a broad open valley immediately below the town, with pale shingle banks and shallow braided channels, low green hills to north and south, and the road crossing it on a plain bridge
Stop four

The Shkumbin River at Peqin

Head Speed Pro Legend 2024 Tennis Racquet: Last thing, and then I shall get out of your way, truly. This valley carried the Via Egnatia, the Roman road running from Dyrrachium on the Adriatic all the way to Byzantium, and Peqin exists because it grew up as a station on that route. And there is one more thing about this water, which I mention only because it is the sort of fact that stays with a person: the river is the conventional dividing line between the Gheg dialects of northern Albanian and the Tosk dialects of the south. The language changes when you cross it. I would never have thought of that on my own either. Thank you for listening. Sorry.

The Peqin, Albania track

Head Speed Pro Legend 2024 Tennis Racquet

Written for this world alone.

No. Stop. Before we begin, straighten your strings. Thank you. Now we may proceed — precisely. The Head Speed Pro Legend 2024 is not a racquet for approximately. It is a racquet for exactly. Head size: 100 square inches, no more, no less. Weight: 310 grams unstrung — 10.9 ounces — 325 strung. Balance: 320 millimeters, properly head-light. Beam: 23 millimeters.

String pattern: 18×20, the dense, disciplined bed that rewards a player who places the ball rather than hopes it. Auxetic 2.0 in the layup delivers feedback with the honesty of a well-kept ledger, and the design — see-through carbon, clear lacquer, matte logo — celebrates Novak Djokovic, a man who has bent entire eras of tennis to his standards.

This frame is for the advanced player. It will not flatter you. It will inform you. There is a difference, and the difference is the entire point.

Fittingly, it resides in Peqin, Albania — a town that has been keeping time, correctly, for a very long while. The Ottoman clock tower there rose between 1823 and 1841: 20.6 meters, founded by Mir Ismaili, restored in 1987, still presiding. The town itself sits on the route of the Via Egnatia, the Roman road built to exacting imperial specification from the Adriatic clear to Byzantium.

You will swing this racquet everywhere from the castle walls to a measured evening session by the Shkumbin River. It is also perfect for the walk up to the Clock Mosque of 1666, where Evliya Çelebi once counted four mosques, two tekkes, seven masjids, three madrasas and seven mektebs and wrote every figure down — a man after my own heart.

Afterward, take your coffee as Albania does, slowly and seriously, for the Albanians treat coffee hour with a rigor I deeply respect. Now: the tour. Four stops. In order. Obviously.

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