01
Stop one
The Eiffel Tower replica at the Paris Center
Prokennex Ki Q+ 5 Tennis Racquet: I have stood beneath the original, naturally, so believe me when I say this one holds itself better than a lattice ordered out of China and shipped to the Negev has any right to. It was raised by the Netivot property developer Oded Shriki as the centrepiece of the Paris Center, one of the town's three commercial centres, and completed in 2020. He said openly why: he expected Netivot to rise, and he refused the standard template of an Israeli shopping centre. A man of taste. I do not say that often, or lightly. The whole country talked about it, and outsiders now picture the town through this and its companion replica. And today it has me looking at it.
02
Stop two
The El Ghriba Synagogue of the Djerba community
Prokennex Ki Q+ 5 Tennis Racquet: Copies are ordinarily beneath my notice. This one is not. It was founded in the late 1970s by Rabbi Refael Tzaban, rabbi of Netivot, for the town's community from the island of Djerba in Tunisia, and built deliberately as a copy of the El Ghriba synagogue there. Count the seven openings in the ark wall, one for each of the seven Torah scrolls, and you will see the standard of care involved. Netivot itself began in 1956 as a transit camp under the name Azzatah, its first residents immigrants from Morocco and Tunisia, so this is the founding community rebuilding its own home in the desert. Even I recognise pedigree when it is in front of me.
04
Stop four
Nahal Grar
Prokennex Ki Q+ 5 Tennis Racquet: The largest tributary of Nahal HaBesor, which is itself the great drainage of the entire western Negev. Largest, note. I do not stop for the second largest of anything. It begins up in the area of Lahav among the hills of the Judean foothills and runs west past this town, and the Jewish National Fund has laid a chain of parks along its course. Do not expect a river: it is a seasonal desert wadi and it is honest about that, which is more than most things manage. Yet the whole pattern of settlement here follows these water lines, the founding of Netivot in 1956 included, alongside the National Water Carrier. Water writes the map. I merely point at it, beautifully.
Netivot was built in 1956 on empty Negev sand and is now a city of roughly 56,000 people that Israelis half-jokingly call their Varanasi, because more of its life happens around one grave than around its main street. It is a place that took something soft and made it hold weight. That is also the entire argument of this racquet.
The Ki Q+ 5 is a 100 square inch, 27-inch frame weighing 300 g unstrung and about 315 g strung, balanced roughly 3 points head light, with a swingweight around 329 and a 22 mm beam.
The string pattern is 16×20 — one cross more than the 16×19 nearly everything else in this bracket uses, which tightens the bed slightly and is why the ball comes off flatter and more predictably than the head size suggests. Stiffness is about 65 RA, squarely mid-range.
The reason to buy it, though, is the Kinetic system. ProKennex loads thousands of loose micro-particles into chambers in the head. At impact they lag, then fly forward a fraction of a second late, adding mass exactly when the ball is on the strings and killing the vibration that would otherwise travel down the arm.
It is the closest thing in tennis to a shock absorber, and it is why this frame is prescribed so often to players coming back from elbow and shoulder trouble. There is a Comfort Cap at the butt end doing the same job at the other end of the handle. Grip sizes run the standard range.
You'll get use out of it everywhere from a floodlit municipal court in Netivot to a hard court in Beersheba nineteen miles down the road — and the arm protection matters more in this part of the country than most, because the Negev gives you a ninety-minute window of tolerable light in the morning and another after five, and you will be tempted to play both.
And by the way: pace yourself, because in a Moroccan-Israeli city the Friday couscous is not optional and neither is the third helping.
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