01
Stop one
The Tokmak River
Solinco High Performance Hyper-Grip Overgrip 3-Pack: Ah — the Tokmak, a tributary of the Molochna, and the town wears the river's name the way you wear a ring. Before imperial settlement, Crimean Tatars grazed horses on this steppe; picture the long grass and the horses knowing their own way down to the water. The town was founded in 1784 by state peasants brought up from Poltava, and by 1861, at some eight thousand souls, it had become Velykyi Tokmak. City status in 1938. Renamed simply Tokmak on 30 December 1962. Simply. Nothing about being named after the only moving thing for miles is simple.
02
Stop two
Velykyi Tokmak railway station
Solinco High Performance Hyper-Grip Overgrip 3-Pack: Built before the First World War, on the line joining Fedorivka to Verkhniy Tokmak II and Volnovakha, part of the Prydniprovska Railway — and oh, the ache of it: the station stands some distance out, so the town's centre and its station have never once touched. A century of near-misses. It made Tokmak a shipping point for the grain of the steppe and, from the 1920s, for the output of the engineering works. Every sack of wheat that ever left this place left from a platform the town could not quite reach. Sorry. Where was I.
03
Stop three
The former Chervonyi Prohres works (Pivdendyzelmash)
Solinco High Performance Hyper-Grip Overgrip 3-Pack: Two works were merged — married, really — on 28 June 1922 into the First State Factory of Agricultural Machinery and Implements, renamed Chervonyi Prohres, Red Progress, on the fifth anniversary of the October Revolution. Between 1923 and 1927 it built the three-wheeled Zaporozhets tractor in series, the first Soviet-designed tractor to reach production, and took a state diploma of the first class for it. Three wheels, and somebody adored that machine. By the 1930s, as Pivdendyzelmash, it was making about 75 per cent of the Soviet Union's low-power diesel engines and feeding most of the town.
04
Stop four
The Church of the Ascension, Tokmak
Solinco High Performance Hyper-Grip Overgrip 3-Pack: The Church of the Ascension, one of two Orthodox parishes here — the other, St Sergius of Radonezh, waits across the town in Balanovka, and I like to think they can hear one another's bells. It stands on a street once named for Volodarsky and now for Vasyl Vyshyvanyi, part of Ukraine's wider renaming of Soviet-era streets; a town changing what it calls things is a town deciding, at last, who it loves. Early twentieth-century merchant premises still stand nearby on the former Revolution Street, now Central Street. And merchants build for someone. They always do.
A tacky, soft, high-performance polyurethane overgrip. Each grip is 110 cm long, 2.7 cm wide and 0.55 mm thick, which is the number that matters: at just over half a millimetre it wraps a full handle without swelling your grip size out from under you, and you can still feel the bevels through it.
Solinco built the Hyper-Grip to sit slightly thinner and slightly tackier than their own Wonder Grip. Three grips per pack, black.
Which is a fitting object to send to Tokmak, a town on the Tokmak River that has spent its whole existence doing precise, unglamorous work nobody applauds — by the 1930s its diesel plant was turning out something like three quarters of all the small-capacity diesel engines in the Soviet Union. Nobody puts an overgrip on a poster either. It just holds.
Use it for sweat-heavy afternoons and cold-handed mornings alike; at 0.55 mm you can re-wrap mid-match without having to re-learn your racquet.
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