01
Stop one
National Tobacco Company Building
Tecnifibre Black Code 4S 17g Tennis String Reel: Attribution first, because this one is constantly muddled. Architect: Louis Hay, of Napier. Client: Gerhard Husheer, the tobacco manufacturer who had founded the National Tobacco Company. Completed: 1933. It went up in the reconstruction that followed the Hawke's Bay earthquake of 3 February 1931, which flattened Napier's commercial centre and raised the surrounding seabed. And here is the cataloguer's headache: everyone files this under Art Deco with the rest of the city, and it does not belong there. Hay was a follower of Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright, and the organic ornament around that doorway is in their manner, not the geometric idiom of the rebuilt centre. Heritage New Zealand lists it Category I. Correct the record wherever you meet it.
02
Stop two
Daily Telegraph Building
Tecnifibre Black Code 4S 17g Tennis String Reel: E. A. Williams, completed 1932, home of the Daily Telegraph, Napier's main newspaper, and one of the first substantial buildings finished in the rebuilding after the 1931 earthquake. Now — the low height. Half the notes I have read call it modest, and it is not modesty, it is policy: the reconstruction favoured two-storey reinforced-concrete construction because it was judged more survivable in a quake. Which is why the whole centre of this city is uniformly low and uniformly of one decade — an entire town accessioned within a single narrow date range, a thing that makes an archivist unreasonably happy. It is one of the anchors of the Art Deco quarter, and its interior banking chamber has been restored.
03
Stop three
Napier Municipal Theatre
Tecnifibre Black Code 4S 17g Tennis String Reel: Two buildings, one site, and they are merged in half the records I have handled. Entry one: an elaborate Italian Renaissance theatre by the Australian architect William Pitt, opened 1912, destroyed in the 1931 earthquake. Entry two: the replacement. Frustration at the lack of a proper performance venue came to a head in 1935, and the new house — 1,154 seats, full Art Deco dress — opened for its first performance on 3 June 1938. Note the seat count. It is exact and I will not have it rounded. Redeveloped in two stages between 1992 and 1997, work carried out with the explicit aim of preserving the 1938 interior, which is precisely how it ought to be done. Still the city's principal theatre.
04
Stop four
Pania of the Reef, Marine Parade
Tecnifibre Black Code 4S 17g Tennis String Reel: Unveiled 1954. Subject: Pania, a figure of Ngati Kahungunu tradition — a sea maiden who came ashore, loved a man of the land, and on returning to the water was held there, becoming the reef that lies off Napier. That is the account as it is held, and I record it as such. She has become the best-known statue in New Zealand and appears on tourism material for the whole region. And there is one line in the file I always look for first: she was stolen from her plinth in 2005 and recovered days later, and has since been reinstated on Marine Parade. A complete provenance, gap included. Those are rarer than you would think. I treasure them.
Black Code 4S is the square one. Where most polys are round or lightly textured, 4S is cut with a genuine square section — four spin-friendly edges biting into the ball at every contact — and that geometry is the entire product.
Tecnifibre build it as a co-polyester with their Thermocore process and high-density polyester for flexibility and tension maintenance, and they publish the comparisons: designed for maximum spin with about 20% more power than Pro Red Code, roughly 15% more durable than the standard Black Code while holding tension like Razor Code, and PU multifilaments in the construction for about 22% less arm fatigue than the previous generation.
The 17 gauge is 1.25 mm. It is a stiff string by the numbers, and it is the official string of the ATP Tour.
Buy the reel if you are a spin player who breaks strings, because that is who this is for: full swings, heavy topspin, frequent restrings. The four edges grab, the flexible core keeps it from feeling like fencing wire, and the tension holds long enough that the string bed you finish a match with resembles the one you started with.
Napier is the right city for something defined by its shape. On 3 February 1931 at 10.47 in the morning, a magnitude 7.8 earthquake destroyed the town and killed 256 people. What was rebuilt through the following decade was one of the most complete Art Deco townscapes on earth — a whole city re-cut, in one style, in one decade.
You will use this everywhere from a windy court above Hawke's Bay to an indoor hall in July, and by the way, this is New Zealand's wine country: Hawke's Bay reds, a long lunch, and nobody in a hurry except me.
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