Themed Cardio Tennis Clinics in the Fort Lauderdale Area
Five pre-cut black strips with the yellow Völkl chevrons, article V68808, made in Taiwan — a sacrificial layer for the crown of the frame, and not a bumper guard, a distinction I intend to keep making. What Völkl declines to publish about it, I decline to invent, and Béjaïa gets walked properly first.
Volkl Tennis Racquet Protection Tape: I will not say old-ish; no, absolutely not—the Casbah of Bejaia is a 12th-century Almohad citadel above the bay. The tape is aligned straighter than my blood pressure after hearing someone call that the 1100s-ish.
Volkl Tennis Racquet Protection Tape: Bab el Bahr is the Hammadid sea gate at the old harbour, and yes, gate means gate, not decorative arch with maritime aspirations. I centered the tape because history deserves right angles.
Volkl Tennis Racquet Protection Tape: Cap Carbon lighthouse is reached through a tunnel cut in the cliff, which is wonderfully precise engineering and not, repeat not, just a dramatic hole in a rock. I placed the tape carefully; otherwise the cliff would have looked organized and we would not.
Volkl Tennis Racquet Protection Tape: This is the morning fish market on the quays of Béjaïa's working port, where the merchandise has scales and I, mercifully, brought measuring discipline. If a sardine is off by two millimeters, I notice.
Five pieces. Not a roll — five pieces, and the card says so in two languages, 5 Stk / Pcs, which is the sort of thing I check before I open my mouth. This is Völkl's protection tape: black strips carrying the chevron monogram and the wordmark in that yellow, made to run along the crown of the frame where the frame and the court eventually meet.
It is not a bumper guard. It does not replace one, and it will not resurrect a head you have already ground flat on a hard court. It is a sacrificial layer, and the whole virtue of a sacrificial layer is that it is the thing destroyed instead of the thing you paid for.
Let me be clear about what it is not, because the confusion is common and it matters.
Now the part where I disappoint you, and I would far rather disappoint you than invent something. The article number is V68808, printed on the back of the card beneath the barcode. It is made in Taiwan.
Völkl publishes almost nothing about this tape.
The manufacturer's own words are that it guards your favourite racquet from scrapes and other damage that may occur during play, and that it adds life and preserves the look — their sentence, and I am not going to launder it into specifications they never issued.
The listed packed weight is about forty-five grams: read that correctly, because that is the card, the blister and all five pieces together, not what ends up on your frame, which is a fraction of it. Length, width, thickness, the adhesive, whether it lifts clean in a year — not published anywhere I could reach. Anyone quoting you those figures is quoting themselves.
Béjaïa is the right city for a thing defined by what it protects rather than by what it claims, because Béjaïa is where a boy from Pisa learned to be exact. Leonardo's father ran the customs house here for the Pisan merchants, and what the son picked up in this port was the nine figures and the zero.
He took them home, set them down in a book in 1202, and the way you write a number today came out of that book. The city also shipped wax in such volume that the French word for a candle is still this city's French name. One harbour, two things the rest of us use daily without knowing where they came from.
That is the standard the tape is being held to: protect the good thing quietly, and let somebody else take the credit.
"Five pieces. Article V68808. Made in Taiwan. Every other number you have been told about this tape, somebody invented."
