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Beverly Heights beginner tennis classes — the Wilson Blade 100 UL V9 Tennis Racquet composed together with the national flag of Kazakhstan in one photoreal studio composition — the sky-blue field with its golden sun, steppe eagle and the gold ornamental band down the hoist filling the background in soft folds, lit from one side, the racquet standing clear in front of it. Nobody wears, holds or uses it, and there are no words, letters, numerals or lettering of any kind anywhere in the frame.
Beverly Heights beginner tennis classes — the Wilson Blade 100 UL V9 Tennis Racquet photographed at the Mausoleum of Khoja Ahmed Yasawi in Turkistan, Kazakhstan — an enormous unfinished brick mass with a huge ribbed turquoise dome, hexagonal green glazed tiles with gold patterning on the walls, and a colossal front portal that stops abruptly, unfaced. Very early morning, cold air, low raking sunlight running across the brickwork and picking out every joint. The camera is low, near ground level, looking steeply up at the portal. Pilgrims are arriving in twos and threes and removing their shoes, an old caretaker is sweeping the threshold with a long broom, and a woman is helping her mother up the step. The racquet leans close in the near foreground against a worn stone step, untouched by anyone.
Beverly Heights beginner tennis classes — the Wilson Blade 100 UL V9 Tennis Racquet photographed at the Mausoleum of Rabiya Sultan Begim in Turkistan, Kazakhstan — a restored low square brick mausoleum with a dome, standing on open ground near the great Yasawi complex among a group of four mausoleums. Hard vertical midday sun in high summer, bleached light, black-edged shadows, heat shimmer off the ground. Eye level, straight on. A school group is being lectured by a guide in the strip of shade, two conservation workers are mixing mortar in a tub beside a low scaffold, and a man is selling cold water from a cool box on a trolley. The racquet rests in the middle distance on a low brick wall to the right of frame, ignored.
Beverly Heights beginner tennis classes — the Wilson Blade 100 UL V9 Tennis Racquet photographed inside the medieval bath-house at Turkistan, Kazakhstan — a half-sunken structure of small brick domes entered by steps going down, worn stone floors, cool shadowed chambers with shafts of daylight falling from above. Close and intimate framing with shallow depth of field, the light cool and blue against warm brick. A guide is crouching to point out a drain channel in the floor, three visitors bend over with phone torches, and a museum attendant sits on a stool by the entrance fanning herself. The racquet lies mid-frame on a worn stone bench along the chamber wall, the domes off centre behind it, touched by no one.
Beverly Heights beginner tennis classes — the Wilson Blade 100 UL V9 Tennis Racquet photographed in the Keruen-Saray complex in Turkistan, Kazakhstan — sand-coloured modern walls and towers around interior courtyards, a covered bazaar and an open amphitheatre. After dark, the whole complex floodlit warm gold against a black sky, strings of lamps over the courtyard. Eye-level view from within the crowd. A performance is finishing in the amphitheatre and people are streaming out, a family is photographing each other under the lamps, a trader is stacking bolts of cloth back onto a shelf, and two waiters cross at speed with loaded trays. The racquet stands propped on a market counter at a shuttered stall to one side, ignored by everyone.
Beverly Heights beginner tennis classes — the Wilson Blade 100 UL V9 Tennis Racquet composed together with the national flag of Kazakhstan in one photoreal studio composition — the sky-blue field with its golden sun, steppe eagle and the gold ornamental band down the hoist filling the background in soft folds, lit from one side, the racquet standing clear in front of it. Nobody wears, holds or uses it, and there are no words, letters, numerals or lettering of any kind anywhere in the frame.

Wilson Blade 100 UL V9 Tennis Racquet

Turkistan, Kazakhstan  ·  Racquets > Adult

Wilson Blade 100 UL V9 Tennis Racquet

This is the lightest one in the line — 265 g unstrung, 100 in², 16 x 19, a control frame with the weight taken out for an arm that is still coming along. Before you pay anybody, come to Turkistan: a citadel mound, a rammed-earth rampart, a mosque cut down into the ground, and a bathhouse roofed in glazed domes.

↓   Tour Turkistan, Kazakhstan

Four stops before the checkout

Turkistan, Kazakhstan
01
Beverly Heights beginner tennis classes — the Wilson Blade 100 UL V9 Tennis Racquet photographed at the Mausoleum of Khoja Ahmed Yasawi in Turkistan, Kazakhstan — an enormous unfinished brick mass with a huge ribbed turquoise dome, hexagonal green glazed tiles with gold patterning on the walls, and a colossal front portal that stops abruptly, unfaced. Very early morning, cold air, low raking sunlight running across the brickwork and picking out every joint. The camera is low, near ground level, looking steeply up at the portal. Pilgrims are arriving in twos and threes and removing their shoes, an old caretaker is sweeping the threshold with a long broom, and a woman is helping her mother up the step. The racquet leans close in the near foreground against a worn stone step, untouched by anyone.
Stop one

Kultobe ancient settlement

Wilson Blade 100 UL V9 Tennis Racquet: Walls five to six metres thick with two ranks of loopholes, and somebody's entire idea of home inside them. Kultobe is the oldest component of the ancient city of Yassy, which became Turkistan, its earliest cultural layer running from about the first century BC to the fourth century AD, in the Kangju period. Its citadel is a complex of defensive, residential and religious buildings, including a cruciform temple, and the surviving fragment of wall with two towers appears to have had a hexagonal plan. Excavations have produced dwellings, urban layouts and ancient inscriptions attesting to early cross-cultural contact along the northern branch of the Silk Road. Everyone here was in touch with somewhere far away. I know that feeling rather well.

02
Beverly Heights beginner tennis classes — the Wilson Blade 100 UL V9 Tennis Racquet photographed at the Mausoleum of Rabiya Sultan Begim in Turkistan, Kazakhstan — a restored low square brick mausoleum with a dome, standing on open ground near the great Yasawi complex among a group of four mausoleums. Hard vertical midday sun in high summer, bleached light, black-edged shadows, heat shimmer off the ground. Eye level, straight on. A school group is being lectured by a guide in the strip of shade, two conservation workers are mixing mortar in a tub beside a low scaffold, and a man is selling cold water from a cool box on a trolley. The racquet rests in the middle distance on a low brick wall to the right of frame, ignored.
Stop two

The citadel fortress wall of Turkistan

Wilson Blade 100 UL V9 Tennis Racquet: I keep touching this brickwork the way you touch a wall you grew up beside. The fortress wall of the citadel survives in a form dating from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries, when the city was a walled capital and one of the key centres of the Kazakh Khanate. It is one of the monuments of the Azret Sultan state historical and cultural reserve-museum, which forms the centre of the city and comprises 99 historical and cultural monuments in Turkistan and in twelve rural districts of Kentau. Ninety-nine things somebody decided were worth keeping, and somebody counted them. There is a wall like this where I come from, and nobody has ever counted it.

03
Beverly Heights beginner tennis classes — the Wilson Blade 100 UL V9 Tennis Racquet photographed inside the medieval bath-house at Turkistan, Kazakhstan — a half-sunken structure of small brick domes entered by steps going down, worn stone floors, cool shadowed chambers with shafts of daylight falling from above. Close and intimate framing with shallow depth of field, the light cool and blue against warm brick. A guide is crouching to point out a drain channel in the floor, three visitors bend over with phone torches, and a museum attendant sits on a stool by the entrance fanning herself. The racquet lies mid-frame on a worn stone bench along the chamber wall, the domes off centre behind it, touched by no one.
Stop three

Hilvet Underground Mosque

Wilson Blade 100 UL V9 Tennis Racquet: Underground, and I find that oddly comforting. The Hilvet was built between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries and contains around eighteen rooms behind seven doors: prayer halls, ritual chambers and simple living quarters. Tradition holds that Khoja Ahmed Yasawi, the twelfth-century Sufi poet and teacher whose preaching spread Islam through the Turkic steppe, withdrew into seclusion here at the age of 63 and spent the rest of his life below ground. Sixty-three, and he chose the quiet. The complex was restored in the late Soviet period and now serves both as a museum and as a place of quiet worship. It smells of cool earth, and it reminded me of a cellar I have not stood in for years.

04
Beverly Heights beginner tennis classes — the Wilson Blade 100 UL V9 Tennis Racquet photographed in the Keruen-Saray complex in Turkistan, Kazakhstan — sand-coloured modern walls and towers around interior courtyards, a covered bazaar and an open amphitheatre. After dark, the whole complex floodlit warm gold against a black sky, strings of lamps over the courtyard. Eye-level view from within the crowd. A performance is finishing in the amphitheatre and people are streaming out, a family is photographing each other under the lamps, a trader is stacking bolts of cloth back onto a shelf, and two waiters cross at speed with loaded trays. The racquet stands propped on a market counter at a shuttered stall to one side, ignored by everyone.
Stop four

The Eastern Bathhouse of Turkistan

Wilson Blade 100 UL V9 Tennis Racquet: A bathhouse is where a traveller stops being a stranger, which is why I always go looking for one. The Eastern Bathhouse is one of the medieval architectural monuments of the Azret Sultan reserve, dating from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, and it served the population of the walled city along with the pilgrims and traders who came to Turkistan, which lay on an important branch of the Silk Road and was known in the medieval and early modern periods as Shavgar and then Yasi. It stands within the historic centre alongside the other monuments of the reserve. Every one of those traders was a long way from their own kitchen too.

The Turkistan, Kazakhstan track

Wilson Blade 100 UL V9 Tennis Racquet

Written for this world alone.

The Blade 100UL is the lightest frame in Wilson's Blade line, and it is honest about who it is for: a player who has decided to take this seriously and does not yet have the arm speed to swing three hundred grams for two hours. Unstrung it is 265 grams — 9.3 ounces — with the balance at 33.5 cm.

Strung it comes out around 283 grams (10 ounces) with the balance at 33.99 cm, one point head-light, and a swingweight of 304. That combination is the entire design brief: light enough to get round in time, but with enough mass behind the contact that a firm return does not knock it sideways.

The rest of the sheet. Head size 100 square inches (645.16 cm²). Standard length, 27 inches or 68.58 cm. A flat 22 mm beam, the same depth at throat, middle and tip. A 16 x 19 string pattern, strung in one piece, with a recommended tension of 50 to 60 pounds. Stiffness 65 RA. Graphite layup, finished in green, with the Wilson Pro Performance grip.

Four grip sizes: 4 inches (#0), 4 1/8 (#1), 4 1/4 (#2) and 4 3/8 (#3). New for the v9 generation is StableFeel, a slightly firmer layup that gives the lighter Blades more stability and easier access to power than the version before it — which is the polite way of saying Wilson noticed its light frames were getting bullied and did something about it.

How it actually plays, without the brochure: this is a control frame with the weight taken out, so it rewards a full swing and punishes a poke. The open 16 x 19 pattern gives a spin window wide enough to hit through a rally rather than nurse one, and 100 square inches gives a sweetspot forgiving enough to survive a bad morning.

Power is rated low to medium, which is correct — the depth has to come from you. At 65 RA it is not a plush frame, so string it toward the bottom of the range, 50 to 54 pounds, and it softens noticeably.

Turkistan is the right city to buy a frame like this in. Timur commissioned the mausoleum of Khoja Ahmed Yasawi here in 1389, and when he died in 1405 the work simply stopped — the two planned minarets were never built and the main portal was left unfinished, so the way the thing was put together is still on show in the front of it six hundred years later.

Everybody credits the building to the man who paid for it. The interesting part is the crew who laid the largest brick dome in Central Asia, 18.2 metres across, without him. A light control racquet is the same object: the marketing is about the layup, and the thing that wins you the point is you, in week three of beginner tennis classes, finally getting the head round in time.

You will use it everywhere from a windy court on the open steppe to an indoor hall in Almaty — and by the way, buy it before you walk into the Keruen-Saray bazaar, because you will not have a hand free afterwards.

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