Provenance first, then the record. The Wilson Blade 100UL v10 is the ultralight entry in a line that has been running since the mid-2000s, and it is catalogued as follows. Head: 645 square centimetres, 100 square inches. Length: 68.6 centimetres, 27 inches. Weight unstrung: 265 grams, 9.3 ounces. Balance: 335 millimetres, 2 points head light. Swingweight strung: 298.
Flex: 67 RA. String pattern: 16×19. Recommended tension: 48 to 57 pounds, 22 to 26 kilos.
Beam: 22 millimetres, unvarying, front to back.
Those entries want reading together rather than singly. A swingweight of 298 with a balance only two points head light is the lightest, freest swing in the whole Blade series — the racquet gives you almost nothing to fight.
Combine that with a 67 RA flex, which is soft for a control frame, and you have a stick that generates head speed for a player who cannot yet generate it themselves, and does so without punishing the arm.
The technologies are the full Blade set, correctly attributed: StableFeel+ for stability and response, FORTYFIVE degree for the connected feel, DirectConnect running the carbon handle into the end cap, Parallel Drilling for a consistent string bed. Nothing has been withheld from the ultralight, which is worth noting because it usually is.
And it is assigned to Telavi, a town whose holdings I would happily spend a year among. Batonis Tsikhe is the walled royal palace of the Kakhetian kings, with its own bathhouse inside the walls and a tunnel out of them, which tells you what the accession records looked like.
Dzveli Galavani, the ninth-century fortress walls, stand above the town and predate the palace by several centuries; the two are constantly confused in the popular literature, and I would like that corrected.
The Korchibashishvili castle is a nobleman's tower house of the sixteenth century, a private holding rather than a royal one, and it is the entry most visitors skip. And then the plane tree: nine hundred years old, forty metres tall, eleven metres around the trunk.
A living object, continuously present, that has been standing in that spot since before most of the documents about this town were written. It is the primary source.
Everything else here is a copy.
"The tree is the primary source. Everything written about this town is a copy."
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