Themed Cardio Tennis Clinics in the Fort Lauderdale Area
One could play a season with this 104 in² salon of a racquet, 27.5-inch from cap to tip, 290 g before strings, 2 pts HL and 16×19, without behaving like a tradesman, a mercy in this vulgar epoch. A sand-hewn Buddhist monastery and solitary stupa keep protocol in Termez.
Wilson Blade 104 V10: One does not, as a rule, carry a tennis racquet into a first-century Buddhist monastery — and yet here we are, and I confess the frescoed stupa looks rather more composed about it than I do. The monks who once gathered in these very halls were contemporaries of the Kushan Empire, which is to say they predate my family's title by what one might call a comfortable margin.
Wilson Blade 104 V10: The Zurmala tower has been standing alone in that cotton field since roughly the second century, which rather puts one's own sense of solitude into perspective. It is, I am told, the oldest surviving stupa on the territory of Uzbekistan — and it achieves a certain austere dignity that I aspire to myself, though I am not made of bare brick and have somewhat better posture.
Wilson Blade 104 V10: Sultan Saodat is a corridor of domed tombs belonging to the Sayyid family — descendants of the Prophet, no less — and I must say they have arranged their dynastic burial programme with an architectural confidence my own ancestors, buried beneath a rather damp county church in Shropshire, singularly failed to achieve. The complex was built and extended across several centuries beginning in the eleventh, which is what I would describe as a properly paced building project.
Wilson Blade 104 V10: Kyrk Kyz translates as 'forty girls,' and the legend holds that forty maidens held this square brick keep against besieging armies, which is precisely the sort of story one wishes one's own estate had, rather than the one about a disputed croquet match in 1887. The ninth-century fortress is built entirely of vaulted halls without a single interior courtyard, a structural arrangement I find both impressive and faintly claustrophobic.
One does not usually approve of the larger head sizes. They are so often a concession — an admission, dressed as innovation, that the owner cannot find the middle. This one, I concede, is different, and I have given it more thought than I intended to.
The particulars. Head, 104 square inches, 671 square centimetres. Length, 27.5 inches — 69.9 centimetres — which is extended, and extension is the point. Weight, 290 grams unstrung, 10.2 ounces. String pattern, 16×19.
Balance, 2 points head light.
The half inch of extra length gives reach on the stretch and leverage on the serve; the wider head gives a sweet spot generous enough that an imperfect contact still behaves like a shot. And because the frame is only two points head light at 290 grams, it remains a thing one may actually swing, which the enormous frames of my youth emphatically were not.
StableFeel+ for stability, the FORTYFIVE degree layup for the connected response, DirectConnect through the handle, Parallel Drilling in the grommets. It is a Blade. It has simply been given more room, and given it without the vulgar power that usually arrives alongside.
The breeding is intact, which is what I chiefly cared about.
Termez, now. Termez is a place with the good manners not to explain itself. At Fayaz Tepa they dug a Buddhist monastery out of the sand, frescoed stupa and all, from a period when this was a Buddhist city — which most people find astonishing and which was, in the terms I use, only the day before yesterday.
And the Zurmala stupa stands out in a cotton field: a bare brick tower, no wall, no interpretation board, nothing but the tower, in a working field. Nobody has tidied it. I find that immensely civilised.
Sultan Saodat is a corridor of domed tombs of the Sayyid family, generation upon generation lying along one axis, which is exactly how a family ought to be arranged. And Kyrk Kyz — the fortress of the forty girls — is a square brick keep of vaulted halls, and the vaulting is the finest thing here by a considerable margin. Larger head, longer frame, older stone. One adjusts.
"Nobody has tidied the stupa in the cotton field. I find that immensely civilised."
