01
Stop one
The Cotton Tree site
Yonex Ace 102 2025 Tennis Racquet: It's a tree. Was a tree. Fine, I guess. Big kapok, stood right here next to the national museum and the law courts, and the story the city tells is that freed people arriving in 1792 gathered under it to give thanks, so it's basically been the — okay, so kapok is Ceiba pentandra, they go up over sixty metres, the seed floss got used for stuffing life jackets, and this one personally outlasted every single government that ever sat in the buildings next to it, which is actually genuinely — anyway. Whatever. It came down in a storm in May 2023 and the whole country grieved. Which, yeah. Fine. Can we move on.
02
Stop two
King's Yard Gate
Yonex Ace 102 2025 Tennis Racquet: Yeah, so. An arch. One stone arch on Wallace Johnson Street, put up in 1817. And you should read what's carved on it, because the inscription says that any slave entering this gate is free. That's the whole building, that's it. People came ashore here from intercepted slave ships and walked under those words into a completely different legal status. So — no. I'm not doing a bit about this one. It's an archway with a carved inscription on it and it does more than most palaces manage with a hundred rooms. Read it properly. I'll wait. No, seriously. I'll wait.
03
Stop three
St John's Maroon Church
Yonex Ace 102 2025 Tennis Racquet: Small church. Stone. Siaka Stevens Street, early nineteenth century, around 1820. Built by Maroons from Jamaica — and, okay, look, the Maroons fought the British in the Jamaican hills, were deported to Nova Scotia afterwards, spent years in a climate about as far from home as it gets, and were then shipped across the Atlantic to Sierra Leone. Three continents, not one of them chosen by them. And when they landed here they cut and laid this stone themselves, with their own hands, which is why it is still standing two hundred years — sorry. That was a lot. I read ahead. Don't make it weird.
04
Stop four
Old Fourah Bay College building
Yonex Ace 102 2025 Tennis Racquet: It's a ruin. Red brick, out at Cline Town near the old wharf, roof's long gone. Fine. Except that Fourah Bay College was founded in 1827, and once it affiliated with a British university it could issue actual degrees in West Africa, so students came from right across the region and Freetown got called the Athens of West Africa, and the graduates went on to run newspapers and churches and eventually whole governments across the — right. Yeah. So a building that's now a shell did all that. Anyway. Best angle on it is from the street, obviously. Are we done? Cool. That was fine. I liked it. Forget I said that.
You climb the tree at dawn, you tap it, and you take only what it gives. Overwork a palm and it stops. That is my entire philosophy of racquets, and it is why I weigh 260 grams unstrung — 9.2 ounces — with a 102 square inch head, a 16×19 pattern, 27 inches of length and a beam that runs 24.0 to 26.5 to 23.0 millimetres. Light frame, wide head, isometric shape. Nothing about me asks for more than you have.
Swing me at whatever pace you actually own. I stay honest everywhere from a first Saturday morning lesson to a social set where somebody unexpectedly starts trying. And while you are still finding your swing, you should know that Freetown gave me my whole approach: this is a city that has repeatedly got the most out of the least and never once apologised for the budget.
Freetown does not do expensive monuments. A tree that nobody built. An arch that cost almost nothing and changed people's legal status as they walked under it. A church raised by hand by people who had crossed three continents. Every landmark in Freetown proves the same point I do — the return has very little to do with the outlay.
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