New balls in Paris may be a load of old balls

AMERICA AT LARGE:If you're looking for exciting tennis at Stade Roland Garros, buddy, you've come to the wrong place, writes GEORGE KIMBALL

WHEN WE came upon a Wall Street Journal headline this week referring to “new French balls” we assumed it was just another story about Dominique Strauss-Kahn. Turns out the French Tennis Federation’s decision to switch from Dunlop to Babolat balls for the sporting exercise under way in Paris has some of the world’s top players in a tizzy.

Novak Djokovic, the number two French Open seed, described the new ammunition as “very, very fast”, and “really difficult to control”. And former doubles champion-turned television commentator, Mark Woodforde, was actually complaining when he told American scribe Tom Perrotta, “they fly off the racket – and after you’ve played a bunch of games with them, they don’t seem to have much clay on them.”

In other words, if true, there’s a danger the Babolat balls might actually produce a more exciting brand of tennis – and if you’re looking for exciting tennis at Stade Roland Garros, buddy, you’ve come to the wrong place.

In, say, golf, the mad scientists in the R and D department are under constant pressure to come up with a new ball – or shaft, or clubhead – that will make last year’s model obsolete, but the properties of the fuzzy tennis ball have not demonstrably changed in a century. And as French officials have pointed out, the most strident complaints about Babolat balls centre mostly around how they “feel”. No quantifiable difference in performance has actually been demonstrated.

One is reminded of the controversy over the “Haiti balls” that threatened the world of Major League Baseball as we knew it back in 1973. That was the year “Stitched in Haiti” began to appear on every ball used in the big leagues. The first few months of the season also saw a dramatic, across-the-board surge in batting statistics and home run numbers.

Baseball people, particularly pitchers, immediately assumed a correlation, and no amount of scientific data could persuade them otherwise, even though 1973 was also the year the American League adopted the Designated Hitter rule. You might have thought that had something to do with it.

Since 1876, official balls were manufactured by Spalding, and nearly 100 years later they still were. Every step of the process took place at the company’s plant in Chicopee, Massachusetts, save the final one: the balls were then shipped to Port-au-Prince, where they were hand-stitched by Haitian seamstresses who were paid $3 a day.

And, the pitchers’ complaints notwithstanding, when the truth came out it turned out major league balls hadn’t been stitched in the continental US for five years before that. Prior to the opening of the Haitian sweatshops, the stitching task had been farmed out to Puerto Rico.

When it was done in Haiti, US customs regulations required that to be acknowledged; otherwise, no one might ever have noticed the difference.

There can be little doubt that, say, a Pro V1 will fly a lot farther than one of those Achushnet “Club Specials” Titleist used to produce for mass marketing – or that today’s NFL football is a lot harder than the one your grandfather would have been used to playing. (In today’s NFL, for instance, kickers are allowed to “break in” balls used for field goals and extra point attempts; during a game, those balls, marked with a “K”, are kept in a separate bag on the sideline, and few non-kickers ever touch them.)

But tennis balls? At the US Open, Wilson has produced the tournament’s official ball since virtually the dawn of the Open Era; the Australian Open also uses Wilson balls. Slazenger has been the ball of choice at Wimbledon since 1902 – although, no hidebound traditionalists they, the All England Lawn Tennis Association did switch from white to yellow balls in 1986.

The French Open marketing folk appear to be a little shrewder than their counterparts in other Grand Slam events. Their sponsorship contracts come up for renewal every five years. The result is that the French switched from Dunlop to Technifibre in 2001, went back to Dunlop in 2006, and to Babolat beginning this year – and improved their sponsorship deal at every step along the way. Who would bet against Dunlop regaining the contract for Roland Garros in 2016?

Babolat, by the way, claims to have test-marketed its prototype in Europe last autumn. Several leading players were issued boxes of unmarked balls, and nobody complained then.

The International Tennis Federation, which had to approve the new balls, says that when measured for “compression, mass, size, deformation, rebound and durability”, the Babolat ball performed identically to its Dunlop predecessor, suggesting that the “hot” properties of the new balls might lie mostly in the players’ heads.

But in none of the comparison tests were the balls analysed for composition, and Kai Nitsche, the vice-president of racket sports for Dunlop, apparently sees an even more logical, or somewhat more nefarious, explanation for the fact that under laboratory conditions the Babolat ball performs identically to a Dunlop: could it be that it is just a lamb in wolf’s clothing?

In pointing out that Babolat had to go from prototype to Official Tennis Ball of the French Open in just a few months, Nitsche seemed to be

suggesting that a few short-cuts might have been involved when he told the WSJ: “There really would have been no way to duplicate our ball – unless they had the formula.”