Four Strings

22 March 2012, 7:42 p.m., Key Biscayne, FL.—Backstage, beyond the alphabet soup of credentials, enclosed in a fluorescent-lit cell of a room deep within the catacombs of Crandon Park’s stadium court, 11 men in black shirts stand weaving. I’m here with Team Luxilon, the official tournament stringers—actually, not so much with as alongside, on the periphery, a foreign spectator. A couple disinterested looks, they give me, and the stringers are back to their labors, a metronomic bustle of dextrous and quick movements.

Their looms are uniform, the Wilson Baiardo, a space-age stringing machine that adjusts ergonomically to a stringer’s posture and executes perfect tension, and is pretty much as technically advanced and sophisticated a stringing machine can get. One lean man, his brown hair slicked back into a mold, begins stabbing through the strings with an awl (exorcising a fiend at a player’s behest, perhaps?). Others furrow their brows and thread crosses. The walls are posterless and totally white. No one talks. Though apparently someone has a weakness for Daft Punk—“One More Time” in particular, which plays from a speaker in the corner. The stringers add in their own unique percussion: the sporadic clak-pops of clamps grabbing strings and the high-pitched whir of friction, the sound like a revving r.c. car as mains saw crosses. Suddenly Romanthony’s auto-tuned voice: Oh yeah, alright, don’t stop the dancin’. Certainly no one’s dancing. Or bobbing about. Has anyone even smiled? One bald-headed man breaks rank and snaps the racquet off his machine. He applauds the stringbed about his ear and then, cocking his head to the side, examines the racquet myopic-like at arm’s length. A quick nod and the stick’s in plastic, a gift from the forge of Hephaestus to the gods.

7:44 p.m.—Into a small adjoining office I follow Ron Rocchi, a large, affable man with spiky hair who looks no older than 40. He’s Wilson’s Principal Designer and Global Tour Equipment Manager—i.e., designer of Wilson products (he invented the Baiardo) and general padrone of the company’s professional stringing operations. From what I gather, he is a very good stringer. And to be honest, before meeting Ron, I thought I wasn’t bad, either. Could you ever get good enough to string with a Team?, I had asked myself. With practice, I thought, Sure, why not? It’s just a matter of picking up the pace, right?

How sophomoric of me, I think, as Rocchi, with a smile on his face and the dark cheer of a competitive marching band director, quickly disabuses me of my whimsical pro stringing aspirations, the disabusing process highly contingent on a run of increasingly impressive (and harrowing) factoids. Ron R.: “We’ve had 4 days of 400 racquets in a row…Each stringer keeps a pace of about five racquets in two hours [that’s 24 mins./racquet]…There are some days we’re here 20 hours a day…It’s not uncommon for a stringer on our team to have to do 30 racquets a day, without a single mistake, with a proper stencil, in the right bag, with the right strings, on time.” And so on.

But it’s the bootcamp that’s the real zinger. Again, R.R.:

“We have in the past had a need to add a few stringers. And we’ve developed a training program—a boot camp, if you will, a two-day event [usually at a tournament] when we’re trying to push that stringer to the breaking point and maybe a little past and see how they react. We train them on ways we do things, certain knots we like to tie, and we sort of throw everything we can at them. Usually we do it a tournament. So we stick them in a back corner. They’re not stringing player racquets, but it’s the same type of process. And they get a sense of what it’s really like. To date, we have about a 25 percent success rate. Only one out of every four makes it through.”

“This is the apex of the stringing world,” Rocchi declares with a wry smile, “the World Series of the Major Leagues.”

8:15 p.m.—And now Ron is leading me through the stringing room. The music has changed to Taio Cruz, he of the wailing “Higher.” First I meet an Atlanta-based stringer, one Todd Mobley, Luxilon Team’s String Captain and second-in-command. He’s stringing Ana Ivanovic’s Yonex EZone Xi 98, but periodically looks over his shoulder, keeping tabs on the rest of the team.

“Yeah, I kind of got burned out on teaching,” Todd tells me. “I was teaching 50 hours a week, doing camps, advanced clinics for kids, round robin socials.” He points to the machine. “And then one of the pros needed somebody to take over stringing. It’s kind of—when you work on here, you don’t have all the distractions of a tennis court. Like, what’s Bobby doing over here, how’s this woman swinging over there. And stringing is pretty much straightforward, easy to—to me, it was like meditating. This is why I do it, because I can stand 18 hours a day and just keep stringin’, stringin’, stringin’.”

8:25 p.m.—“Quite honestly, pros have all different theories on why they do things. And ours is not to question why [laughing].” Meet Joe Heydt, a man with animated eyes who speaks fast and hails from Nebraska. Right now he’s stringing for “Robin Haas, or Haasa, depending on how you pronounce it.” Head Prestige. Sonic Pro. 25 kilos in the mains, 24 in the crosses. Don’t tell me. You haven’t heard of hybrid tensions? Haas likes his crosses soft.

“It’s all dictated by the feel of the player,” says Joe. “So if they experiment with something—whether we think it’s right, or they think it’s right or wrong—if that’s what sings to them, if that’s what makes it work, great. I’m not going to say, ‘What’s this guy doing?’ I don’t know more than what their feel is. You know, it’s like food. It’s a taste thing.”

Food indeed; the players never tire of eating.

Justin diFeliciantonio is the gear editor for TENNIS.com and writes The Pro Shop blog. He strings his racquet at 52 lbs.