Tennis.com recently launched a new Gear page, with comprehensive racquet and shoe reviews, as well as features and blog posts from our Gear editor, Richard Pagliaro. I’ll also be testing racquets and writing about them over there in the coming months. Today I give you my first review, of a one-of-a-kind frame that I’ve been flailing around the last week or so, a Babolat Aeropro Drive done up the way it is by its most famous endorser, Rafael Nadal. I’ll start by saying that Rafa’s racquet is as unique as his game, and that it’s a lot easier to watch him than to try to play like him.
Sometime during the first week of the U.S. Open, I sat in the pressroom and watched young American Jack Sock win a match at virtually the same moment that not-so-young American Robby Ginepri was losing one. It seemed to me, in a snarky kind of way, to be the passing of the third-tier torch in American tennis. Ginepri and Sock are both thick-bodied athletes who play a similarly, solidly prosaic baseline game. I also noticed that they both used Babolat racquets.
It made me wonder: We know that racquet evolution transformed the sport starting in the 1980s, but has Babolat in particular had its own effect in more recent years? The companies' racquets began appearing on tour in the 1990s, in the hands of Carlos Moya, Andy Roddick, and Kim Clijsters, among others. Were the specs and makeup of those sticks partially responsible for the deepening trend toward power-baseline tennis? A lot of big-name players on both tours have used them, most prominently the second most successful player of the era, Rafael Nadal. At least one knowledgeable figure in tennis, Nate Ferguson, a stringer for dozens of pros, has said that he thinks the combination of the power in Babolat’s frames combined with the spin of polyester strings has helped make today’s type of tennis possible.
Babolat has always seemed like a peculiar choice for the pros. The company helped pioneer what’s known as the “hybrid” frame. Rather than targeting its racquets at players of specific levels, such as intermediate or advanced (with "game-improvement" or "player" sticks), it designed them for a wider range of people. The pros, obviously, are an extremely specific target audience, and they use racquets that are heavier, and with smaller sweet spots, than you and I. And then they customize them to make them even heavier, and the sweet spots even smaller. Sometimes I think the pros tell their companies just to build them the most difficult racquet they can, and they'll learn to make it work. I’ve mentioned here before that I once tried out one of Yevgeny Kafelnikov’s Fischer frames. It felt something like swinging a 2 x 4. I think I was able to lift my arm a couple of days later.
Babolats, on the other hand, are lighter and more rec-friendly, and they generate more power. That’s fine, obviously, for hackers and bunters like us, but not so useful when you can already serve upwards of 130 m.p.h. with a small-headed wooden frame, as Mark Philippoussis once did in a test for Tennis magazine. Power, obviously, is not the issue. (As they often are, the Williams sisters are an exception to the rule. For years they used powerful Wilson frames and learned to control the ball with them. They also use bigger grips than many of the top men now.) As Ferguson said, though, couple those frames with the spin you get from a polyester string, and the increasingly small, whippy grips we’ve seen in the last decade on the men's tour, and you’ve got something. Something weird, yes—racquet and string almost at cross purposes—but something that works.
I had tried the classic Roddick Pure Drive a few times many years ago. It was indeed light and fast for an oversize, and deadly on serves and inside-out forehands when I hit them right. But it also encouraged a dangerous new mindset in me: I went for winners on virtually every shot. The ones I hit felt great; the ones I didn’t—i.e., most of them—didn’t. I eventually went back to whatever duller but safer frame I was using at the time.
The Aeropro Drive has since outdistanced the Pure Drive in sales and status. Part of that is the obvious Nadal appeal, especially to younger players—you can’t help but notice the thing when he stalks out on court with it in his left hand. But part of Babolat’s success is also in its design and its marketing strategy. The company has traditionally released fewer variations on its models than other manufacturers, which helps avoid customer confusion and makes the racquets they do put out seem iconic. More important, the bright cosmetics, with the distinctive two bars running across the strings, are much more eye-catching than, say, what Federer or Djokovic are currently using. I can’t even picture what Federer’s racquet looks like at the moment.
It was time to try the Aeropro and see how it would influence my game. Richard Pagliaro, our Gear editor, had the company to send us one that was as close to what Nadal uses as possible. The Aeropro was designed with him in mind, with a tapered throat that supposedly whips through the air more quickly. The racquet is listed at 10.6 ounces, but his version felt heavier than, though it was still light by pro standards (Federer uses a 12.2 ounce stick). But Nadal’s is less head light than other top players, which makes it feel less flimsy. The racquet was strung with RPM Blast, a string that was also designed with Rafa in mind, at his 55-pound tension. (For an illuminating comparison of the Big Three's frames, see Chris Clarey's piece from the Times in June.)
The most distinctive feature, though, is the grip. Nadal uses a miniscule 4 and a quarter inch handle, all the better to fly it around his head more rapidly. The thin grip makes the rest of the wide-body frame appear almost unnaturally wide. With that size grip, I imagine that the racquet can’t be too heavy or it would get unwieldy.
Last week I put down the frame I’d been using this summer and picked up the Aeropro, dauntingly small grip and all. The first thing that stuck out to me was its lack of feel—as in, you couldn’t feel the ball on the strings the way you can with most advanced player’s frames. This is also an oddity of Nadal’s; pros generally want that feel more than anything else, and will play with the most club-like frames to get it. With the Babolat, it was hard to tell exactly when you made contact, a fact that threw me off badly. I wondered how it was possible that Rafa did what he did while feeling the ball so vaguely on the strings.
Speaking of those strings, the Blast does indeed control the ball and produce a ton of spin. Even with this light frame, I had trouble getting the ball past the service line to start. After a few sessions, I adjusted, and my experience with the racquet was largely the same as it was with the Pure Drive years ago. It was very good for serves, especially flat serves—also a surprise, considering that this is hardly Nadal’s best or most important shot. It was even better on overheads—not a surprise, considering that Nadal has the best smash I’ve ever seen. It wasn’t good on drop shots—again, weird, because this is a Nadal specialty—but very good on half-volleys, even though that’s not its reputation. We all, it was clear, experience racquets differently, through our own hands.
As for the bread-and-butter strokes, forehands and backhands, I hit my share of winners with it, especially inside out. The fact that you can’t quite feel the ball at contact gives it a certain magical quality when you hit the ball right and it bolts past your opponent. A couple of times I looked at the stick and wondered how I just did that. But again, these winners turned out to be a curse in disguise for me; I tried for them constantly and often missed badly. I also found myself unconsciously imitating Nadal with my forehand. On a few of them, I ended up sending the racquet over the top of my head on my follow-through, the way Nadal does routinely. It felt cool, certainly, but a little dangerous, too.
With the Aeropro I played a bigger, riskier, more erratic, more topspin-heavy and perhaps uglier game than I normally play, but it worked. I won all of the sets I played. There was one thing in particular that seemed to work for me the same way it works for Nadal: that tiny grip. I normally use a 4 and a half, and my last opponent, who I play with regularly, said that my topspin forehand with the 4 and a quarter had more “torque” on it. “The ball looked like it was coming straight at me, and then it would kick to my left.”
That’s pretty similar to how Federer has described Nadal’s shots in the past. Yes, those shots have a lot of topspin, but it's a weird, hard-to-read topspin. If Babolat doesn’t hold the secrets to today’s game, it does seem that the company's most famous frame, and its smallest grip, has played a part in today's greatest rivalry.