Mise En Scene: Life in Le Village

PARIS—You’ve probably heard that Roland Garros is hopelessly undersized, and it is. But that doesn’t mean a few extra inches of space can't be found for a friendly sponsor or two. As the Herald Tribune reported today, corporate hospitality now brings in more money for the French Open than ticket-selling does—33 million euros to 28. Most of the people who jostle for space in the few yards between Chatrier and the Bullring probably have no idea that there’s a small, well-appointed world tucked away nearby, hidden behind a couple of waving trees in the corners of the grounds. It’s called, as the green sign on the handsome wood paneling out front lets you know, Le Village.

Who lives in Le Village? You can get a decent idea from the man who’s standing at the top of the steps at the entrance, behind the two female ushers who check to make sure you have the proper papers to enter. He has spiky hair, is wearing a silver blazer and skinny jeans, and has a cell phone pressed to his ear. This is a village, and a place for business.

The interior is designed less like a town than a wooden ocean liner. Its cabins are fronted by hostesses in blue dresses and populated by executives and friends and wives and children, hanging out, watching tennis, making pitches, sipping drinks, eating what snacks or delicacies are provided at the moment.

One of these sponsors is Babolat, the venerable French string company that has transformed itself in the last decade into the most high-profile equipment manufacturer in tennis. After inventing and making gut strings for a century, it got into racquets two decades ago. The company’s idea of putting as many of its sticks as it could into the hands of influential juniors paid dividends. One of those young players was Andy Roddick, another was Kim Clijsters, and a third was Carlos Moya. It was the latter who proved most crucial, because a younger friend of Moya’s named Rafael Nadal saw him using it and wanted to try it himself. The rest is racquet history.

Babolat keeps a fairly low profile, logo-wise, at Roland Garros. There are shops that stock its products, but little signage with its name or colors. Like Nike with tennis clothes, the company uses its endorsers as billboards—seeing Nadal and Tsonga swing their Babolats on the giant screens around the grounds is advertising enough. The company also does all the stringing for the players here, in an indoor area that’s open to fans. You can come and see a player’s racquet strung by his or her personal stringer, while the tension and string type flashes on a TV monitor above. (I find myself imagining, during the finals, just two stringers left in the place, staring each other down from across the room.)

Otherwise, the firms’ executives, including Eric Babolat—his great-great-grandfather, Pierre, started the company in Lyon, where it’s still based, in 1875—spend much of their time in Le Village. That includes Gael Moureaux, a product manager who is helping spearhead Babolat’s big initiative for the future, Play & Connect. The concept, as Moureaux describes it, is both futuristic and seemingly inevitable: Sensors are placed in the racquet handle that can read the location and vibrations of the ball off the strings; a USB port is installed underneath the butt cap, which connects to a computer that reads the information from the sensors.

From that you get a readout of your game. Power, spin, where you tend to hit the ball on the strings, and your consistency—how closely one shot resembles the next—are measured and charted. The latter could be of particular interest, considering that there’s never been a numerical measurement, the way there is for power, of how well you replicate your swing over a period of time.

“We want to give players and their coaches as much data as we can about how you really play,” Moureaux says. “The key for us is to make it useful for players of all levels, from pros to beginners, to give everyone a more concrete assessment of their games.”

The idea has been in air at Babolat for a decade, and five years were spent creating sensors that could read a tennis shot.

“We had to ask, ‘What is a slice, and what is topspin?’ Moureaux says, “and teach the sensor to recognize it. That was the most difficult and interesting thing.”

The technology is still being worked out and tested, and is scheduled to debut in 2013, though Babolat staged an event in Court Suzanne Lenglen the week before this year's French Open where Nadal, Tsonga, and Clijsters tried it out—I’m hoping Rafa scored OK on consistency, or we’re all in trouble.

The ultimate goal, as the Play & Connect name suggests, is to build a worldwide community of Babolat players who can share and compare data and advice on their games. It sounds like a natural development—as long as people continue to like playing with the company’s racquets in the first place (there’s no outward difference between a sensor-enabled frame and a normal one).

Moureaux thinks P & C can change the sport. "With this players will know exactly how they compare with other players all over the world,” he says. “You’ll be able to work together, to rank yourself in terms of power and consistency and see where you can improve.”

Knowing exactly how good, or bad, you are, in cold hard stats, with no place for illusion, no chance to give yourself a nudge up, the way you can with the NTRP? I’m glad Babolat is waiting a year to tell us. The idea might take some getting used to.