Oversize Tennis Racquet: Interesting Facts
Andre Agassi loved to play with an oversize tennis racquet right the way throughout his career. It was the Prince Oversize racquet that started him off, and when he changed racquet sponsors they would emulate as best they could the original Prince OS.
This is sort of thing is nothing new and in fact is just history repeating itself.
Many years ago in the era of Rod Laver and Lou Hoad, all players grew up with either the Dunlop Maxply Fort or the Slazenger Challenge No.1. Rod Laver was one of the first to use his name to make a bit of money. He changed from using a Dunlop Maxply Fort to a Donnay racquet. Most people recognise Donnay as the racquet of Bjorn Borg, but don’t realise that Rod Laver also helped to make the Belgium company famous.
When Laver first made the switch, Donnay took the Maxply Fort and painted it white and put the Donnay branding in red lettering all over it. The funny thing was that he actually was using a Dunlop racquet!
In those days Donnay used to produce most of the world’s racquets under license – they were a huge company. However, once the big headed racquets started to become popular, the ski companies started take market share.
The first use of graphite was in the use of skis and so they applied their experience to get ahead of the competition.
These days, the Austrian company Head is recognised the world over as a big player in racquet manufacture but it’s origin is in skis. The Head logo is actually the end of a ski with a hole in the middle to let the build up of snow shoot through. Most people don’t realise that they have a picture of a ski painted on their racquet.
