Taken from Nick Paumgarten's article "Levels of the Game":
"People often speak of a 'heavy ball.' It is not a technical term. Recently, however, John Yandell, a tennis teacher in San Francisco, came up with a way to quantify heaviness. Yandell runs the Advanced Tennis Research Project, an outfit that uses high-speed film to analyze the strokes of the world's top players. ATRP has been able to measure the spin on a ball in terms of revolutions per minute. As expected, the biggest spin hitters tend to be the clay-court specialists, the players with a more modern, Western grip. The biggest of all, on average, was the now-retired Spaniard Sergi Brugera. Federer plays with a more classic grip, which gives him both variety and velocity, yet he can generate more spin than most of the spin hitters. Velocity plus spin equals weight. The heaviest ball Yandell and his team have ever recorded was a forehand that Federer hit at Indian Wells in 2004: 4,400 rpm, 80 miles an hour. Thwock."
Wow.
"People often speak of a 'heavy ball.' It is not a technical term. Recently, however, John Yandell, a tennis teacher in San Francisco, came up with a way to quantify heaviness. Yandell runs the Advanced Tennis Research Project, an outfit that uses high-speed film to analyze the strokes of the world's top players. ATRP has been able to measure the spin on a ball in terms of revolutions per minute. As expected, the biggest spin hitters tend to be the clay-court specialists, the players with a more modern, Western grip. The biggest of all, on average, was the now-retired Spaniard Sergi Brugera. Federer plays with a more classic grip, which gives him both variety and velocity, yet he can generate more spin than most of the spin hitters. Velocity plus spin equals weight. The heaviest ball Yandell and his team have ever recorded was a forehand that Federer hit at Indian Wells in 2004: 4,400 rpm, 80 miles an hour. Thwock."
Wow.
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