Have Tennis Balls Gotten Worse?
I'm admittedly new to tennis. But I'd be lying if I said I didn't have opinions on different brands of tennis balls.
We've settled into being a "Dunlop household," favoring the brand's ATP Championship Extra Duty (fitting since it's the tournament ball for the Australian Open which starts today). Before that, we'd preferred Wilson's U.S. Open Extra Duty. We leveled up to the U.S. Open from Wilson's Championship Extra Duties. We bought a goo-gob of Penn Extra Duties because they were so affordable, but fresh out of the can, we felt they lacked a certain pop and bounce; now they've been relegated to my piss-poor serving practice.
It's with this rank amateur's experience that I read this exploration of the question from Defector.
Giri Nathan
It's an interesting piece that entertains complaints from various players, but most relevantly, it contains a fairly frank and revealing interview with a marketing vice president at Penn. He doesn't shy away from the reality that the pandemic's disruptions definitely contributed to some quality issues (though he says they've since been squared away), and he posits a handful of other potential issues that might account for some of the players' complaints that, he thinks, are being unfairly placed on the ball.
The question doesn't get a definitive answer, but the piece explores a lot of ground before coming to the conclusion that perhaps the very act of asking "Have the balls gotten worse?" put the idea in the heads of players who already tend toward neuroses when it comes to what could be negatively affecting their games.
More generally: Do you know how balls are actually made? I didn't until I read this:
To create a tennis ball, two separate rubber ball halves are filled with compressed air and fused under high temperature with a heat-activated glue. The resulting rubber sphere is abraded, then coated in a different glue, then wrapped in flaps of that yellow-green felt covering. A third glue, applied to the edges of the felt, forms the white seams we see on the surface of the ball.
After reading it, I went looking for what the process actually looks like. It's oddly satisfying to watch, and it's wild to think this factory churns out these balls 24 hours a day.