Then Zing Go The Strings

Later that day, about the time Lendl was advancing to the semifinals in Vienna on one string job and a prayer. Bosworth drove a short distance from his home in suburban Hartford to his studio, a spacious, windowless chamber in the rear of a modern brick warehouse he shares with a distributor of power-plant parts. There, surrounded by an array of precision tools and exotic machinery that suggests the laboratory of a space-age Dr. Frankenstein, he set to work.

First, from a honeycomb of cubicles covering one wall and filled with string-less rackets, Bosworth selected a dozen Adidas GTX graphite frames from the compartment marked LENDL. Next, after consulting the detailed specifications he keeps on file for each of his clients and working with one racket at a time, he stripped off the leather grip and placed the frame on a set of ultrasensitive scales and balance bars. When extra weight was required to achieve the heft and balance he and Lendl had previously determined was best for Lendl's game, Bosworth added strips of lead tape to the racket at strategic points. When a reduction was needed, he drilled minuscule holes in the butt of the handle, carefully giving and taking until the racket weighed precisely 371.5 grams and its balance point was exactly 321.0 mm from the butt cap.

Then Bosworth measured the handle with a dial caliper and used a sanding block to shape the handle to the octagonal dimensions Lendl prefers. With a dial gauge, he checked the width and uniformity of the leather grip and deftly wrapped it around the handle, securing the beveled calfskin with contact cement and black finishing tape.

That done, Bosworth clamped the frame into a stringing machine of his own design, a massive device not unlike a medieval torture rack in appearance. Next he scrutinized the string holes with an otoscope, the illuminated magnifying probe used by ear doctors, checking grommets and replacing any that had hairline cracks. Then he plugged a frequency analyzer into his tape recorder and played Lendl's Viennese waltz, a refrain Bosworth more accurately likened to the "clanging of a San Francisco trolley car." By converting the reading on the analyzer's meter into pounds of tension, he determined that the level Lendl felt was a "leetle loose" could best be remedied by setting the stringing machine for 72 pounds.

No sweat so far, if only because the temperature in the studio is fixed at 62° to preserve the resiliency of the $10,000 worth of gut stored in an airtight cabinet designed for surgical instruments. Bosworth withdrew a 34-foot strand of 16-gauge beef gut and measured it with a micrometer to make certain it was uniformly 50 thousandths of an inch in diameter. Then, waxing the gut and threading it through snippets of protective plastic tubing at the various pressure points on the rim, he strung the frame. Next, he meticulously straightened the strings. Finally, he stenciled the Adidas trileaf emblem on the strings with spray paint, cleaned and buffed the racket with a toothbrush and polishing cloth, chalked the number 72 on the butt cap, encased the grip in a sandwich wrapper, slipped the finished product into a cushioned plastic bag and placed it in an insulated shipping carton. Each racket required some 90 minutes to customize. Bosworth completed the job, and then, because he is a perfectionist who prides himself on being able to prepare and deliver a set of rackets to a player anywhere in the world in about 24 hours, he immediately drove his Cadillac De Ville sedan with the license plates BOZ 1 to Hartford's Bradley Field, where he had the carton airfreighted to JFK Airport in New York and then put aboard a Lufthansa flight bound for Cologne. Finally, Bosworth phoned Cologne and arranged for a member of the tournament committee there to meet the flight, escort the carton through customs and deliver it to Lendl's hotel. Thus, when Lendl arrived in Cologne on Monday, fresh from a win in the finals in Vienna, Bosworth's gift-wrapped reinforcements were awaiting him in his hotel room.

"Varren is a vizard," says Lendl. "I don't know how he does it."

The Wizard of Boz the players call him, and no one values his legerdemain more than Lendl. Indeed, he dates the origins of his most successful streak—which included a 45-match run of wins that began shortly before the Vienna crisis and extended into 1982, a year in which he won 121 of 129 matches, 20 tournaments and a record $1.9 million—to the introduction of Bosworth-strung rackets to his arsenal. But for all Bosworth's attention to the matériel side of the game, an important part of what he does, as Solomon avows, is give his players a "huge psychological advantage." Call it the assurance that comes with uniformity. Fact is, the piles of tennis rackets that are stamped from molds and rolled off assembly lines like so many overpriced rug beaters are less than precision instruments. No pro worth his endorsement contract would dare play with his autograph model without first having it customized in some way.

"Among other pluses," says Mayer, "Warren saves you the trouble of having to go to the racket factory and pick through 200 frames before you can find five that are the right weight and balance for you." Using tournament stringers is another kind of crapshoot. Says Gottfried, "Sometimes I got back rackets with strings that meandered like rivers or were so dead I couldn't even play with them. And no two stringers or stringing machines are the same. You can have five rackets all strung at the same tension, and none of them will come out the same."

Connors agrees. "I play with the smallest head in the game," he says of the Wilson T2000, a tubular steel curiosity which, in the era of the oversized racket, does indeed seem as small and whippy as a fly swatter. It's so volatile, says Connors, "I could never play with a racket off the shelf." To compensate for the variances, he has, in effect, developed his own racket customizing system. Going "mostly by feel," he adds as much as 40 grams of lead tape to the head of his racket to stabilize its weight—and his nervous system. "The T2000 is like an extension of my arm," says Connors, "and Warren with his stringing helps to add a little muscle."

Given the fact that a top pro goes through 100 frames and as many as 400 string jobs and grip changes a year, the chances that he'll end up with a clinker in his bag are disconcertingly high. "Before Varren," says Lendl, "I had to get my rackets strung three or four times during a tournament before I got the right touch. I spent all this time and money running around, and even then I was always worrying, if I broke a string, that the racket I picked up would not be the same. Now I don't even look at the rackets before a match. That helps my confidence and concentration."