TennisWeek 2-05-07

Forbes' Experiment
Photo By Getty Images	By Richard Evans 05/02/2007 With some justification, the strange exhibition being held in Mallorca tomorrow between Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal that involves a match in which one end of the court is clay and the other grass is being touted as something that has never been tried before.
That may be true but something quite similar was going was going behind closed doors at the former headquarters of Greenset, the indoor court manufacturers, near Versailles outside Paris in the late eighties. Tests were taking place to try and find the optimum speed and bounce for the next generation of Greenset courts and the man doing much of the testing was Gordon Forbes, the former South African Davis Cup player and acclaimed author whose reminiscences of the French Open will appear in the next issue of Tennis Week. Forbes and his partner Lee Frankel owned Greenset at the time and much depended on getting it right. So Forbes had strips of carpet as well as the quick-drying liquid mix that made up some of their courts laid out in quarters over one court. Each quarter offered a completely different speed and bounce. I hit with him one afternoon and it made the scary experience of playing with someone of Forbes’ caliber even scarier. Some serves gripped; others sped through. Waist shots on the forehand; head high on the backhand. After hours of this, we needed a very good bottle of wine over dinner to re-capture some level of sanity. It will be interesting to see what state Federer and Nadal are in after their little joust.