Washington: Before each serve on the ATP and WTA tours comes a weighty choice. Three balls sit in a pyramid on a player’s racket, or two ball boys offer two balls each.
To the untrained eye, those balls don’t seem to differ - at least not enough to merit the long seconds of consideration given them as choosy players examine them thoroughly point after point.
But professional players know better. A given point affects a given match, which affects a season, which can affect their careers. Their fates lie in those balls and the outcomes of the points they endure.
Some players choose better than others, or so say their serve percentages, but standard criteria seem unlikely to develop: Superstition and ritual often outweigh logic in such crucial selections.
American Donald Young, for example, doesn’t know which of the three balls he’s handed before a service game will serve him best, but instinct has warned him for about a year now it won’t be the ball on the right. So he keeps the ball on the left, keeps the ball on the top, and knocks the ball on the right back to the ball kid.
“I don’t know why,” Young said. “It’s just a ritual, I guess.”
Svetlana Kuznetsova, on the other hand, knows it’s silly to believe how a ball’s handed to you has anything to do with the outcome of a serve. She knows it’s all about where it’s handed to you.
When she receives a ball from a spot behind the baseline, and that ball performs well, Kuznetsova returns to that spot again and again. The ball kids on one side of the court are reduced to spectators.
“I don’t know why,” Kuznetsova said. “But I’ve been doing it a while.”
Richard Gasquet knows there’s only one right ball. Once it presents itself by winning a point, he has no choice but to use it again. At one point during his Citi Open semifinal, the match stalled momentarily while the Frenchman requested a fan hand a would-be souvenir back to him: He’d won with it the point before.
“I keep the same ball when I’m winning the point,” Gasquet said. “Everybody knows that about me, I’m always doing the same.”
Gasquet’s not alone in sticking to a winning ball, so the ball kids have a system: They’ll hold the ball used in the most recent point down with one arm, and another ball up in the air with the other.
Devoid of such trust in a proven winner, other players rely on physics to choose. The smoother a ball, the faster it will travel, so many players seek out balls with less “fluff,” or puff on the felt covering, to reduce drag on shots. The more fluff, the more air resistance, which slows it but increases spin.
“I like to serve my first serve with a ball that’s less fluffy, that way it will go faster,” Marina Erakovic said. “My second serve, I like to get a little more spin on it, and if it’s fluffier it will grab more. So I like to take a fluffy ball, a less fluffy ball, and the third one I throw out.”
For one of the game’s most feared servers, No. 6 Milos Raonic, spin is less relevant than pure power.
“I look for the smallest balls that will go the fastest,” Raonic said at the Citi Open in July.
Tournaments sign sponsorship deals with ball companies, so the brand of ball can vary from week to week. But are some balls really smaller than others?
“There would be no variation in the size of the ball,” said Jeff Ratkovich, the senior manager of Penn tennis balls. “Players are creatures of habit to the ultimate, and see things, they’re so keenly aware of things - almost beyond what’s really there.”
What’s really there is a hollow rubber sphere 6.7 centimeters in diameter pressurized to about 12 PSI above pressure at sea level. That’s why tennis ball cans pop when you open them: They’re pressurized like the balls they’re meant to keep fresh.
As balls smash against the ground, the side that makes contact with the court is pushed inward. The pressure pushes it back out and propels the ball off the court. The more you use a ball, the less pressurized it gets.
USTA and ITF rules say a regulation ball is one that bounces between 53 and 58 inches when dropped from a height of 100 inches. If you drop your tennis ball from your head and it bounces to your belly button, it’s good to go.
Balls are covered with a layer of felt, whose durability is determined by the surface on which the ball will be used. Hard-court balls tend to have extra-duty (heavier) felt to withstand the abrasive courts, though women at Citi Open played with regular duty Penn balls because they travel faster. In order to keep up ball pressure and reduce the effect of wear, ATP and WTA tournament balls are changed out seven games after warmups, then every nine games after that.
While a ball can wear and change throughout a match, the blueprint for the ball itself hasn’t changed much over the past few decades, according to Ratkovich. Perhaps the most noticeable change in the once-white tennis ball came in 1972: the shift to the now ubiquitous “optic yellow” color .
Studies have shown the optimal color for a tennis ball would be orange, which is most visible to the player’s eye on all surfaces and against most backgrounds. But orange balls don’t show up well on television, so when the game was growing in popularity in the early 70s, the ITF approved the second-most visible color - “optic yellow” - for use in tournament play.
Before the color change, the switch to a hollow rubber inside after the invention of vulcanization in the late 1880s was the most significant renovation to the tennis ball since the late 15th century. In the late 1400s, an ornery Louis XI removed all fun from the early iteration of the game when he decreed tennis balls be covered in “good leather” and could no longer be filled with such base substances as chalk, soil, or sawdust. Sometimes human hair from local barbershops was used to fill the tennis balls, instead - a practice that has since been abandoned, and is not currently being considered for revival by the ITF.
The U.S. Open will use sawdust-free Wilson balls this year, and has since 1978. Rotkovich says the difference between the most prevalent tennis ball brands is minimal, but there will be a difference between the Penn balls used elsewhere on the U.S. Open Series hardcourts and the Wilsons in play at Flushing Meadows.
“They’re made in two different factories, they’re actually made in different countries,” Ratkovich said. “They don’t share their recipe with us, and we don’t share our recipe with them. . .What we equate it to is baking a cake in one country and baking a cake in another. Even though you have the same ingredients, they’re just going to taste a little bit different.”
You may not notice the difference, but the players will, and they’ll choose their service balls accordingly. After all, a Grand Slam title may depend on the decision.