Two of my favorite pioneer models were the Wilson T2000 and the Head Arthur Ashe Competition series. They were the prototypes, experiments that would show the way for the upcoming generations. The T2000 was, in reality, a catapult; with very little control. You needed Jimmy Connors’ flat strokes in order to make the ball land where you wanted. And with a tiny 68-square-inch head, you could forget about imparting any kind of effect on the ball. The Ashe Competitions were also too flexible (although an improvement over the T2000) but the road towards stiffer racquets was clear. However, what the early lacked in control they made up in beauty. The T2000 was bizarre, odd looking, almost medieval (and slightly sinister) in its shiny steel and wire construction. The Ashes were beautiful in their colors, being sold in a polished aluminum top layer or a separate version with hues of copper.

From these on, cosmetics were essential to the selling success of any racquet.

Head and Donnay went miles ahead of everybody when they introduced the Head Vilas (1978) and the Donnay Borg Pro (1980). Although still made of wood (the Vilas had a shiny graphite layer on its face) these two racquets donned beautiful black cosmetics with stripes of red, and were significant departures from the wooden look of the classics mentioned above.

At the same time, people had stopped laughing at the Prince Classic Oversize, made in dull aluminum with a green plastic throat, and started looking at the Prince Pro. In black and gold, the look of the racquet (and the new technology, which made it stiff enough for pros to use it) made it an instant hit.

Head, not to be outdone, moved on from the Vilas wood/graphite model and produced the first full graphite models. The frame shape of these was and is one of the most beautiful ever. The Graphite Edge midsize series is still around, morphed into the Radical and Prestige series. The proportions of the head measured against the overall length made it an appealing design, plus by now the technology had moved so far ahead that wood was dead. The last wood-based racquet I can recall was the Le Coq Sportif used by Noah to win the 1983 French Open. It was a forgettable racquet, in a dull gray that did nothing to make the racquet appealing.

Wilson begat two outstanding racquets in the 1980s: the gorgeous Wilson Ultra, the first braided graphite racquet, and, in 1983, the ProStaff series. The 85-square-inch head size (evolved from the oversize) perhaps can be called the most successful racquet of the modern era. Connors was used as the flagship to introduce it, but he never won a Grand Slam with it (more due to his age than to the racquet). Chris Evert, Stefan Edberg, Jim Courier, Pete Sampras and Mary Pierce did win majors using the Pro Staff 85, and Roger Federer began his career with it (switching to other ProStaff-based models on his way to greatness). The proportions were again a thing of beauty, but the industry was still clinging to the Black – with – Some – Color – Stripes theme. Another great-looking and very successful racquet, the Dunlop Max200G, was a super powerful stick that, in the hands of John McEnroe and Steffi Graf proved to be lethal. Still, it was almost all black, with green and gold stripes replacing the usual red cosmetics that complimented the Wilsons and Heads.

Two companies really went ahead in introducing color to racquet design. Donnay broke from the beaten path when they signed neon-clad Andre Agassi and used his name on a series of colorful racquets. Yellow and red were two that he used, and after years of wielding a Prince with little Grand Slam success, Agassi won Wimbledon with a fiery Red Donnay. The other company was European-known Kneissl (manufacturer of skis), which introduced an egg-shaped head racquet (on the logic that 80 percent of the balls were hit with the lower half of the head) in pastel colors. They also changed the cross section of the frame, making it more aerodynamic. The series was called the Aero, beating Babolat to the name by more than a decade.

Yonex experimented with the “square” head models (more rounded corners than truly square, but you get the point). It produced classics: the R22 and R27, the first one being the instrument of choice for Martina Navratilova when she torched the tour during the early 1980s. Yonex still uses variations of this head shape, and to great success.

By now, it is almost impossible to find an all-black racquet. Certainly there have been aesthetic disasters along the way: Mats Wilander’s Rossignol F200 and its inverted throat, the Prince Mono (Connors used it for a while, trying to return to the trampoline of his beloved T2000) and the 10-sided Bosworth designs. But any trip to the local tennis shop is guaranteed to allow you to see art hanging from a wall as if you were in a museum. Now color is the mode of choice, shapes are varied and any motif that can be thought of is there.

Tools of beauty, indeed. If only the designs really helped me hit that sharp volley I need so much…