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Building and maintaining the tennis venue at Wimbledon is expensive, so starting in the 1920s, the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club sold bonds to investors. But buyers don’t get money; they get tickets. They can sell these tickets freely on an open market and thus earn a profit:
The club has issued these since the 1920s to finance development. But instead of paying cash coupons, like regular bonds, Wimbledon debentures pay interest in something much more valuable: tickets.
Holders get one ticket for each day of the Wimbledon tournaments during the five-year life of the bond. And here is the kicker: If you don’t feel like going on any given day, you can sell it—legally.
“They’re the only tickets that are freely tradable on the open market,” says All England Finance Director Richard Atkinson. “You are free to sell them to anyone you like.”
Link -via Marginal Revolution | Photo by Flickr user acme used under Creative Commons license
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Diving for a ball could be deadly at the world’s highest tennis court atop the Burj Al Arab hotel in Dubai. The hotel’s helipad, 650 feet in the air, was converted to a special court for Andre Agassi and Roger Federer to play a match on in 2005. It’s terrifying. The Burj Al Arab is the fourth-tallest hotel in the world (the three that rank above it are also in Dubai).
Link via Laughing Squid
Tiny Table Tennis – $9.95
Do you have the back to work blues? Keep the holiday weekend party going with the Tiny Table Tennis set from the NeatoShop. Grab a coworker or play by yourself. This miniature ping pong set is the perfect addition to any cluttered desk.
Be sure to check out the NeatoShop for more Office & Desk fun!
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Researchers have found that it may be advantageous for tennis players to grunt as they swing because the grunt may confuse opposing players about in which direction the ball is moving:
For those clips that included a grunt, respondents had a slower response and were less accurate about the location of the forthcoming shot. The authors, while concluding that future on-court study needs to be conducted, posit one possible explanation, that “the interfering auditory stimulus masks the sound of the ball being struck by the racket or it distracts an opponent’s attention away from the sound of the ball.”
Link | Photo by Flickr user Adam Baker used under Creative Commons license
Yesterday, US player John Isner won the longest tennis match in history by defeating Nicolas Mahut by 70-68 in a final set at Wimbledon. The competition lasted more than eleven hours spread over three days:
Picking up at 59-59 in the fifth set Thursday, the match continued on serve with no break points until the American hit a backhand passing shot to finish the contest in front of a packed crowd on Court 18.
You can watch the winning play at 20 seconds into the video.
Link via The Presurfer
Sony Ericsson hosted a promotional tennis tournament that was bathed in ultraviolet light in order to recreate the atmosphere of the movie Tron. It’s far more scenic than the Medieval version.
via DVICE
This week marks the 25th anniversary of an historic tennis match. At a Virginia Slims tournament in 1984, Vicki Nelson and Jean Hepner exchanged 643 shots; it remains the longest single rally in the history of professional tennis.
The 6-hour-31-minute marathon was itself the longest match in tennis history for nearly 20 years and remains the longest match completed on a single day.
The rally that put Nelson-Dunbar and Hepner in the record books came at set point for Hepner, who was ahead, 11-10, in the second-set tie breaker, which lasted 1:47 on its own…
Hugh Waters, a former tennis coach and the owner of the Raintree club, remembered: “I had a lot of people coming up to me at the tournament saying the match was ridiculous, but I always jumped on them. It takes guts to do what they did. “People don’t understand the mental aspect of the game: this was a battle of wills and real tennis fans like me could appreciate it.”
Among the astonishing elements to the match was this: If Hepner had won the epic rally, she would have forced a third set, and who knows how long the match might have lasted.
Link, via Metafilter.
Photo: Jean Hepner (L) in 1985 and Vicki Nelson Dunbar (R) in 1987.
The American tennis player Andy Roddick puts some weight behind his serve.
According to the video comments over at YouTube, this clip has been used for a Powerade commercial but someone also points out that “it happened in front of a stadium full of people, it’s not fake”.
