Marcos baghdatis breaks rackets and runners
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According to the oh-so-serious ATP, Safinator has broken 1055 frames throughout his career. It is fairly common to see golfers breaking their clubs on their knees or throwing them away like a boomerang, and baseball players frequently break their bats on their knees.
Why Is Breaking Rackets Not Allowed?
In tennis, breaking rackets is considered to be unsportsmanlike conduct.
A moment of stress relief turning into performance anxiety? For the most part, players do a good job keeping it cool – until they don’t. To avoid this, Tursunov explains how to do it successfully: "I think it's better if you don't throw it. The incident wasn’t bad for everyone, however. But, to believe the equipment manufacturers, they could do without these slow zooms on their damaged products.
When I started, it seems that I only had the fragile kind (laughs)."An observation surely shared by Messrs McEnroe and Safin.
By Robin Delorme
Smashing rackets is a common way for players to vent their fury.
You feel the vibration and the strength in your arm." A solid analysis, born of experience, which is shared by Benoit Paire: "I used all possible techniques to break rackets. As confided by Rafael Nadal, "If I miss a shot, it's my fault and not that of an object." A reflection that the Frenchman endorses: "I used to be very temperamental but as I’ve grown I've tried to calm down.
After losing his second game, 26-year-old Baghdatis sat down, flung a towel over his head, and battered his racket into oblivion on the floor. We did some research on rackets meeting their maker…
John McEnroe gave it its letters of nobility, Marat Safin codified it, Marcos Baghdatis made his a star on YouTube...
But, after a while, I was breaking so many rackets that it stopped working." So whether you have a suave character or are a bit more nervous, the result differs.
Smash rather than throw
Especially if you don't train.
Nowadays, you don't go to a tournament without expecting to see at least one good meltdown resulting in a hasty reconfiguration of strings and graphite which adds a palpable air of violence and drama to the proceedings. At first it felt good, it released tension.
We have written a full article that breaks down all the fines associated with it (you can check it out in here), but in essence ATP players can be fined up to $500 per occurrence while WTA players can be fined up to $2,500 per racket they break.
Players don’t need to actually break the racket in order to be fined. Often soiled, sometimes mistreated, occasionally destroyed, it serves as a scapegoat for players lacking in confidence.
With an elaborated flick of his wrist, he used to break his racket with his own thigh:
On another level altogether, the Cypriot Marcos Baghdatis could smash four rackets in 25 seconds:
In short, according to these multiple examples, "when you want to break a racket, you're so upset that your strength increases tenfold and it becomes difficult to stop you" according to Paire.
“Racket constitution doesn’t change”
The various evolutions in racket hardware also explain why this "trend" entered tennis playing customs.
We see it with our after-sales service where return rates declined in recent years. When that happens, the natural reaction is to let the anger out on whatever you have on your hands – most times it ends up being either the racket or the ball.
This is somewhat of a “natural” reaction, and you can see it in other sports in which players have equipment in their hands.
They say that sometimes releasing all the pent up anger can finally allow the player to relax and start playing better.
Worst Racket Breakers
Tennis has seen some notorious racket-smashers throughout history.