Note:
If you decide not to read all the
text below, please scroll past the text and take a look at all of the
photos.
There's not a
lot of information to be found about this Prince racquet (nicknamed "God's
Racquet" or "The God Racquet" by many). So, we've decided to put
together a small page of tribute to it, thus acknowledging the God racquet's
status as somewhat of a cult item among racquet collectors and enthusiasts.
The God
racquet was apparently made as a promotional prop and used as part of a
commercial ad in roughly 1994 for Prince tennis racquets. It
apparently ran in conjunction with the US Open tennis tournament that year.
The commercial is said to have featured God in a grueling tennis match in
which he used this racquet. The general idea was that God could use
any racquet. One of our friends on the Tennis Warehouse forums
remembers the commercials as being for the Prince Extender series of
racquets and that the commercial message embodied in the racquet was
something to this effect: "If you had all the power, speed, and accuracy in
the world, all you'd need is this racquet. For everyone else, there's
the Prince Extender."
Interestingly
enough, it seems that the CBS network refused to run the commercial based on
it being inappropriate to use God to sell tennis racquets, and because
viewers and affiliates might be offended by the concept. CBS was
generous enough to suggest that if Prince were to change the character of
God to an angel or a wizard they would run the ad. Prince officials
responded that if such changes were made, the tongue-in-cheek commercial
would lose its ability to come across with the intended level of humor.
The USA Network, which also covered the US Open that year (and whose
executives apparently understand the concept of humor), allowed the
commercial to run, so it did get some network air time.
Along with
the commercial ads, there were apparently a certain number of the
promotional racquets made and distributed to vendors in various locations.
Below are
comparison photos of the God Racquet next to other racquets in our
collection,
as well as many photos taken of the God Racquet alone, from various angles.
Click Any Photo to
View Larger Version
For anyone
interested, there
are a couple of short videos of players using the God racquet on the Tennis
Pod Pro Videos site:
Tennis Pod Pro Videos
If you have
feedback, questions, or comments about the content of the pages on the
photostringer.com website, please
e-mail
Al Ruscelli
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