Interview with Peter Lehrner, Part II: "I even covered it with 40 kilos"
For over 45 years Peter Lehrner has strung rackets for the best tennis players in the world. In the second part of the interview with tennisnet.com, the former professional player talks about the advantages of hybrid strings and explains why Thomas Muster's 39 kilograms of string weight was actually not that much.
by Michael Rothschädl
last edit: Jun 22, 2021, 09:53 am
Here you come to the first part of the interview with Peter Lehrner!
Mr. Lehrner, in your tens of years of club tuning experience you have of course also got to know many different materials. The majority of tennis professionals have trusted Hybrid for a number of years. Are these the non-plus-ultra of tennis strings?
That depends very much on the individuality of the players. So if you take the players who really only play topspin, whose main focus is on the spin, they don't play hybrid. For example, Nadal (Rafael's note) and Dominic (Thiem's note), they don't play a hybrid. It is important to them that they can play the spin optimally and retain maximum control. And since, of course, they only play a few games with their covering, which you should never forget, the covering remains in the consistency that it just slips back, so the snapback effect remains.
A string bed forms on the stringing in the rackets, which is not rubbed in after stringing, but only pressed in. However, through playing, through the extreme spin, the high speed and the extreme speed of wiping over it, there is strong friction and therefore great heat. And this heat ensures that the strings notch and once the strings notch they don't slide back as well. This is exactly the reason why the players take a new string for new balls because the string is simply broken. Applied to the hobby player, this is only the case after one or two months. This non-notching is best with the hybrid string when mixed with a natural gut string. This means that players like Djokovic, Federer or Nishikori, who play a mixture of straight play and spin, all play natural casings with - mostly - mixed with Luxilon, or with the string from Babolat. The natural gut string is mostly played lengthways and the smooth monofilament string across, so that this slipping back works optimally.
Because I've won Wimbledon!
Andre Agassi to Peter Lehrner
Some then play it the other way around in order to have more control. They play the monofilament string lengthways and the gut string across. The snapback effect doesn't work that well, but it still increases the elasticity. Personally, I saw an intestinal-art mixture for the first time at the Agassi (note: Andre Agassi) in 1994, when he was in the town hall, where I was allowed to make his clubs. He played a completely stiff kevlar string lengthways and a thick Babolat natural gut string across, and his Head Radical OS had 20 main strings back then, two more than normal, that was like a board. He used the gut string to make it a bit elastic. Because Kevlar strings actually have no elasticity and stretch coefficients at all, that's just stiff. The stringing machines sometimes fail to string it, if you have a mechanism in which the string is stretched and measured whether the stretch has been reached. But Agassi played it that way and I asked him once why he played it that way, because it was really unique. He just meant: “Because I've won Wimbledon.” When he switched to Luxilon at some point, he suddenly won Australia (Australian Open).
In the past it was really tough when you think of Thomas Muster and Tommy Haas who supposedly weighed up to 39 kilos. You were Thomas Muster's service man - if anyone needs to know, it's you.
I met Tom (note: Thomas Muster) in 1986 as a young player. Ronny (Ronald Leitgeb, Manager of Muster) came up to me at the time and said they needed a service man because he needed so many clothing and whether I could not help. At that time he only played natural casings on the prestige racket and at some point Isospeed tennis strings came along. At that time, Isosport signed both Alex (note: Alexander Antonitsch), Skoff (note: Horst Soff) and Tom (note: Thomas Muster). The only one who couldn't cope with it was Alex, because he just couldn't take it, he always wanted to play gut because it was a little more emotional. But Tom then played with this string because his top spin worked very well with it.
He should be playing with it within six hours
The peculiarities of the string by Thomas Muster
The problem with this isospeed string, however, was that it lost around 20% percent of its weight within five or six hours. That means you had to string them and play them right away. In the end, when I was there, I strung the rackets with 38 kilos. Then the clubs had to be ready for the match two hours before he started playing. And within six hours he was supposed to play with it, because before it was a little too hard for him, but afterwards it was too soft for him. So when I was there, he was actually playing at 33 or 34 kilos, but that was only because this string lost the stiffness that he needed for control so quickly. For Babsi Paulus, who played the same string, the rackets had to be strung two days before she played because she had waited for the string to decay so as not to feel any change in weight during the match.
The Sampras, for example, in his Pro Staff, which was smaller in area, strung with a thin 1.20 natural gut string weighing 33 kilos. That was actually almost harder than Tom's. And a certain Björn Borg also strung 30 kilos in his wooden clubs. There are also the famous stories that Bergelin (note: Lennart Bergelin, coach of Björn Borg) woke up again and again during the night because there was a terrible bang, because the strings in the small wooden racket broke without any action. It's like a shot.
In other words, the string tension used to be significantly higher than it is today due to the multifilament and gut strings. Of course, this has to do with this deterioration of the strings. When I stringed the rackets for Tom in Südstadt and we sent them on to him on the plane because the stringing machines at the tournaments were a disaster at the time and no one on site could string these 38, 39 kilos, I even got 40 Kilos strung, so they were still harder than the strings he would have got on site.
Of course, everything then had to go very quickly until the bat got to him.
It used to be the case that he could not be considerate of coming into this window for two to six hours. Ronny called me and I stringed ten rackets that one of the journalists or an AUA pilot friend took with me. Or once in Madrid for the final he calls me on Saturday afternoon that the final is on Sunday and he still needs five clubs and if I want, I can fly with them. So I flew to Madrid with five clubs in my luggage. That was cool, of course.
But as I said, the hardness had to do with the fact that he played an extremely heavy racket. Because the high mass of the racket he was playing needed a really hard string so that it didn't get too fast energetically. Because if a racket with a swing weight of 365 is pulled through to the full, you quickly lose control with a string that is too soft, so there are a lot of parameters that have to fit together. That’s why all the clubs that I have been given and have been able to measure at tournaments since 1990 are different. I have never seen two players play the same thing in terms of club model, club weight, club balance, swing weight, grip strength, stringing, and stringing hardness. Everyone plays their own set-up.
The racket must of course be tailored precisely to the game of the respective player.
Of course, it's like skiing. The tennis player's set-up is of course also an issue in reality. In skiing, however, you have a route and a different type of snow and not, as in tennis, an opponent who influences you. In tennis, that adds up to that, but you have to let your individual feeling live. The art is about figuring out what is really ideal for me. I think there is far too little thought about it, especially among the young players. They mostly get what the sponsoring companies submit to them. Then it is mostly the coaches who can help, of course, but in the end only the player can say what he is comfortable with. Of course, this is a very complex story that shouldn't be reduced to just the covering. That would be too easy.
As far as the tension is concerned, however, it is the case that due to the monofilament strings, which have much less elasticity and a much less trampoline effect, the tension is significantly lower. That means, when I look at how we covered the town hall this year, it now moves between 23 and 24 kilos. 25 is almost a lot today.
For over 40 years, Peter Lehrner has been offering world-class racket service in his "House of Tennis" in Mödling.You can find all information about the racket service of the tuning expert here!