The Making of a Tennis Ball continues with the property everything else in the ball exists to produce: the bounce.
Drop a tennis ball on a hard court and something almost unremarkable happens — it comes back up, roughly to where it started, and the game proceeds as if that were the most natural thing in the world. It isn’t. That single, reliable bounce is the end result of everything discussed so far in this series: the rubber core, the internal pressure, the felt. Change any one of them and the bounce changes with it.
A Number the Sport Agreed On
For most of tennis’s early history, bounce was simply whatever a given ball happened to do — inconsistent between manufacturers, courts, even individual balls from the same batch. It wasn’t until the sport standardised its equipment in the twentieth century that bounce stopped being a matter of chance and became a matter of regulation. Once balls could be manufactured consistently, it became possible — and necessary — to define exactly how a ball should behave, so that a match played in one country resembled a match played in another.
What’s Actually Being Measured
The ITF’s test is simple in principle: drop a ball from a fixed height of 254 cm onto a rigid, flat surface, and measure how high it rebounds. A regulation ball must bounce back somewhere between 135 and 147 cm — a narrow enough window that it effectively certifies everything upstream of it: the rubber compound, the internal pressure, the felt’s effect on air resistance. A ball outside that range isn’t failing the bounce test on its own terms; it’s revealing that something earlier in its construction — or its shelf life — has drifted.
Next in the series: The White.
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