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Nate Ferguson's stringing speed

Q: In your piece on Nate Ferguson, he says he could string Pete Sampras’ racquet with gut in twelve minutes when he had to. What special techniques did he use to achieve this level of speed and accuracy?

A: We caught up with Nate between tournaments (he is now stringing for other players on the ATP tour). He says that while it often took longer than 12 minutes to string Sampras’ racquet, he could do it that quickly when circumstances demanded it. Nate says he used an around-the-world pattern (which makes it possible to start the crosses at the head instead of at the throat of racquets where the mains tie off at the throat, such as Pete’s Wilson Pro Staff 6.0, when using one piece of string for the entire racquet). Pete used very thin natural gut, which helped in some ways, but it is so fragile that Nate had to use tubing on every hole where the string “made a turn” when passing through the frame, to prevent breakage. When we asked him to what he attributed his amazing speed, Nate told us, “For years, I used the same stringing machine to string 700 racquets a year for one client [Pete Sampras]. I just got very good at it.”

From the March 2004 issue
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