Macgregor

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Bergelin Longstring

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1985

Tennisnow.com voted it the most unusual racket in tennis history. It made it into the New York Magazine on June 2, 1986. They called it “the biggest innovation in tennis since Howard Head revolutionized the sport with the oversize racket”. Herwig Fisher, the German aeronautics engineer who invented the racket added “Our racket has 75 moving parts and takes about 5 and a half hours of manual labor to fabricate”. The LongString was, in effect, a programmable racket. A series of 64 miniature nylon pulleys is built into its 6-sided-head, allowing the strings tension to be “tuned” instantly. It´s tennis equivalent of the ten-speed bike. Lennart Bergelin, Bjorn Borg’s coach, endorsed the racquet. Bergelin commented “It´s the world´s first universal racket who uses the tote of many as 40 rackets, each strung differently, for Borg, so the tennis star could vary the tension as he played”. Unfortunately, the company went under. Yet the tension adjusting technology lived on in several other racquets. Comment by us: We got the racket from Lennart Bergelin. Together with the Donnay Borg Pro. Bergelin hoped that Borg would terminate his time-out promoting the racket on the tour. But it should take 5 more years before Borg would make his comeback.