This weekend is the weekend we’ve been working hard for - Louisiana Adult State League playoffs! YEA! We have a really good team this year and we’re hoping to win state and move on to Sectional playoffs which is in Mobile, AL (I think). I’m on a 4.5 Women’s team and we don’t start play until Saturday morning. We have two matches on Saturday, two on Sunday and one on Monday so it’s going to be quite a bit of tennis for the next three days!
I’ll probably be playing all singles which should work out well. Usually, when I have any special sort of tournament I’ll take my racquet to our local tennis shop and have one of my racquets restrung with gut - that’s right…REAL GUT! In my opinion, there’s nothing like the real stuff. It just feels SO sweet in your racquet and gives you so much feel on the ball. I LOVE the stuff and would keep it in my racquets ALL the time if it weren’t so darned expensive and nondurable!
If I’m lucky, I can get maybe 4 or 5 matches out of one gut stringing. I’m usually not that lucky though and the last time I had natural gut in my racquet was for a mixed doubles tournament and I got 3 matches out of it. The string broke during the warm up of my fourth match.
Contrary to popular belief, natural gut tennis strings are not made from cat or sheep gut but rather from cows. They use the part of the cow intestine called the serosa.
The reason for the common misconception that tennis gut came from cats is that in the Middle Ages, Welsh troubadours played an instrument that sounded like a cat meowing. The english called this instrument a cat and its string was called cat gut. When players started using natural gut strings in their tennis racquets, the “cat gut” name stuck.
Sheep on the other hand WERE originally a source for tennis strings. However, sheep gut didn’t prove out to be a feasible option in the long run because tennis gut manufacturers had to compete with the sausage industry. Both used the same part of the sheep intestine (the sausage industry uses it as the skin for breakfast links). Also, the tensile strength and length of sheep gut isn’t adequate for today’s tennis game which requires more string with greater tensile strength for the larger, stiffer racquets being used.
Anyways, I digress…I don’t even use the most expensive stuff (I use Babolat Tonic+) and it still runs me about $50 per string job - $34 for the gut and $16 stringing labor. I can get the gut cheaper online (about $25 a pack) and have a friend of mine string it but I’m lazy and always forget to order it in time. Even with the high cost and short life, I love the stuff and will continue to let it grace my racquets on those special occasions. It’s like crack for my racquets 
And that concludes our gut discussion for the week LOL!
Well, I’ve got an 8am match tomorrow morning so it’s off to bed for me shortly…wish me luck!
