It’s easy to dismiss New Jersey as some kind of Turnpike ride gone wrong (with too many Sopranos, oil refineries and Jersey Shore types). But before you do, remember this place is some kind of magnet for whizzes. Think Thomas Edison — the greatest inventor ever; a beloved frizzy-haired fellow named Einstein; and then there’s a lesser-known bald guy named Howard Head, who transformed the sport of tennis as much as anyone.
In 1976, Head, an inspired innovator who said that sports equipment always had to feel right, had already invented the laminated ski, which rendered the clumsy, old hickory skis obsolete and revolutionized the sport. But the visionary — wealthy and retired — wanted to rev up his tennis game. So he got himself a ball machine and started to blast away. Unfortunately, many of his forehands landed in the next county. Something was wrong. Something had to be done.
For starters, he bought Prince Manufacturing, which made his semi-primitive ball machine. An inspired entrepreneur, he would morph Prince into one of the iconic names in international sports. He began by tweaking the motor on a household vacuum to produce the first commercially successful tennis ball machine. That was mere prologue. Almost immediately, Head grasped that little user-resistant wood rackets were far too frustrating. They twisted too much. And then came his Eureka moment. In a hot flash, he awoke one night, realizing that rackets needed to be bigger and have a far bigger sweet spot that wasn’t exactly in the middle of the frame. Wow!
His solution for all that twisting, wrote Ray Kennedy, was to “Make it bigger! Bigger because the laws of physics dictate – and the fat man on the disco floor can verify — the wider something is the more resistant it is to twisting.”
Using high-speed cameras, he wrestled with such notions as coefficients of restitution, polar moments of inertia and centers of percussion and eventually came up with the first oversized racket — the Prince Classic.
Critics, noted Sports Illustrated, asked, “Hey, Howard, what are you going to do with that contraption? Strain Spaghetti? Chase butterflies?” But Head’s odd looking spaghetti strainer, the most radical innovation in the game in decades, proved to be the greatest tennis invention since 1874, when the Abner Doubleday of tennis —Britain’s Major Wingfield — created the modern game itself.
Head himself noted, “With my skis and my racket I was inventing not to just make money, but to help me. I invent when it’s something I really want. The need has to grow in your gut…The best inventions come from people who are deeply involved in trying to solve a problem.”
Almost overnight, Head’s Prince Classic — which provided a face more than 40 percent larger than traditional frames — made tennis easier. Much easier. Now clumsy dorks could actually smash the ball and get it back. Rallies lasted longer: power, control, consistency — thwock! That old country club game for the elite is actually fun. Sales soared. We’re No. 1!
Wielding Head’s invention, a little-known 16-year-old, Pam Shriver, became one of the youngest players ever to reach the U.S. Open final. Suddenly, Prince accounted for about one third of the rackets sold. Virtually every other racket manufacturer followed suit. But there was more breakthrough technology to come. In ’77 came the groundbreaking Prince Original Graphite — a stiff model that took the game to a whole new level. (Ranked No. 148, Gene Mayer jumped to No. 6 when he picked up the Graphite. Six months after discovering the technology, Paul McNamee upset John McEnroe at Roland Garros.) In ’95, Prince unveiled long body technology, which quickly became the industry’s top-selling frame and was the weapon-of-choice for Michael Chang as he climbed to No. 2 in the world.
Over the years, the brand has not only been a weapon of choice for weekend warriors from Scarsdale to Singapore, but it’s attracted A-list celebs (like Princess Di, who famously used her Prince frame to fend off those nasty paparazzi) and generations of extraordinary players (think: Budge, Smith, Navratilova, Seles and beyond.)
These days, Prince boasts an impressive array of headliners, including Maria Sharapova and the entire U.S. Davis Cup team of John Isner, Sam Querrey and the record-setting Bryan Bros. Of course, those inside the beltway know that Prince has produced generations of key executives in the tennis industry, and has weathered many a storm in a merciless industry not suitable for the meek. Techno savvy analysts will tell you that the company continues to unleash a small flood of racket innovations, including the O3 and Speedport, all the while continually delivering trailblazing innovations in footwear, apparel, strings and balls.
Founded in 1970, Prince is celebrating 40 years of game-changing, think-outside-the-box foresight. Prince’s color may be green, but here’s an important red-white and blue factoid: the company is the only racket manufacturer that is owned by Americans and headquartered in the USA.
And what of Howard Head, you may ask? Well, his on-court skills never did improve all that much. He got into Plato, poetry and snorkeling. But the whiz sure used his head to create innovations that transformed a once sleepy sport and created a company that has thrived for over four decades.
