In the second week of the 1997 French Open, an unseeded twenty-year-old Brazilian named Gustavo Kuerten worked his way through a draw that included every one of the tournament's three most recent champions. He beat 1995 winner Thomas Muster in the third round, 1996 winner Yevgeny Kafelnikov in the quarterfinals, and 1993 and 1994 champion Sergi Bruguera in the final itself, winning 6-3, 6-4, 6-2. Kuerten jumped from thirty-sixth in the world to fifteenth overnight, and became the first Brazilian man to win a Grand Slam singles title. What made the run more than a great two weeks was what was strung inside his racket: a Belgian-made polyester string called Luxilon, one of the first times the material had appeared at the sport's highest level.
The String Change That Reshaped Tennis More Than Any New Racket
What Was Actually Different About the String
Luxilon had introduced the first widely used polyester tennis string, marketed as Big Banger, in 1991, six years before Kuerten's title. The company had been making synthetic thread since the late 1950s and only moved into tennis strings in the mid-1980s, expanding out of an unrelated textile business. What made the polyester formulation matter on court was tension. Players could string a polyester bed ten to fifteen pounds looser than they typically used with natural gut or nylon synthetic and still keep the ball inside the lines, because a looser polyester bed deflects more on contact without sending the shot long. That let players swing faster through the ball, and faster racket-head speed at contact translates directly into more topspin, which pulls a hard-hit shot back down into the court instead of sailing past the baseline.
The Physics Behind the Spin
The mechanism researchers eventually isolated is called snapback. When a strung ball is struck off-center, or with enough force, the individual strings deflect sideways before snapping back to their resting position, and that snapping motion imparts additional rotation to the ball on top of whatever spin the player's swing path already generated. Polyester's stiffer, slicker surface lets the strings slide and snap back more freely than a stickier natural gut or nylon bed, which grips the ball and resists that lateral movement. Physicists Rod Cross and Crawford Lindsley of the University of Sydney ran a detailed study on the effect, testing sixteen different strings across multiple tensions using both clamped and hand-held rackets, and found that polyester strings produced roughly 20 percent more spin on average than nylon strings under comparable conditions. Separate testing by the International Tennis Federation in 2006 reached the same broad conclusion: polyester generated measurably more spin than the synthetic gut strings that had dominated the sport through the 1980s and early 1990s.
Early Adopters and the Slow Spread
Kuerten was not the only player experimenting with the material that week in Paris. His semifinal opponent, Filip Dewulf, was also stringing with Luxilon, and within a few years American players including James Blake had adopted it as well, drawn by the same combination of control at lower tension and the extra topspin that let a full swing clear the net safely. Longtime professional stringer Nate Ferguson, who has strung racquets at every Grand Slam and Masters Series event through Priority One Tennis, has pointed to that stretch around 2000 as the moment polyester genuinely changed how the sport's best players hit the ball, rather than a one-tournament curiosity.
Not Everyone Switched the Same Way
The adoption was not uniform, and the most instructive holdout was Roger Federer. Rather than stringing his racket entirely with polyester, Federer settled on a reverse hybrid setup he has used since 2002: natural gut in the main strings for feel and power, paired with Luxilon ALU Power Rough in the crosses for the added bite and control polyester provides. His mains are strung noticeably tighter than his crosses, a small tension gap he has maintained for most of his career. The setup captures why the polyester era did not simply replace older materials outright, it gave players a new variable to mix and match, full polyester for maximum spin and durability, hybrid setups for players who wanted some of that benefit without giving up the feel of natural gut entirely.
Why It Spread Faster Than Any Racket Change
Racket technology in the same period, larger head sizes, lighter graphite composites, stiffer frames, gets far more attention in tennis history, but a string change is cheaper, faster, and more universal to adopt than a new frame. A player can restring a racket they already love in an afternoon; switching frame technology means relearning timing and feel from scratch. That is a large part of why polyester spread through the professional tour within a handful of years while other equipment shifts took much longer to become standard. By the early 2000s, heavy topspin, western-grip forehands hit with tremendous margin over the net had become the default template for tour-level tennis, a stylistic shift that tracks closely with the string's adoption curve rather than any single racket launch.
The String Behind Every Modern Rally
The heavy-topspin, high-margin baseline game that defines professional tennis now, the one that lets players swing as hard as they can and still keep the ball in play, traces back to a string change most casual fans never think about. Kuerten's run through Paris in 1997 is remembered as an underdog story. The equipment inside his racket that week is the more durable part of the legacy, because the string he was using became the standard nearly every player on tour has strung with since.
