Eric Babolat has run the family business since his father’s fatal accident in 1998. A conversation with a man who knows tennis in all its nuances.
Monsieur Babolat. It is said that your German is very good …
Eric Babolat: It used to be. About twenty years ago I spent a lot of time in Austria, in Bergheim near Salzburg, where we had our branch office at that time.
tennisnet: What brings us to the question: Why are there no alpine skis from Babolat?
Babolat: We certainly thought about it because many companies have moved from tennis to skiing. But we have focused on strings, shoes and other things since the beginning of tennis, to be exact: My grandfather developed the first tennis strings in 1875. At that time, the tennis rules were only just being established. Just to compare: that was two years before the first Wimbledon tournament. And since then we have been connected to tennis. In the 1930s, René Lacoste or Suzanne Lenglen played with our strings. And so we have specialized in racket sports. We do few things, but these are good for it.
tennisnet: How risky was it for Babolat to start producing its own rackets?
Babolat: My father made this decision in the mid-1990s. And back then, of course, there was a risk involved. The golden era was just over. When Björn Borg played, tennis was everywhere, even in fashion. Then it went downhill, only tennis lovers were interested in our sport. The sales figures for clubs have gone down. My father said at the time that we had to give tennis players a reason to change rackets. There have also been voices in our company that have said: Why now? And my father said that we are able to be stronger than the competition and produce an innovative racquet. Nobody’s been waiting for us. And we met with resistance: Pete Sampras used to play with our strings, but when we made rackets ourselves, his manufacturer said Sampras wasn’t allowed to promote our strings anymore.
tennisnet: With which player did you achieve your breakthrough?
Babolat: We launched our first racquet in 1994 and Carlos Moya won the French Open in 1998. 1998 was an important year for us, also for a sad reason – my father died in an accident this year. But Kim Clijsters won in the women’s singles with our racket, Fernando Gonzalez in the juniors. So we had a vision. And even when my father died at the age of 51, we continued this vision. Even though I was only 28 years old at the time.
tennisnet: How did you find your way into tennis yourself?
Babolat: We are still a family business. But before I went to Austria, for example, I worked as a stringing machine on the tour. I learned a lot about our company, but also about the players. It’s not particularly difficult to string a bat. But for the players it is important that they can trust their material. My father sent me to the USA to learn English. That worked, but I also learned how important our products are to players, how to give them confidence.
tennisnet: And you can earn good money with it …
Babolat: Of course it’s a business. But people only play tennis when they love it. We work in a passionate world. And that’s fantastic.
tennisnet: Rafael Nadal or Jo-Wilfried Tsonga play the classic Babolat racquet. Dominic Thiem a completely different model. What are the differences?
Babolat: The first player to play a racquet more focused on control was Fernando Gonzalez. Actually, we’re targeting power and spin. Dominic is a player with a lot of power, and he immediately loved his racket, the Pure Strike. Tsonga has been trying this racquet for a year but Dominic is the best player that plays with this racquet. And he’s our ambassador for this bat.