Tennis on the Cheap--the Very, Very Cheap

I found this amusing forum string over at Tennis Warehouse's Talk Tennis area (a most excellent forum, by the way, probably the best, and going strong for a many years now). It's premise speaks to my inner skinflint: they call it the "Cheap Players Club," and the rules for membership are that you spend next to nothing on your tennis passion.

Here are the parameters, the "basic requirements for membership":

* Your main racquets cost $130 or less
* You are baffled by people like J011yroger who has 27 tour racquets (j0lly's cool though
* You play with simple attire
* You'd rather buy 2 good pairs of shoes for under $100 than go all out for one pair (they're all made in China or Indonesia anyways)

Optional:
* You enjoy beating players that flaunt expensive racquets
* You use friction fighters and the like to make your strings last to the end (stringing gets expensive)
* You know where all the free and cheap courts are in your city
* You use balls until they don't bounce above the knee anymore. Even then those can be used for practice serves

I can't really submit myself, as I'm not a truly cheap player. However, I have been gravitating to a setup, of late, that's pretty dang cheap. Almost free, in fact. It is as follows:

Racquet: Fox Ceramic Precision WB-210 ($3 @ Goodwill)

String: Prince Synthetic Gut, the orginal, 17g ($15 to string up)

Overgrip: Gosen (3 for $1.99)

Shoes: Wilson Fantoms ($30? I think, about three years ago)
*Just for the record, I advocate spending some $$$ on shoes, as they are arguably more important than anything else. But you can usually get a decent pair at a specialty retailer on discount, if they are a few years out of date

Threads: Some old Nike shorts (???), Hanes socks ($5 or so for 3 pairs, I wear 2 pairs at a time), free hat, free shirts that my wife brought home from work

Courts: My local park (free)

Balls: I pay full price, because I don't enjoy playing with even slightly dead balls and never have

I believe whole setup can be had for less than $50, suggesting to me that tennis MAY be the cheapest sport to get into that there is these days. Quite the irony, given the game's patrician lineage.