The racket on the shelf is not the one the professional is playing

Tour frames are customised, weighted and sometimes built on discontinued moulds under a modern paint job, and the sport says nothing.

A player wins a major with what appears to be this year's model. It is on sale in the pro shop by the weekend. Underneath the paint there is a decent chance the mould is a decade old and the specification bears very little relationship to what is in the box you just bought.

Paint jobs are the open secret of the equipment business. A professional finds a frame that works, often early in a career, and has no interest in changing it because the feel of a racket is the least negotiable thing in the sport. The brand, meanwhile, needs the current model on television. So the old mould gets painted in the new colours, the endorsement continues, and the customer buys a racket that shares a name with the one on court and almost nothing else.

Then there is the customisation, which is legitimate and equally invisible. Lead tape in the hoop, silicone in the handle, a matched set of frames weighted to within a gram of each other and balanced to within a millimetre, strung at tensions adjusted for temperature and humidity between matches. A retail frame has manufacturing tolerances of several grams and a few points of swingweight. Two rackets off the same rack are not identical to each other, let alone to a tour specification.

I do not think any of this is cheating and I am not sure it is even a scandal. Golfers get fitted clubs, cyclists get custom frames, and no reasonable person expects the shop version to match. What bothers me is the pretence in the marketing, which asks the buyer to believe the frame is the reason for the result.

The useful reaction is not cynicism, it is imitation. If tour rackets are matched and customised, an ambitious club player should do the same with what he already owns, because the gap between two of his own frames is very likely larger than the gap between two models he is agonising over in the shop. Weigh them. Balance them. Get them strung with the same string at the same tension by someone whose machine is calibrated.

That is a hundred pounds of work on rackets you already have, against several hundred for a new pair that will be no more consistent than the last.

The technology story sells frames. The consistency story wins matches.