nytimes.com - Fans at the United States Open stand a good chance of not catching a single glimpse of Roger Federer or Serena Williams. It may be impossible to miss the jumbo balls.
At tournaments around the world, oversize tennis balls are the must-have souvenir, especially for the preteenage set with regular-size Sharpies and jumbo-walleted parents. New Yorkers have a special affinity for them. It is likely that more jumbo balls will be sold during the Open than at any other tournament in the world. A boisterous crowd, apparently, is best armed with an in-your-face ball.
“It’s a much better seller at the U.S. Open than it is at the Australian,” said Chris Kushner, global manager for tennis balls at Wilson Sporting Goods, the official ball supplier at the Open.
Wilson saves its biggest balls for New York: 11 inches in diameter, two inches bigger than the usual “jumbo” ball sold at other Wilson-sponsored tournaments. (A third size, five inches, comes with the oxymoronic name Mini Jumbo Ball.) Thousands are gobbled up, by autograph seekers, mostly, but also dog lovers and those who cannot resist the temptation of purchasing anything deemed jumbo, particularly when covered in bright, fuzzy material.
It is unclear who had the initial idea of creating an oversize tennis ball, pricing it proportionately to its size ($40 at the Open this year) and aiming it at the preteenage demographic. But it was a stroke of marketing genius (someone deserved a promotion).
Wilson has been selling the balls at the Open since 1992, Kushner said, and sales have increased each year. Wilson expects to sell as many as 8,000 jumbo balls at this year’s tournament.
All the top-level tennis ball suppliers have versions of oversize balls, sold mostly at tournaments where they provide regulation-size balls for competition. But Wilson, the official ball of the WTA Tour, several ATP Tour men’s events and two of the four Grand Slam tournaments, is probably the No. 1 oversize tennis ball seller in the world, whatever that is worth.
Actually, it is worth millions, although Kushner declined to be more specific than to say that the company sold “tens of thousands” of jumbo balls each year.
“It’s part of our business that’s growing,” Kushner said. “It’s not a huge part of our business, but it’s something that’s kind of fun and gives us a lot of good P.R. at the events. At the tournament, every single kid that walks in there wants a jumbo ball. They get attracted to them. It’s like a magnet.”
Other companies have their own synonyms for big. At the French Open, Dunlop’s “giant balls” of yellow, orange or turquoise are available. Penn and Head, part of the same company that supplies balls to tournaments around the world, call theirs “giant balls,” too. At Wimbledon, Slazenger sells a “midi ball” in yellow or pink.
There is no truly comparable item in the world of sports concessions. Most novelty items are smaller than the real thing — miniature baseball bats, pee-wee footballs, a model Zamboni. But even when such things are in convenient sizes, stadiums and arenas are not filled with people walking around with them under their arms.
Before tennis balls, the trend toward oversize concession items seemed to stop with the giant foam No. 1 fingers. Thankfully, no one has dared make an authentic-feeling golf ball the size of a beach ball, or had much success in marketing it. Mr. Met, with a huge baseball head, has not spawned a jumbo baseball craze. Even Fathead, the maker of giant cut-out posters of athletes to cling to the wall, primarily sells images that are life-size, not oversize.
But bigger is better in tennis, apparently. That is a serendipitous byproduct of the tennis ball itself. It is small, light and fuzzy. Even a bigger version is nonthreatening and relatively cuddly, at least for sporting equipment. And making jumbo balls is relatively simple.
The same factories in China, Taiwan and Thailand that produce Wilson’s regulation-size tennis balls create the jumbo ones, too.
“But they’re not made the same way,” Kushner said, adding with a laugh, “We don’t have giant machinery for them.”
A regular tennis ball is essentially a hollow rubber sphere covered in felt. Enlarging it proportionately, Kushner said, would make the rubber membrane too thick and the ball too heavy — a sure way to get a jumbo-size case of tennis elbow, should one dare rally with giant rackets.
Instead, the jumbo balls are akin to soccer balls and basketballs, with a thin inflatable membrane that makes them light and bouncy. Then they are covered with felt.
They are shipped deflated — not in a vacuum-sealed, three-pack cylinder that goes wooosh when opened.
That is why one of the busiest jobs at the Open, besides running the cash register where jumbo balls are sold, is that of jumbo-ball inflater.
Autograph Article 
