Several sports have varying surfaces

The Quick Study items are thoroughly enjoyable and a great addition to the magazine. That includes “Tennis Physics, Anyone?” by Rodney Cross (Physics Today, September 2008, page 84 ).

Unfortunately, Cross begins his review of tennis physics by saying, “Tennis is unique among major sports in that it is played on a wide variety of surfaces.” One can also correctly argue the exact opposite.

Baseball and American football use both real grass and artificial turf at different stadiums. Baseball goes further in having dirt, in addition to grass or turf, on the same playing field—not including the bases, which are also in play.

Each hole on a golf course changes from virtually no surface—when the ball is held above it by a tee—to the short grass of the fairway and longer grass in the rough to extremely short grass on the green. Most courses also include sand traps and water hazards. Golfers have a specialized club, the sand wedge, to play out of sand traps, and water is such a different “surface” that most players don’t even try to hit out of it.

NASCAR drivers and other major motorsports participants spend days before a race testing the responses of their cars on the surface of the particular track they’ll be driving on next.

Even something as supposedly standard as a basketball court can differ from arena to arena. The old Boston Garden was infamous for the pits and dead zones in its parquet flooring; Celtics players familiar with the uneven surface used it to their advantage.

Hockey rinks change the nature of their surfaces during play. At the beginning of a period, the ice is clean, solid, and smooth; by the end of a period, it is chewed up. That’s the purpose of a Zamboni, after all—to return the ice to its formerly pristine state.

Some sports—track and field or soccer, for example—might attempt to regulate their surfaces, but even then there will be noticeable differences from one locale to the next.

One could perhaps argue that tennis has the widest range of surface properties among major sports. But the truth is that across sporting events, a variety of surfaces is the rule, not the exception.