The Diamond Racquet and the Crystal Cup: How Luxury Tennis Equipment Became a Trophy Worth More Than the House

There is a tennis racquet you are not allowed to hit a ball with. It is set with more than 1,700 diamonds, it was valued at roughly $1.3 million, and for a few years in the early 2000s it sat in a glass case in Antwerp, Belgium, waiting for someone to be good enough to take it home. Most luxury tennis equipment is at least pretending to be useful — a $300 frame, a reel of co-poly that promises a few more revolutions per minute. This thing made no such pretense. It was jewelry shaped like a sport.

If the number made you blink, that's the right reaction. We blinked too when we read it. The interesting part isn't the price tag, though. It's what the racquet was actually for, and how it stacks up against the other famous trophies and tools the game hands out. So we put three of them side by side — the Antwerp diamond racquet, the silverware Wimbledon gives its champions, and the very ordinary frame a touring pro actually carries onto the court — and we judged all three on the same three questions. What are they worth. How hard are they to get. And what, if anything, can you do with them.

What was the diamond tennis racquet, and why did it exist

The diamond racquet was the grand prize of the Diamond Games, a WTA event held in Antwerp's Sportpaleis from 2002 to 2007. Antwerp is the diamond-cutting capital of the world — something like 80 percent of the world's rough diamonds have historically passed through its district — so a diamond-themed tournament was a piece of civic branding as much as a sporting event. The trophy was built by the local diamond houses to advertise the city's trade.

Here is the catch that made the whole thing work as theater: you couldn't win the racquet by winning the tournament once. You had to win the Diamond Games three times — either three years running, or three times within five editions. Win once and you got a check and an ordinary cup. Win three times and the diamond racquet was yours to keep, outright, forever. It was a jackpot rule, the kind casinos use to keep people at the table. In a six-year tournament, it was an almost impossible ask, which is exactly why it generated headlines every single year.

So the racquet existed to be coveted and, mostly, not won. That is a strange brief for an object. It puts it in a different category from a trophy you lift and hand back, and a very different category from the frame in a player's bag. Worth comparing, then.

The three things we're weighing

We're going to hold the diamond racquet up against two reference points that casual fans already half-know.

The first is the Wimbledon trophies — the gilt Challenge Cup the men's singles champion holds aloft, and the Venus Rosewater Dish the women's champion gets. These are the most photographed pieces of metal in the sport.

The second is a professional player's match racquet — the actual graphite frame, strung and gripped, that someone like Amélie Mauresmo or Venus Williams was hitting with in those same years. Not a luxury object at all, but the thing the luxury objects are all imitating in shape.

Three objects, three questions: material value, difficulty of acquisition, and usability. Let the verdict sort itself out at the end.

Criterion one: what the materials are actually worth

Start with money, because that's the part everyone shows up for.

The diamond racquet wins this going away, and it isn't close. The reported figure was about $1.3 million, anchored in roughly 1,700-plus diamonds set into a racquet-shaped frame. We should be honest about the limits of that number: we did not appraise the racquet, and the $1.3 million valuation is a figure that came from the tournament and its sponsoring jewelers, not from an independent gemologist we can name. Promotional valuations on objects built to promote a diamond district deserve a raised eyebrow. But even halving it for skepticism's sake leaves you with a six-figure racquet, which is enough to make the point. To put $1.3 million in concrete terms, that's roughly the price of several Ferraris, or a comfortable house in most of the country, hanging on a wall in a sports arena.

The Wimbledon hardware is more modest than its aura suggests. The men's Challenge Cup, first awarded in 1887, is silver gilt — silver with a thin gold layer — and stands about 18.5 inches tall. The Venus Rosewater Dish, awarded since 1886, is sterling silver, a little over 18 inches across, decorated with figures from mythology. These are genuinely old, genuinely fine pieces of silversmithing, and their insured value runs into the tens of thousands. But silver and gilt are not diamonds. As raw material, the Wimbledon trophies are worth a fraction of the Antwerp racquet. Their value is almost entirely historical and symbolic, which is a different kind of value and arguably the more durable one.

And the player's actual racquet? A high-end graphite frame retails for $250 to $300. String it with a premium co-polyester and a natural-gut hybrid and you might add $40 to $50 a frame, and a pro restrings every match, sometimes between sets. Over a season the strings cost more than the frames. But as an object on a table, a tour racquet is worth less than a nice dinner. On material value, the order is clear and lopsided: diamond racquet, then Wimbledon silver, then the working frame a distant third.

Criterion two: how hard each one is to actually claim

Money is the boring criterion. Difficulty is where the diamond racquet earns its strange reputation.

To win the Wimbledon trophies, you win Wimbledon — seven matches over a fortnight, the hardest two weeks in the sport. Brutal, but it has happened more than a hundred times. To own a tour racquet, you call a sponsor or walk into a shop. Effort: near zero.

The diamond racquet sat between "hardest thing in tennis" and "literally impossible," and the players spent six years finding out exactly where. The three-wins rule meant the contest wasn't one tournament; it was a campaign across years, against the calendar and against the fact that nobody dominates a single mid-tier event for that long.

Walk through how it actually played out, because the near-misses are the whole drama.

Venus Williams won Antwerp in 2002. One down.

Justine Henin, the Belgian, won on home soil in 2003 — a coronation in front of her own crowd, and a reset of the chase.

Kim Clijsters, the other Belgian, took 2005.

And then there was Amélie Mauresmo, the Frenchwoman with the one-handed backhand and the reputation as the most graceful — and most fragile — player of her generation. Mauresmo won Antwerp in 2004. Then she won it again in 2006. Two of three. She had one of the five-edition windows lining up, and in 2007 she came back to finish the job.

She did. Mauresmo won the Diamond Games for the third time in 2007, and she walked off with the diamond racquet — the only person ever to claim it. She beat Kim Clijsters in the final of that last edition, in front of a Belgian crowd that would have much preferred the other result. The most expensive piece of luxury tennis equipment ever assembled as a prize was won exactly once, by one player, on the tournament's way out the door.

Difficulty verdict: the diamond racquet was the hardest of the three to claim, not because any single match was harder than a Wimbledon final, but because the rule demanded sustained excellence at one venue across years — a thing the structure of pro tennis almost never allows. The Wimbledon trophies are harder to win in any single attempt. The diamond racquet was harder to win ever. That's a meaningful distinction, and it's why Mauresmo's name is the only one in the book.¹

Criterion three: can you do anything with it

Here the order flips completely, and this is the part the price tag distracts everyone from.

A tour racquet is the only one of the three that does the thing a racquet is for. It's strung at a real tension, balanced to a real swing weight, and it hits a ball at 100-plus miles per hour. Everything about it is functional. It is, in the most literal sense, the only real racquet in the comparison.

The Wimbledon trophies do nothing athletic, but they perform their actual job perfectly: they get held aloft, photographed, and handed back. Both the Challenge Cup and the Rosewater Dish are kept by the club — winners receive a smaller replica to take home. So even Wimbledon's champions don't truly own the famous object. The trophy's job is to exist on Centre Court in July, and at that it is undefeated.

The diamond racquet does the least of the three. You can't string it. You can't swing it without scattering a fortune across the court. It is racquet-shaped and racquet-named, but it is functionally a sculpture — a $1.3 million argument for Antwerp's diamond district wearing the costume of a sport. Mauresmo couldn't have hit a single ball with the thing she spent three tournament wins earning. Usability verdict: working frame first, Wimbledon silver second by virtue of doing its ceremonial job, diamond racquet dead last. It is the most expensive object here and the most useless, and those two facts are the same fact.

Putting the three side by side

The table makes the punchline visible. The three objects don't actually compete on the same axis. One is the most valuable, one is the most meaningful, and one is the only one that works. The diamond racquet wins exactly one of the three questions, and it's the question — money — that matters least to the sport itself.

So what's the verdict

If you came for the "most expensive" headline, the diamond racquet wins, and it isn't close. A million-dollar-plus object built from 1,700 diamonds, claimed by a single human being in the entire history of the prize, is a genuinely remarkable thing, and we'd defend the trophy's existence as a piece of marketing theater that absolutely did its job.

But weigh all three criteria together and the verdict gets more interesting. The diamond racquet is the richest and the rarest and the most useless. The Wimbledon trophies are the most storied and the most photographed, and their champions don't even keep them. The cheapest object — the strung graphite frame in a player's bag — is the only one that is actually a racquet in any sense that matters on a court.

The honest read is that "luxury tennis equipment" and "the best tennis equipment" point in opposite directions. The most expensive racquet ever made for the sport cannot play the sport. The thing that wins the most expensive prizes is a $300 frame that the winner restrings between sets. Mauresmo earned a million-dollar object by being brilliant with a cheap one. That gap is the whole story.

A small, honest note on the numbers

Before anyone screenshots the $1.3 million figure as gospel: treat it as a sponsor's valuation, because that's what it is. The Diamond Games and Antwerp's jewelers had every incentive to round generously and every incentive to make the racquet sound like the most fabulous object in sport. We could not find an independent appraisal to confirm the figure or the exact diamond count, and we're not going to pretend we did. What's solid is the structure of the prize, the three-wins rule, and the result: Mauresmo won the event in 2004, 2006, and 2007, and she is the only player who ever took the racquet home. Those facts we'd stand behind.

What happened to the Diamond Games

The tournament didn't survive its own jackpot. The 2007 edition — the one Mauresmo won to claim the racquet — was the last. The Diamond Games disappeared from the WTA calendar after that, the way mid-tier events sometimes quietly do when sponsorship and scheduling and arena availability stop lining up. Antwerp eventually returned to the tour years later with a different event under a different name, but the diamond racquet era was a closed six-year window with exactly one winner.

There's something fitting about a prize designed to be almost impossible being claimed in the tournament's final year, and then the whole thing folding. The racquet got its one champion and the lights went out. As a story it lands cleaner than most things in sport, where prizes usually outlast the players and the players usually outlast the meaning.

The richest racquet in tennis history never hit a ball, and the woman who won it knew exactly which racquet she'd rather have in her hand on match point.