The Tudor Black Bay Pro’s thickness is a feature, not a flaw: the pros of exploring the boundaries of your personal taste

Andrew O'Connor

It wouldn’t take much twisting of my arm for me to take the side of vintage and heritage-inspired watches. Classic designs that have built the legacies of brands are cemented in our minds, making it easy to envision a life with them. Compact case dimensions are easy to wear, and rarely look out of place. A collection of mid-sized watches with classic designs can likely be worn with almost any outfit for any occasion (maybe keep a modern diver in the collection for the pool).

I sometimes feel that my tastes were almost developed out of necessity. It wasn’t that long ago that it felt like there were very few mass-market dive watches and chronographs under 42mm. There were even a large number of “dress” watches that were also 42mm in diameter. While diameter definitely does not tell the whole story, lugs overhanging the sides of your wrist seem to be an almost universally accepted faux pas.

So again, compact vintage watches and heritage releases seem to be the easy choice. However, my horological guilty pleasure is large sport watches. I really do love the Audemars Piguet Royal Oak Offshore, for example, despite the fact that the lugs of “The Beast” extend past my wrist bone. I love the look of the Ceratanium IWC Big Pilot’s Watch Perpetual Calendar. I do think a big chunky Panerai Luminor looks awesome on the right person, and is begging to be worn by me from the display case. Sadly, even a 40mm Luminor threatens to call the self-imposed watch etiquette police with lugs that barely hang over the sides of my wrist.

So what is a watch collector to do? The easy answer is to stay with what you know. What I have realised, though, is that you then end up with a collection of multiples of the same thing. Sure, it may be different brands, case designs, dial colours, but in reality, they are different versions of the same type of watch. Going smaller is an easier way to provide variety, but my strong preference for mechanical movements and a growing appetite for complications can make that pretty difficult. I have found a solution for myself, at least for the time being, and I encourage others to do the same: a shift in mindset, and an open mind to explore the perimeters of what you think you can wear.

Enter the Black Bay Pro

One of my favourite watches from a design perspective is the Rolex Explorer II ref. 1655, frequently referred to by the nicknames Freccione or Steve McQueen (even though his association with the watch has been largely debunked). While vintage watches are a win for me in terms of proportions, the high prices of coveted references and questionable durability make them impractical for daily wear. When Tudor released their first Black Bay GMT in 2018, the vintage styling was spot on, but the large 41mm case diameter, 50mm lug-to-lug, and 14.6mm thickness made it wear quite large, and larger than I was comfortable wearing. The world had to wait 4 years before we saw a smaller Tudor GMT watch.

In 2022, the Black Bay Pro arrived, and the vintage styling and smaller 39mm case diameter made Tudor fans rejoice. While a reduced case diameter and lug-to-lug length of 47.5 made it more wearable, spec sheet warriors were quick to point out that the chunky 14.6mm case thickness remained. Journalists on the ground at Watches and Wonders were quick to point out that the thickness included the heavy domed box sapphire crystal, but 14.6mm is quite thick for a watch, especially contrasted by its compact case diameter and lug-to-lug.

I decided I would keep an open mind. I really appreciated the clear influence of the Rolex ref. 1655, but the snowflake hands, 3D indices, lack of crown guards, and the faux-rivet bracelet gave the watch its own distinct personality, enough of one for me to want to try one on despite the stated flaws. The model was hard to find initially in the United States, but I did eventually find one… On vacation!

In person, I was totally won over. Is it a thick, chunky boi? Oh yes. The thick case, domed crystal, and prominent indices come across as sculptural, giving the watch a distinct presence, separate from not only other brands but even other Tudor models. Without the depth of the indices and the space between the crystal and the dial, the Black Bay Pro would not have the same visual effect in person. It is also true that the case band is not the entire thickness of the watch, so the visual weight of the watch is broken up.

If the other Black Bay models are the heritage connection, and the Pelagos models are the brand’s modern tool watches, the Black Bay Pro feels post-modern, combining modern and heritage elements in a way that doesn’t inherently provide any use-case benefit, but offers an aesthetic and tactile experience that seems pretty unique in the context of modern watches.

The previous point feels particularly true within the context of my own watch collection. I realised I was buying a number of watches that offered very similar wearing experiences, despite obvious visual differences. My occasional forays into checking out oversized sports watches reminded me that there was an itch to scratch. For some people out there, the Black Bay Pro could be their smallest watch in their collection. For me, anything with a lug-to-lug over 50mm that does not have lugs that angle downwards is pretty much a hard no for me.

The Black Bay Pro offered a solution; it offered me a wearable, big and satisfyingly chunky sport watch. There are days when it feels like the coolest thing I could possibly wear. Then there are days when I want to wear a small rectangular dress watch, which also feels like the coolest thing I could wear.

Closing thoughts

I think having self-imposed guidelines for watch collecting isn’t a bad thing, as it easily eliminates watches from consideration and helps you focus on which ones to consider. But I think there is value in exploring the outer limits of what you are comfortable with, as that variety allows one to appreciate the quirks of each watch. While some will eliminate the Black Bay Pro for its thickness, for me, it is one of the defining characteristics of the watch that adds to its charm. To me, the Black Bay Pro is a wearable, large sport watch, and I would say that itch has been satisfyingly scratched.