May 22, 2013

My Top Fifteen Best Moments as a Player

Here are my best moments as a player, in no particular order. It was going to be a Top Ten list, but I couldn't keep it to ten. (On Thur and Fri I plan to write about my best moments as a coach, and my worst moments as a player.) Feel free to comment with your own best moments as a player. For some reason, I get lots of reads, but few comments. Feel free to speak up! What are YOUR best moments as a player?

  1. Winning Open Singles, Open Doubles, Under 22, and Under 2000 at the 1980 North Carolina Open. I went in rated about 1850, though I'd been as high as 1954 before. I was playing so well before the tournament that I was incredibly nervous going in, knowing I could beat everyone there but not sure if I really could, considering the best players were rated much higher. (I won several other NC Opens, but this first one was the best.) The best players at the tournament were rated about 2100, but with rating inflation that's about 2250 in modern ratings.
  2. Winning the National Collegiate Doubles Championship in 1990. My partner was Christian Lillieroos. I especially remember the semifinals, where I was on fire and carried the team. The final was almost anticlimactic as we won easily. (In singles, I got stuck with top seed Khoa Nguyen in the quarterfinals.)
  3. Winning the National Collegiate Team Championship in 1994 and 1995 as a grad student. My teammates included Todd Sweeris, Xu Huazhang, and Sean Lonergan.
  4. Hardbat titles - all of them. At the Open and Nationals I've won Hardbat Singles twice, Over 40 Hardbat four times, and Hardbat Doubles 13 times. I hope to win a few more at this year's U.S. Open, when I'm not coaching.
  5. Going 52-0 at the U.S. Open Team Championships in 1995 and 1996 (31-0 and 21-0 respectively.) I was a player/coach, playing with lower-rated players, but they were still 2000 players and I was playing lots of 2100 players and a number of 2200 players.
  6. Beating members of the Nigerian National Team (Kazeem Badru, rated 2538, in the early 1990s), Canadian National Team (Alan Bourbonnais in the early 1980s), and USA National Team (women's team members Insook Bhushan once and several times over Virginia Sung in the early 1990s, as well as Carol Davidson in the early 1980s). I also beat a member of the Israeli National Team at the 1981 U.S. Open, but I can't remember his name.
  7. Wins over Ricky Seemiller, Rey Domingo, Dave Sakai, and Insook Bhushan in a one or two month period in 1990. If you don't know who these four are, you don't know your table tennis history and are probably under age 40. (Unfortunately a couple of timely bad losses kept my rating from skyrocketing - thanks a bunch, Bill Ukapatayasakul! I lost to him fifteen minutes after beating Insook.)
  8. Winning Northern Virginia Open in early 1980s, my first Open win outside North Carolina.
  9. The first two days at the Teams in the early 1990s. I went in rated about 2270, and beat just about everyone for two days, including lots of 2300 players and a few 2400 players, without any serious losses. If I'd stopped, I would have been adjusted to about 2500 or more. On the third day, unfortunately, my teammates showed up late, I didn't have anyone good to warm up with, and at the last minute I warmed up with a very weird player. Between that and my irritation with my teammates, I went 0-6 on Sunday, all against lower-rated players, including three that were about 100 points lower. I came out rated about the same I came in, around 2270. But for two days I was among the best players in the U.S.
  10. Winning the A Division (the highest division below the Open Division) at the U.S. Open Teams one year with Jason St. George and Bernie Pietrak. I didn't have a great record in the tournament except for one thing: I kept winning the ninth match by upset over and over.
  11. Beating the two undefeated Canadian juniors in a division final at the U.S. Open Teams. We were the only undefeated players that year - I was again playing on a weaker team as a player/coach - but these two were probably stronger players. I won on tactics. Both players had ferocious forehand attacks and long pips on the backhand, which they used to receive short serves. So I served high-toss forehand serves from my forehand corner short to their forehand corner, mixed with down-the-line serves to their backhands so they couldn't cheat with backhand receives, and they couldn't figure it out.
  12. Almost going five with David Zhuang at a New Jersey Open in the early 1990s. I was up 20-18 in the first but he won. I won the second (!), he won the third, and I was up 20-18 in the fourth. He won, but for a while there I was battling even-up with a 2700 player.
  13. Two big clipboard matches, both for $650. It's a long story how these two matches came about, and why both were for $650. Suffice to say that both times I was challenged by roughly 2000-level players, and I pocketed $1300. I'm about 2100 with a clipboard - I've been taking challenges for over 20 years.
  14. Reaching #18 in the U.S. with a 2292 rating. (Ratings have inflated some since. These days 2292 is much lower in the rankings.)
  15. Coming back from down 0-10 in the fifth in the final of Under 2400 at the Eastern Open against Pat Cox in the early 1990s to win the title. Games were to 21 back then - but amazingly, I tied it at 10-all, and won 26-24 in the fifth.

Life of a Table Tennis Coach

Today I normally have students scheduled for 2:30-3:30PM, 4-5PM, 6:30-7PM, 7-8PM, and 8-9PM. The 2:30 person is out of town. The 6:30 person is in the hospital (can't disclose why). The 7PM person has a baseball game (last game of the season, with games not normally on his table tennis night). The 8PM person (actually a father and son who do 30 min each) has to work overtime at work and can't make it. So now I'm down to just the 4PM person. Next week it'll get back to normal. Today I'll get a lot of other stuff done.

Chinese Quartet and Wall Street Journal

Here's an article from Monday's Wall Street Journal on the Chinese quartet of Xu Xin, Zhang Jike, Wang Hao, and Ma Long dominating at the Worlds, entitled "Young Stars Dining at Top Table,"

Samsonov Wins Richard Bergmann Fair Play Award

Here's the article.

Top Ten Shots at the 2013 Worlds

Here's the video (5:51). These are mostly different from the ITTF's Shot of the Day I've been posting.

Carolina Pong

Here's how Carolina Pong got started - the "You Got Served" CFTTC Documentary (11:26).

Orioles at MDTTC

It's been nine days, but the visit to MDTTC by Orioles shortstop J.J. Hardy and former center fielder/current VP Brady Anderson is still the third headline story at Orioles Hangout. I've been in discussions with them about our visit to Orioles Park; it'll take place after the kids are out of school. (Last school day for locals is June 12.)

Bogus Account Requests

Three weeks ago, buried in an avalanche of bogus accounts that were posting spam all over TableTennisCoaching.com, I finally started requiring account approval. Since then I've had exactly 812 bogus account requests. (When I wrote this, it was 805; seven more came in while I wrote this blog.) You can tell the bogus ones by the strange usernames they give. (Here are the last three: wtqCJyGWFn, JNQbwZFiLU, and JGIkMfzjlL. I also get more reasonable sounding ones, like joseph13pyudadaeo, but though they start out okay, the inevitably end with gibberish.) I require all accounts here to have real-sounding names, and to put something about table tennis in their account bio.

Clipboard Table Tennis

I wrote about my clipboard challenge matches above. Here's a video (1:51) that shows the dynamic future of table tennis - Clipboard Table Tennis! It stars Tahl Leibovitz and Al Papp, with umpire Berndt Mann, with Marty Reisman joining in near the end. 

Non-Table Tennis - SF Story Sales

This month I sold two science fiction stories. (Here's my SF page.)

One was "Tyler's Ten" (6800 words), to New Myths Magazine. John Tyler was the tenth president of the United States. But when he (then the vice president) took the oath of office in 1841 after the death of President William Henry Harrison after 30 days in office), his body was taken over by an alien vacationer, and his consciousness stored in an alien computer in a virtual reality world in a star system far away. There he found the first nine presidents - Washington to Harrison - since each had also been taken over by an alien vacationer when they took the oath of office, with their minds in this virtual reality environment. Much bickering ensues as you meet the first ten presidents (Andrew Jackson has spent years picking on poor John Quincy Adams), but now Tyler takes things into his own hands to save them all in an alien courtroom drama. The ending is the best of any story I've ever had - let's just say it ends on earth, modern times, with all ten presidents walking up the steps of the Capitol.

"Human Help Desk" (1000 words) sold to Abyss & Apex. It's about a computer who realizes its owner is about to click on a virus that will kill it. It only has a second to live - "That's a very long time" - so who does it call? The Human Help Desk! While parts of it are light, it's not really a comedy, more a melodrama as the two computers talk while trying to save it from the virus.

I also sold a non-fiction story to Science Fiction Writers of America for their blog, "Fifty Writing Quotes." A few years ago, during a sleepless night, I went to my computer and made up fifty inspirational and/or instructional quotes about writing. I've been fine-tuning them since. Then I submitted to SFWA. It's not a big paycheck - $45 - but it's not bad! I'll post here when it goes live.

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