May 30, 2013
Top Ten Table Tennis Things That Were At One Time Unthinkable
Some things to ponder! These are not in any particular order.
- Games to 11. It's hard to believe, but over a decade later I'm still uncomfortable with it. I much prefer games to 21 with five consecutive serves. With games to 21, a player could spend the first game getting used to the opponent, trying out different tactics, and even if he lost, the opponent still had only two chances to win a second game to 21 - and if he could win a game to 21, he's just better on that day. Now if you spend the same time adjusting to an opponent, you are down 0-2 in games, and the opponent has three chances to beat you in a short game to 11. Just about anyone decent has a chance in a game to 11. As to serving, with five consecutive serves you could really use them to set up an opponent. It's not quite the same thing when you only serve twice in a row.
- Ball is 40mm. It did slow the game down a bit, and cut down on spin. It didn't really make a big difference to me, though it does make counterlooping and fishing easier. So perhaps a good thing. It hurt the pure chopping style, but may have actually helped chopper/loopers (because of the better counterlooping, and because the bigger ball gives them more time to get in position to counter-attack). It also helped kill off the hitting style at the higher levels.
- Gluing is illegal. Modern sponges make this relatively unimportant. Players today often forget or never knew what it was like to constantly have to time your reglues at tournaments to maximize the effect, not to mention gluing every session before playing. Did we really do that???
- Hidden serves are illegal. But many world-class players openly break the rule. This bothers the heck out of me. We face this in U.S. tournaments all the time, where some tournaments (including junior events) are won by whichever player would hide his serves illegally and get away with it. It was worse a few years ago, so I'm happy with that.
- There are no pips-out penholders among the best players in the world. If you had predicted that in the 1980s you'd have been laughed at, though the signs that the style was in trouble were coming out by that decade. (Who is the best current pips-out penholder among men and women? Anyone know? I'm hitting a blank. I'm guessing there are still some relatively top women who play that way, but my brain isn't cooperating this morning - I was up until 3AM on a writing project.)
- Penholders use the reverse side of their paddles for backhands. Aw, c'mon, that's just wrong. Except . . . pretty much all the top penholders do this, and it basically single-handedly saved the penhold style. (World #1 Xu Xin and #4 Wang Hao both play this way.) Ryu Seung Min, the 2004 Olympic Gold Medalist and current world #21, is I think the last of the great penholders with a "conventional" backhand, and he does it in spite of his weak backhand, with great footwork and a great forehand. Anyone know who's the best after him? (A few "old-timers," such as Ma Lin, still block with conventional penhold backhands.) Of course, there will come a time when the reverse penhold backhand will finally be "conventional," and we'll have to find a new name for the "conventional" backhand. Old-style?
- The best players in the world often receive short balls to the forehand with their backhands. No way! This is wrong! Bad technique! Use the stupid forehand flip! Except . . . the best players in the world are now doing this. This is right! Good technique! (Welcome to the age of the Backhand Banana Flip, where you can flip any short serve aggressively with topspin and sidespin.)
- Table tennis is an Olympic Sport. Whoa!!! It happened in 1988.
- Some of the biggest money events in table tennis are sandpaper table tennis. I believe there have been two $100,000 sandpaper tournaments. Mention this to Stellan Bengtsson and see if he turns red with anger or if he falls to the floor laughing.
- A full-time table tennis center centered on coaching could survive in the United States. It'll never happen. There simply aren't enough players in the U.S. to sustain a pipe dream like this. I wish I'd tape recorded all the prominent people in table tennis who told me this at various times before we opened the Maryland Table Tennis Center in 1992 (then called the National Table Tennis Center), and in the years since when many believed our situation was "unique." Now, of course, there are about 60 of them, the great majority of them popping up in the last seven years. This is the best thing that's happened to table tennis in the U.S. in modern history.
My Upcoming Plans
Here's my upcoming schedule and plans.
- Coaching 20 hours/week. (Less during summer camps.)
- Blogging and Tips of the Week.
- Coaching at Eastern Open, June 8-9.
- Ten consecutive five-day camps at MDTTC, 10AM - 6PM each day, June 17 - Aug. 23. (I'll miss two weeks for the U.S. Open and the TNEO writers workshop, and possibly another for the Junior Olympics.)
- Coaching and playing at U.S. Open, July 2-6.
- Attend TNEO, "The Never-Ending Odyssey" Writers Workshop in Manchester, NH, July 19-27.
- Coaching at Junior Olympics, July 29-31 (tentative).
- Attend ITTF Level 2 Coaching Seminar at Lily Yip TTC, Aug. 26-31. (Just made that decision last night.)
- Run ITTF Level 1 Coaching Seminar in South Bend, IN, Oct. 2-6. (I may also run one in Maryland, as I did in 2011.)
- Do rewrite of my book Table Tennis: Steps to Success, tentatively retitled Table Tennis Fundamentals, with all new pictures.
- Do rewrite and expansion of my book Instructor's Guide to Table Tennis, with all new pictures.
- Organize new Junior Team League for the Maryland region, starting this fall.
- Continue to write science fiction and fantasy as a fun money-making hobby, see lots of movies, and read lots of books.
USATT CEO Blog
Here's Mike Cavanaugh's blog on Tuesday, where he focuses on Memorial Day, Paralympics, and miscellaneous other items.
ITTF's "Ping Pong Paix" Wins the 2013 Sport Accord Spirit of Sport Award
Here's the article and video (1:19). The award was given out last night in Saint Petersburg, Russia.
Why Timo Boll Doesn't Play Doubles
Here's the article - but the short answer is "To save energy." As Timo points out, the top Chinese do the same. (I'd wondered about this in my blog during the Worlds.)
Guide Dog Table Tennis
Who says you need to see to play table tennis?
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Re: May 30, 2013
About hidden serves. It is simply a bad rule - although created with good intentions. Simply put it is very hard to enforce it. Same with all the recent attempts to formalize it. The rules must be
a) simple (that is can be undersood by 99.9% of players),
b) logical (no contradiction with existing rules, reasoning behind them must be sound),
c) enforceable (should not generate more controversies than before the rule was introduced)
Even worse was the rule that banned the boosters and speedglue - not that I am so much in love with the speedglue. I can take it or leave it. It's just that the rule is illogical (original reasoning for it was demonstrated to be almost completely false), hard to enforce (regular player cannot check the legality of his paddle unless he comes to a tournament where they have some pretty expensive equipment), unnecessary (who the heck really thinks that not having speedglue/boosters increased sport's popularity or slowed down the game) and finally generated a lot of bad feelings. Also the way it is currently interpreted by ITTF the rule bans some ways of assembling paddle which is just plain crazy - the umpire/referee cannot have any idea what was done wit h this paddle before it was brough to the tournament, and he shouldn't. He needs to qualify or disqualify the paddle as it is at the moment of the match, and that's it. The devices used by ITTF are intended just for that, so why the need for illogical language of the rule?
Anyways, it's over and done and now we reap the consequences... the main problem is that ITTF seems to think that solving problems of the sport as a whole by changing the very basic rules is a good idea. And that is pretty dangerous. Soon we will be told that to make TT more telegenic we all have to play in Red or Black shirts only, or that the ball will have to made of special fluorescent material etc etc.
And don't even start me on the rumors that blades will have to be certified, or that ITTF came up with the new tools to determine whether the rubbers were boosted by measuring the bounce. I cannot wait to see that implemented.
Re: May 30, 2013
Some good points, Jim, though I think a major reason for the speed glue ban was health concerns, not just slowing down the sport. (But I'm sure both were argued, rightly or wrongly.) There's definitely a lot less gluing now since speed glues are no longer on sale by distributors, plus the sound of speed glue is rather distinctive, and so while a referee might not enforce it, it takes a special kind of cheater to do it knowing everyone can hear the sound.
As to the service rules, I used to get really irritated at umpires who didn't enforce the hidden serve rule as it is currently written. Since I'm coaching and playing every day, and have done so for decades, I have no problem telling if a serve is hidden (though of course some are borderline). But I've come to realize that umpires, who do not have this daily experience for decades and are volunteers, really cannot tell, nor can the average player. There is, of course, one key rule that's rarely enforced that would solve the problem - that it is the responsiblity of the player to serve so that the umpire can see he is serving legally, so if the umpire can't tell if the serve is hidden, then by the rules it is clearly illegal.
I blogged a while back about a proposed rule that would require the ball to be visible throughout the serve by both umpires or where the umpires would sit if there weren't umpires. This would solve the problem - even if you can't quite tell if both umpires can see the ball, any ball that is hidden from the receiver would clearly be hidden from the umpires, and so illegal. So the result is the receiver can see the ball, and the problem is solved. But the rule probably won't pass because the powers that be have no common sense.
Re: May 30, 2013
In reply to Re: May 30, 2013 by Larry Hodges
But, Larry, that is exactly the problem - "ye shalt not" introduce rules which are a) confusing; b) very subjective; c) not easily enforced. You are complaining - and with reason - that the umpires do not properly enforce the "hidden serve" rule. But that is exactly why they don't - it is a bad rule. I do not mean that they don't like it or decided it's too much trouble and therefore decided not to enforce it too tightly - as is the case with 65 mph speed limit or jaywalking - but because they know that every time they make a decision like that it will cause trouble, not to mention they really are quite often not 100% sure whether the serve was proper or not. Therefore they stay away from it and interfere only when it is super-obvious.
The solution is not to run special education courses for the referees, or to over-use the rule, or to punish severely the players who serve borderline or illegal serves - the proper solution is to rework the rule. Abandon it completely (not gonna happen), or replace it with something different but reasonable. For instance, it was suggested that the serve must be done so that the entire body of the server except for his hands up to his elbows (or perhaps just his wrists) is behind the ball during the serve. That of course would mean adjusting/changing a lot of serves but it doesn't seem like a huge thing to ask (at least not to me). Even if that will lead to a considearble simplification of the serves at the elite level, I do not see that as a bad thing. But that's just me...
Re: May 30, 2013
In reply to Re: May 30, 2013 by JimT
Hi Jim, I'm not suggesting special education courses or anything else like that, but simply changing the rule to the following, as I wrote above: "... require the ball to be visible throughout the serve by both umpires or where the umpires would sit if there weren't umpires." This is as easily enforceable as the 6-inch rule. If a player tosses the ball up 5.5 inches, few umpires call it, but it's not a problem because even a 4-inch toss is easy for the receiver to react to. If the server tosses the ball up 2 inches, he gets an advantage, but the umpire will almost always call that. Similarly, if a server goes to the edge with this new rule so it's borderline whether an umpire can see the ball throughout the serve, then it's not a problem because the receiver would then obviously see it. If the server tried to serve so the receiver cannot see the ball - which is what we're trying to eliminate - then it would obviously be illegal since the umpires obviously couldn't see it, and so it would be called.
Re: May 30, 2013
the highest rated pips-out penhold player that i know is he zhi wen, currently #65 in the ittf world rankings. amazingly, he is 51 as of tomrrow (happy birthday juanito!)! to me, he zhi wen's style is the most beautiful in the world. his mystifying high-toss serve...his tactical genius...his mind-blowing blocking at such acute angles...his ferocious hitting...he is a credit to all of humanity. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lsQqCrHs_hI