August 25, 2025

Tips of the Week

Table Tennis and the World Science Fiction Convention
I had a busy nine days in Seattle – and while it was for the World SF Convention (7,739 attendees), there was also some table tennis! As a reminder, when I’m away I still have a Tip of the Week every Monday, which you can find in the Tip of the Week tab to the left. Above are the three tips that went up while I was gone.

The big surprise came at the Pop Culture Museum. A boy, about 12 years old, came up to me and asked, “Are you Larry Hodges?” I said yes. He said, “I have your table tennis book!” Then he walked away. How did he recognize me? Besides my picture in most of my table tennis books, I was wearing my new T-Rex Playing Table Tennis cap. (My previous one, a different design, was lost when my bags were lost returning from the Nationals in July, as I’ve blogged about.) So, that was probably what got his attention. The irony is that I was at the World Science Fiction Convention, and that I have four SF novels and five SF short story collections, but I was recognized for one of my TT books! (The odds are it was Table Tennis Tactics for Thinkers, my best-selling book.)

It's actually sort of a regular thing – in the world of science fiction, I’m sort of known as that “table tennis guy.” In fact, in the 2019 SF anthology “Across the Universe,” there’s a story by Cat Rambo titled “All You Need,” with the following lines:

No matter what, all major deals on this side of the mountains were sealed in the boardroom of the Larry B. Hodges Memorial Museum of Ping-Pong History. The original furniture was long gone; the only remnants of the original decor were the murals on the wall depicting a series of ping-pong tournaments on one side and the history of ping pong on the other, beginning with a scene of lawn tennis players fleeing raindrops and snowflakes by taking their game indoors and concluding with a scene of the museum’s construction, overseen by a smiling man Vito had always presumed was Larry Hodges.

Besides panels (such as one on Historic Mistakes in Movies (not just SF ones), where I elaborated on problems with “Braveheart” and “JFK”), I did a reading. I decided to read three of my very short stories (under 1000 words) from one of my short story collections. (These are stories that I sold and were published in various magazines, and then I put them together in collections.) I got to explain to the audience my ping-pong background, which is why I call them:

These, of course, parallel my Tips series:

More importantly, to entertain the crowd between readings, I pulled out a ping-pong ball and did my ball-blowing trick. (Link should take you to 38:45 of this interview I did in 2020.)

Alas, after finding out it would cost about $100 each way to Uber to the Seattle Pacific Table Tennis Club, I didn’t go there. However, amazingly, Spin Seattle was only two blocks from the where we held the WSFC – so I stopped by twice, just to visit. But there were no coaches there either time, and just beginning-level players playing, and nobody I knew or who knew me.

As to non-table tennis, besides the panels and the reading, I attended a lot of interesting panels, watched some of the movies in the SF and Fantasy movie festival, and spent a huge amount of time browsing the gargantuan dealer’s room, which was about three times the size of a football field. (I also signed for dealers a number of anthologies that included my stories.) I also did a LOT of sightseeing (lots of new refrigerator magnets!) – here’s a listing:

  • One-hour Harbor Cruise
  • Five-hour Whale Watching Cruise – saw three killer whales (spent nearly an hour watching them), plus two harbor porpoises, two elephant seals, hundreds of harbor seals lounging on a beach, lots of leaping fish, four bald eagles (one adult, three juveniles), two blue herons, and a kingfisher.
  • Three-hour Seattle Bus Tour
  • Fremont Troll
  • Space Needle
  • Seattle Great Wheel
  • Pop Culture Museum – Captain Kirk’s actual chair from Original Star Trek, Arnold’s jacket from Terminator, the axe and swords of Gimli, Aragorn, and Frodo from Lord of the Rings, loads of Star Wars and Marvel original items, and . . . well, just about everything! I spent hours there.
  • Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture
  • Pike Place Market
  • Seattle Aquarium
  • Woodland Park Zoo
  • Olympic Sculpture Park
  • Underground Tour

FlashScore
Here’s a site that shows table tennis results from all over the world.

Touring China's Table Tennis Museum
Here’s the video (8:26) of the museum in Shanghai. I will be there in November, playing on a US Over 60 Team in the Amity Cup and sightseeing – more on that next week.

Coaching and News from All Over
Since I’ve been away for three weeks, rather than try to list every interesting article, here are links to some of the main news and coaching pages that have been active in that time, and you can pick and choose. (I checked all the usual sites to see which ones had new material.)

Cat Pong Shirt
If you’re a cat person, you have to buy one of these!

Five Seconds of Real Table Tennis
Here’s the video!

Second-Story Pong
Here’s the video (19 sec) with Adam Bobrow (above) and Matt Hetherington (below)!

When Coaching Becomes a Desk Job
Here’s the video (9 sec)!

I Challenged CHINA… what could POSSIBLY go wrong?
Here’s the video (16:29) from Adam Bobrow!

How Many Bounces Can Average Players do? [$1000 Contest]
Here’s the video (12:02) from Pongfinity!

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