Ping Pong for Fighters

Ping Pong for Fighters by Tahl Leibovitz, a Paralympics gold medalist, is a relatively short read, which is both good and bad, i.e. reading it isn't a huge commitment, so don't expect War and Peace; it's a two-hour read, full of golden nuggets. It's available in paperback ($13.45, 152 pages) or Kindle ($9.95).

I've known Tahl since he was about 13 years old, when he was part of the New York Junior Team that competed with a Maryland Team in a ten-on-ten match. He was always a battler, but back then he didn't look special, other than a knack for pulling off spectacular shots. Well, he can still pull off spectacular shots, but as he relates in the book, he's learned patience and tactics, and knows how to use these shots - how to fight with what he's got. On the back cover I wrote, "Tahl Leibovitz has forever been overcoming the odds as he fought his way to the top, so it's only fitting that he wrote Ping Pong for Fighters - and if readers have even a fraction of his fight, they too can reach the top."

The book starts off with a foreword by Stellan Bengtsson and an introduction by Tahl. And then we get into the real text, divided into four parts: The Fight Against the Environment; the Fight Against the Opponent; the Fight Against the Ball; and the Fight Against Ourselves. Yes, this is truly a fighting book!

• The Fight Against the Environment

Early on there's a quote from Samuel Jackson in the movie "The Negotiator": "You are not in control," where he explains the importance of knowing which factors are in our control and which are not, and that we should not worry about the ones we don't control.

Ping-Ping Diplomacy by Nicholas Griffin - Review

This book should be of great interest to table tennis buffs, history buffs, and Chinese buffs - lots of great stuff! It's subtitled "Ivor Montagu and the Astonishing Story Behind the Game That Changed the World." It's 275 pages, plus another 61 pages - so 336 total - of various end notes, acknowledgements, index, etc. It has 51 chapters, divided into four parts. There's also a very nice photo section in the middle.

Part 1 is titled "The West." Here we learn about Ivor Montagu, the founder of the ITTF, the person most responsible for table tennis becoming an international sport due to his tireless efforts - when he wasn't spying for the Soviets. Yep, our sport was pretty much founded by a communist spy! But we learn how he was instrumental in helping spread the sport to China as well as a little bit of Soviet history, where we even meet Trotsky.

Team League Sign-Up Time

Here's a call-out to players in the Capital Area, New York, and Los Angeles areas - time to join a team!!! Below are the team leagues in these regions. Deadlines are coming up fast, so enter now! (Deadline for the Capital Area Super League is this Friday.)

As I noted in my Feb. 2 blog, leagues such as these are the first step toward changing the culture of table tennis in the United States. As I wrote then: "…developing these team leagues won't be easy, and that's because of the culture of table tennis here, where few have ever played regularly on a table tennis team. They don't know what it's like to compete regularly on a team where your teammates and friends are cheering you on, even as you cheer them on - you know, like most of you were cheering on a football team at the Super Bowl last night! Except - you get to be Tom Brady or Russell Wilson."

It's going to be a long process, but eventually, if we can have the type of "team" culture they have overseas, we can have the same table tennis success as they do. Helping set up the Capital Area League and watching how it and others develop is a learning process as we learn how to create this type of team culture. Currently we have to almost connive players into entering, since it's something new and unfamiliar to them - unlike overseas, where this is the norm and why players come out to play. Gradually this will change.

Tip of the Week

Playing Off-Table Two-Winged Topspinners.

Snow!

We had about five inches last night, so schools are closed here in Montgomery Country, Maryland (and pretty much everywhere else in the region). No afterschool program or coaching today, so I'll either catch up on work, reading, or sleep. Lots of coaching articles and feature videos today!

Adult Beginning/Intermediate Class

On Sunday night my new Adult Beginning/Intermediate Class began. We have 16 signed up, though four had to miss the first session due to a combination of Presidents Day/Chinese New Year/Bad Weather. The class will meet at MDTTC for ten weeks, Sundays from 6:30-8:00 PM. (You can still sign up.) On the first day we covered the grip, ready stance ("Like covering someone in basketball, a soccer goalie, or a shortstop in baseball or softball"), forehand drive, and spin serves. (I brought out the soccer-colored balls for that.) Afterwards I let everyone stay for about half an hour, and hit with the players. Assisting in the camp are Raghu Nadmichettu and Josh Tran. This is about the 20^th time I've taught this class.

What, did you think I was going to blog while everyone else is taking the day off? Heck no!!! It's President's Day, and I'm an amateur presidential historian. (During long car trips to tournaments I drive people crazy by reciting all the presidents in order, including their terms of office and other trivia. It's how I punish bad-behaving juniors.) So in honor of our presidents - especially the ones who play table tennis (Obama, Bush Jr., Clinton, Bush Sr., Reagan, Nixon), I'm off today. I'll have lots to write about tomorrow, and plenty of time to do it since I'll likely be snowed in here in Maryland (5-8 inches expected). 

Where Do Top Players Come From?

Nearly all top players start out as juniors training at training centers with top coaches. And so if we want more top players, what do we need? More training centers with top coaches. Sometimes I'm amazed at how many people don't see this as obvious.

Back in the pre-TCPUAOTC days (that's Training Centers Popping Up All Over The Country), i.e. before roughly 2007, there were only 8-10 such training centers in the country, and no more than a few dozen kids at most in the whole country doing serious training, while countries all over the world had many thousands. So we obviously needed more junior programs. That meant more training centers. Others argued that all we had to do was take some of the few current kids, and train them well, and they’d catch up to other kids who were years ahead of them – despite the fact that there were many thousands of these kids who were years ahead of them and getting training we could rarely match.

But now we are in the TCPUAOTC days (with nearly 80 full-time clubs), and guess what? More training centers => more junior training => the current explosion of talent. It used to be we’d have perhaps one or two good players in each age group, if we were lucky. Now we have players in the 11-14 age range that are downright scary, and great depth to back them up. We have kids who don't make the quarterfinals of their age group who would have dominated their age group eight years ago. Many of the top cadets of the past wouldn't make it past the early rounds in today's weighty draws.

Chinese Domination

There's no question the Chinese dominate table tennis. It isn't even close. At the World Championships they've won Men's Teams seven straight times and nine of the last ten. In fact, other than that blip when Sweden won it three straight times from 1989-1993, and the two times they missed due to the Cultural Revolution (1967 & 1969), they've won it 19 out of 22 times. On the women's side they are even more dominant, winning 18 of the last 20 times. They've also won Men's Singles four straight times and six of the last seven times, and Women's Singles ten straight times and 18 of the last 19.

In the World Rankings, China has the top four men and top three women in the world, and dominate below that level as well. Only a few countries have an outside chance of occasionally defeating the Chinese in team competition - probably only the German and Japanese men, and the Singapore and Japanese women.

I wrote an article about Chinese domination in Sports Illustrated in June, 1999, and since then the domination has only gotten greater. This leads to a lack of suspense in many major tournaments. As long-time Chinese star Ma Lin said in an article I linked to yesterday, "Before every World Cup (football), no one can confidently say which team will win the championship title because they are just popular. But that is not the case in table tennis because there is no suspense." He also wrote, "The decrease of the competency level of other countries in the world has resulted to the lack of eye-catching competitions and confrontation."​

Contenders for Greatest Of All Time (Men)

There have always been debates about who is the Greatest Of All Time (GOAT). Most end up with a ranking. But a ranking for GOAT is not the same thing as listing the actual contenders. There are players who are arguably among the best of all time, perhaps even top five, who don't really have a good argument for being the actual GOAT. And there are others who might have an argument for being the GOAT who might not make the top five or even top ten list for others.

Also note that "Greatest" is not the same as "Best." Every generation is usually better than the previous one (better techniques, training methods, and equipment), and any modern sponge champion would easily defeat the hardbat champions of the past, as well as the early sponge players. But "Greatest" is a relative term, and so we are looking at how they did relative to their peers. I do take into consideration how strong the competition was. For example, in the very early days of table tennis there simply were not many serious players, and so the level was not very high, and I don't see them as being as "Great" as a more modern player where there are many thousands of players training full-time all over the world. You have to find a balance here, though ultimately it's a judgment call.

Tip of the Week

Pulling Off Big Upsets.

North American Grand Tour Final

I spent the weekend watching and coaching at the Westchester Table Tennis Center in New York, where 16 players from around North American gathered to battle for $10,150. (1^st $3500; 2^nd $1750; 3-4: $850; 5-8: $400; 9-16: $200.) Here's the USATT article by Bill McGimpsey and Ben Nisbet, featuring Eugene Wang (rated 2799), who (as most predicted) won the final in a 4-3 battle over Bob Chen (2730). Here's the USATT page for this five-star event, with results and video. Here are photos from Warren Rosenberg Photography and from JOOLA. Here's the event program booklet.

The North American Tour was started in 2013 by Bruce Liu, and has grown to 25 tournaments from coast to coast. Players earn points based on their results, and the top 16 were invited to the final. Two players couldn't attend, and so two promising players were invited in their place (Nathan Hsu and Crystal Wang). The stated goal of the Tour is to "raise the level of table tennis in the United States by encouraging the best American players to compete in tournaments more often and by attracting top foreign players to the U.S. for Americans to compete against."

Exhausting Weekend

Ever have one of those weekends where you leave early Friday morning for the five-hour drive to the Grand Tour Final in New York, spend that night and the weekend watching spectacular table tennis matches, get back home very late Sunday night, and then stay up until 4AM working on something? Yeah, it was one of those weekends. Plus I've got a zillion emails and a todo list from here to eternity. Let me take today off, and tomorrow I'll blog about the North American Grand Tour Final as well as the Tip of the Week. Meanwhile, here's are a few coaching and news items. (And here are some photos from the Grand Tour Finals - yes, that's me playing with a clipboard on Friday night against Crystal Wang; she won 11-8.)

Forehand Smash

Here's the new coaching video (4:54) from PingSkills.

Ask the Coach - Werner Schlager Academy Version

Here's the video (2:22, in German with English subtitles): What is a good exercise?

Perfecting Tournament Tactical Performance

Here's the new video (8:36) from Coach Brian Pace from Dynamic Table Tennis, which highlights his new Tournament Tactics video.

North Korean Ping-Pong Diplomacy with U.S. Table Tennis Star

Here's the article from TMZ, where Adam Bobrow does a Glenn Cowan with the North Koreans.