Aside from the usual sports in which boys here in the United States participate, such as football and softball, I played a lot of table tennis and badminton. My father was a good table tennis player from his days in the U. S. Army. He taught me how to play. I started out using a hard rubber paddle, which was common in the middle 1950s. I used a defensive block-and-kill style similar to my father's. This required a great deal of agility on my part to run down and return some hard shots. I possessed the requisite agility until I suffered a back injury in Judo as a senior in high school. I couldn't play table tennis (or anything else) for some time afterwards. While my back did heal, more or less, I never regained the agility I enjoyed prior to the injury.
When I started playing again, I switched to inverted rubber on my paddle. I adopted a variation on my old block-and-kill style which did not require so much agility. I now counterhit hard drives directly off the table rather than retreating and waiting for them to die down as I had done previously. I played with Sriver S on the forehand side and Sriver L on the backhand. Occasionally I played with Cobra rubber on both sides, but I liked the Sriver better. Much later I switched to TSP 730 black and red. I also tried both Mark V and Panda spin factor, but I could not control incoming spin very well with these two rubbers, so I returned to TSP 730. That rubber had the best combination of control and spin of any I ever used.
I continued to play table tennis regularly up until about ten years ago. By then all my regular partners had moved away. I've hardly played at all since. I still like to watch good players. Unfortunately, there aren't as many table tennis clubs in Chicago as there used to be, and very few table tennis matches are televised anymore.
I don't recall when I first learned to play badminton. I remember playing a lot with some neighbors as a young child, so perhaps they were the instigators. I haven't played badminton at all in at least seventeen years.
Canupnet - Table Tennis - Crafts - Images and More! by Terry Canup, and umpire for the ITTF, offers an enormous collection of links to table tennis sites all over the world.
International Table Tennis Federation (ITTF) lists pro tours, world rankings, and international results; offers its handbook and an electronic version of "Table Tennis Illustrated," the official journal of the ITTF; and provides links to table tennis sites.
Newsgroup rec.sport.table-tennis discusses the sport of table tennis.
Table Tennis FAQs answer frequently asked questions about the sport, including rules, news about table tennis in the United States, a club handbook and directory, and associations affiliated with the International Table Tennis Federation (ITTF).
Table Tennis (TT) Page by N. Sukumar here at Northwestern lists mail order stores for table tennis equipment, offers images of Swedish table tennis players, and provides links to other table tennis sites.
Table Tennis Pro by Donald Winze offers table tennis robots and tables, coaching help, advice, and more.
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Last modified by pib on March 22, 2000.