History of U.S. Table Tennis VOLUME IV In the summer of 1962, Norman Kilpatrick became the 15th President of the USTTA. His approach to his office initially differed from his hard-working predecessor Rufford Harrison’s in that it was diligently liberal rather than restrictive; it sought to accommodate, not to tight-ship punish. But Kilpatrick’s idealism and integrity did not extend to prolonged USTTA in-group fighting for policies he wanted (and he did want what he wanted); when pressured he became in time thin-skinned. We saw in Vol. III, how when Norman wasn’t elected to take the ailing John Varga’s place as USTTA V.P.—E.C. members in a closed 3-2 vote chose Sol Schiff over him—he immediately resigned his two Committee positions. He said that, without being able to represent his constituents as a V-P who could register a meaningful protest vote, he couldn’t in good faith serve an administration that intended to ban sponge for the 1958-59 season.
Now, after the first half-year of his Presidential term, he felt that people were out to embarrass him and his administration. Vice-President and U.S. Team Captain Schiff, particularly, he felt was a negative force. It raised the question of whether Norman could stay the course.
Like Harrison, who remained on the E.C. as Recording Secretary, and also took over as International Chair, Kilpatrick must be congratulated for not wanting the USTTA to remain isolated from the new techniques that were affecting table tennis the world over. Spurred on by Kilpatrick, Jack Carr, Si Wasserman, and Gene Lee, the U.S. began to at least recognize the importance of coaching. Carr’s Advanced Table Tennis came through several drafts (he himself had never been abroad to actually immerse himself in a world-class tournament), and, though he found it “quite discouraging that none of the very top players either requested a copy of this work, or offered any advice,” he persevered, and eventually the book would come out in both hard and soft covers.
USTTA Coaching Chair Wasserman served as a Consultant for the booklet “How To Improve Your Table Tennis,” one of a series of How To Improve sports instruction aids published by the Athletic Institute, a non-profit Chicago group Harrison had initially contacted. The many illustrative photographs of Chicago teenagers Ken Oler and Pat Havlick in the booklet were reproduced from the Institute’s sound/color slidefilm, “Table Tennis” (one of maybe 25 different sports’ slidefilm kits the Institute had put out). Si’s $.50 booklet, aimed at beginners, would then quickly find new form as one of a series of hard cover books the Athletic Institute would publish.
In line with this sudden surge of interest in coaching—a more or less groping interest, since for the better part of the ‘60’s there would be no follow-up Coaching Program—the USTTA, in addition to having earlier acquired films of the 1955 Rochester National’s and the 1957 Stockholm World’s, purchased a succession of 1960’s Championship films, beginning with the 1961 Peking World’s. Also, the Association bought a “Science of Table Tennis” film with commentary by famed English Coach Jack Carrington who in 1966 would give some well received but poorly attended clinics in Canada. How many of our players ever saw any of these films, let alone profited from them, I can’t say. But advances in technique, such as the “loop drive,” were being talked about in the early ‘60’s in North America.
In Mar., 1963 Kilpatrick, hoping our clubs would be enthusiastic and appreciative, brought two English “loopers” to the U.S. to tour various cities, play in our U.S. Open, and in general engage with our “professionals” (Norm was the first USTTA President to try to make a supportive distinction between amateurs and professionals). One of these Englishmen, Derek Baddeley, explained in a Topics’ “Coach’s Canopy” article addressed to uninitiates—that is, just about everybody in U.S. Table Tennis—how the loop stroke worked (I’ve greatly condensed this one-page article, but you’ll get the general idea):
“…To sum up, the [loop] stroke can only be used really effectively against a chopped return, as it is basically a very exaggerated top-spin drive, and is merely increasing the amount of spin already on the ball.
…[The technique involves contacting the ball] as it drops from the peak of the bounce…at, or slightly below, the level of the table surface, although it is quite possible to take the ball even later than this.
…The back swing should begin very low, near to the floor, following through almost vertically, but inclined slightly forward [“brushing the ball as lightly as possible with the bat”], and finishing overhead. The blade of the bat…should be whipped upwards at great speed, with the body weight transferring [from the back] to the front foot simultaneously…” (May, 1963, 19).
Four-time World Singles Champion Richard Bergmann, touring with the Globetrotters in the U.S., happened to be in the Washington, D.C./Baltimore area when Baddeley and Europe’s early loop-leader Stan Jacobson were playing Americans Erwin Klein and Bobby Fields. Bergmann claimed that this loop, played with reversed sandwich rubber, was “definitely a new stroke, unlike anything he has seen consistently utilized anywhere or anytime during his vast traveling, over many, many years.” Reversed sandwich rubber is used because, as Jacobson explains, “the ‘loop’ requires friction from the rubber to produce its spin, and reversed rubber gives a larger area of rubber with which to contact the ball…than does regular sandwich rubber.”
Bergmann had obviously been away from England and apparently European table tennis for some months, for the loop wasn’t new to former World Champion Johnny Leach. He’d seen Jacobson destroy defensive players in matches that made for very poor table tennis, and had again protested change, as he had earlier the menace of sponge. He’d suggested that the loop be banned before it killed table tennis. But Jacobson (soundly beaten in the quarter’s of the English Closed before coming to the U.S.) said that “this type of poor play lasted for almost two years in England, but finally has produced a most worthwhile evolution in the style of table tennis now played in that nation” (TTT, Apr., 1963, 10). Naturally as the power-loop evolved, the defensive-minded would be at more of a disadvantage, so more and more players would take to looping, counter-looping, and lobbing. Chop and push play would give way to rangy two-wing topspin. This was part of the Sport’s inevitable “Standardization Through Evolution” that Kilpatrick had talked about earlier.
Meanwhile, USTTA Executive Vice-President Herman Prescott, whom Kilpatrick had unsuccessfully favored as U.S. Team Captain to Prague rather than Schiff, had raised funds to help send a 1963 U.S. Junior Team to Europe for matches in various countries and to the French Open in Lyon, which members of our World Team, perhaps sharing some camaraderie with our Juniors, would also attend.
There was nothing at all comradely about Kilpatrick and Schiff’s relationship though; both before and after Sol’s trip to the 1963 World’s there was a bitter exchange between the two that would contribute to Norm’s decision to resign the Presidency. Sol’s negativism, he said, was thwarting his hopes for progress. Better he stop the inevitable E.C. infighting by leaving office.
It may be, however, that Kilpatrick, consciously or unconsciously, realized that, without money, or the wherewithal to raise it, the USTTA wasn’t going to accomplish much, and so, faced with mundane matters and losing interest himself, he found a way, via Schiff, to exit the scene. Certainly President Chuck Burns who replaced Kilpatrick didn’t care about invigorating the Association, and, sad to say, it was lethargic. How apt that Topics Editor Graham Steenhoven could say that Rufford Harrison “is unlikely to find E.C. members with his zeal, drive and capacity for Table Tennis work.” Indeed, here’s Rufford, then the USTTA Equipment Chairman, in an Oct. 25, 1963 letter railing at Burns’s E.C.:
“It is almost a month since I asked you about reducing the price of table seals, and I still cannot write back to Brinktun and tell them whether or not you are in favor. Before some of you delay any longer in replying to that letter, please remember that company does nearly $2000 worth of business with us every year. Offend them, and you could be responsible for our losing that much income. If you really are not interested in the welfare of this Association, might I suggest that you resign so that we can complete the EC with workers instead of dead-wood. With a change of presidents in mid-term, this has been a trying two years, without the complication of an EC that is 50% idle.”
It’s going to be more than a trying short time for U.S. Table Tennis. In talking about England’s melancholy Self-Evaluation Report (no 10,000 spectators at the English Open now), Rufford might as well be talking about where table tennis, or ping-pong, is played publicly in the U.S.:
“…Many affiliated clubs, and almost all other places where table tennis is played, have inferior tables: thin tops, no white lines, splintered edges, battered surfaces, and so on. Very often, they also have insufficient space: too little back-space, too little space between the tables, and almost invariably too little space above them. A third factor, which the report mentions only in passing, is equally important: lighting. Most installations are too dim, not uniform, or, more often, too low” (TTT, Jan.-Feb., 1964, 9). [Rufford urges elsewhere that players contact their local power company regarding what light-intensity fixtures they need—whether they’re playing in a basement or running a two-star tournament in a large hall.]”
Serious problems in France, too, mirror those in the U.S.: “if we do not adapt ourselves to modern Table Tennis we shall be relegated bit by bit to the level of the weakest countries.” Elaborating on this thesis, in an Aug.-Sept., 1964 Topics article reprinted from the English Table Tennis, is Pierre Ceccaldi, President of the French Association. Noting that the “French game is relatively slow and passive,” he goes on to say:
“…The new racket has transformed the game of Table Tennis in its essential elements: trajectory, spins, speed. Table Tennis today is attack, toward which everything trends….
…[The] Chinese, who lead World Table Tennis at the moment [that was 40 years ago], have surpassed the Japanese, who were their teachers, because they realized that the latter’s game using solely forehand attack was incomplete. Their own game uses the whole gamut of Table Tennis strokes, especially attack on the backhand.
…Defence, whether chop or loop, is only a preparation for attack, for an attack which must not be delayed, for whoever first launches a flat-out attack wins the point.
…[Also,] it is no longer permissible to ignore the fact that the service is a weapon. The service serves to (1) prepare the attack; (2) put the opponent in a difficulty; (3) at least prevent him from attacking himself, as good players, especially the Asians, attack any service they can with a minimum of error” (8).
French players, however, unlike U.S. players, have the opportunity to compete against, if not the expert Asians, the best in Europe. The Americans can only be as good as their daily, weekly, monthly, yearly tournament competition—and, as will be all too evident in this decade, they have very little contact with, never mind great, even good players. In an Oct., 1964 Topics article, the USTTA Treasurer, the man who’d been in charge of the International Team Fund, put off by the amount of money the Association spent in sending our 1963 U.S. Team and U.S. Junior Team to Europe, urged that we should “first develop our game at home and then [my italics] perhaps in the future concern ourselves with world development.” He certainly wasn’t going to fund raise for International play.* Our players, therefore, relative to international competition, are weak at this time, and will remain so until the innovative anti-spin play of Danny Seemiller and later Eric Boggan, both ambitiously playing at home and abroad in the 1970’s and ‘80’s.
Through the ‘60’s Rufford, disliking U.S. provincialism, would continue to keep the Membership abreast of t.t. tournaments, rankings, and articles from overseas, especially in times of World Championships which, if a visa were possible, he unfailingly attended. The English magazine, Table Tennis, was always a source of interest. Want to read about Russia’s ’61 European Girls Champion, the penholder Zoya Rudnova? By 1963 she was playing for the Soviets in Prague where reportedly she “frequently served up to five aces in a row.” How was this possible? Here’s USSR National Team Coaches Valentin Ivanov and Sefgei Shprakh to explain:
“…She learned these service shots on a spinning disc: Zoya, with a wooden bat, simulates a real service by slightly touching, and not hitting, the disc and making it spin. The top-spin is perfected on a spinning bicycle wheel. These exercises…call both for academic precision and great endurance. After 12 or 15 minutes of practice with the bike-wheel a player feels just as tired as after a strenuous tournament game” (Nov., 1965, 10).
Of course reading about the newest playing techniques is different from seeing them being employed either in person or on film, and far different from putting them to use on court against savvy opponents.
After coming back from the 1963 World’s to stress the overwhelming superiority of the Chinese men, Rufford had this to say in one of his monthly “Sidelines” Topics’ articles:
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“When hitting, the Chinese feet leave the ground two at a time. The choppers chop on one foot. When hitting a high-bouncing lobbed ball, these fellows take it at the height of its bounce—even if they have to jump a foot and a half to do it. Forget the text-books; you can get the elementary strokes there, but this new stuff just hasn’t reached the book-shelves yet.
Incidentally, the lob-defense is just as standard in Europe and Asia as the chop-defense. Some of our people considered it to be not quite table tennis—exhibition stuff, no less. Whatever it was, we couldn’t beat it, so let’s try to learn from it. The style can win; let’s get our lights raised so that we can play all the strokes, instead of just the old-fashioned ones.
The loop is also valuable. Most Europeans have it, and we can’t afford to neglect it” (May, 1963, 5).
What will happen with our players, though, is that not much will happen—since, as I say, and it bears repeating, this dismal decade they will be out of the “loop,” will not compete against a variety of even 2nd-rate International players. On returning from the 1965 World Championships, Dell Sweeris, one of our most promising players, criticized USTTA members and officers for not having “a definite plan for the improvement of U.S. table tennis.” Young players, he said, need to get “a good start with coaching, training, leagues and tournaments.”
And Dell’s teammate, Jerry Kruskie, made it clear in a Topics article, “Table Tennis 1965,” what U.S. players had to do—they had to spin the ball:
“…Rather than chop [Jerry’s speaking of the Europeans, the very progressive Swedes in particular], they will hit the serve and exchange drives. Most players would take their chances with the exchange rather than play the safe push shot because the low ball is now looped with a great deal of speed and spin….
The loop now has different and deceptive spins….
The Swedes, who are the forerunners of the new techniques and development, are now using a backhand loop….They attempt to loop at the table; when forced back, or if they decide to retreat, they lob and loop from everywhere in the court and challenge the attacker to hit through them” (Dec., 1965-Jan., 1966, 12).
Kruskie, who’d abruptly disappear from the Sport, felt that “our two years deficit could be made up in two months” if our top men could play against Europe’s best. By the mid-‘60’s it wasn’t a question of not knowing the Sport’s advances, but of how our players could get into the action and be part of the Spin advance.
Herman Prescott, who’d championed the young and urged them to go abroad, would resign his Presidency, at least in part for health reasons, for he’d suffered severe hypertension from the time he’d first taken office. His successor, Richard Feuerstein, whose diligent organizational work had largely been confined to his local St. Charles, Missouri area, hadn’t Sweeris’s vision about bringing the U.S. back into the Sport.
Dell, though not on the USTTA E.C., took E.C. responsibility—urged action. In an article in Topics, he said: (1) “We are financially unsound”: “we cannot pay or compensate our executives or send our good players to national and international tournaments.” Said (2) Unless our E.C. “can clearly see the desires of the players they represent,” there will be no progress. Said (3) “Our players are losing interest,” especially our young players. “They feel that there is no future in table tennis” (Oct., 1965, 14).
Sweeris might also have pointed out how apathetic the Membership was: in the E.C. election of 1966, every one of the four candidates for office ran unopposed. Eventually, though, with Tim Boggan’s 13-year Editorship of a greatly enlarged and sometimes controversial Topics (first issue: July-August, 1970), the Membership would have a much larger input and so would feel their individual thoughts and feelings about the Game mattered more.
Real Table Tennis now demanded fast footwork, mobility, and speed of stroke. But who—before or even after South Korean International D-J Lee began his dominating play in the U.S.—were still contesting our National’s? Bukiet (U.S. Open Champion at 47, U.S. Open finalist at 52, U.S. World Team member at 54); Jack Howard (U.S. Open finalist at 37); and Miles (U.S. Open semifinalist at 40). And among the U.S. Open women semifinalists as late as 1968, more than 20 years after they were already U.S. Open Champions: Neuberger and Chotras.
Moreover, to realize that 1 of our 3 women to play at the 1967 Stockholm World’s was Neuberger, and 4 out of our 6 men were Klein, Miles, Gusikoff, and Reisman, is to understand that whatever juniors we have, if we ever want to make them players, will sure need a lot of seasoning. In 1963 our Men’s Team finished 10th; in 1971 they’d finish 28th. In 1965 we didn’t even send a Women’s Team, and in 1971 they’d finish 21st.
Of course we had some world-class players come to our shores, but they quickly came and went. European Champion Hans “Hasse” Alser and South American Champion Ubiraci “Biriba” da Costa participated in our first nationally televised tournament—the Jan., 1964 Eastern Open. Although Alser didn’t lose a game to da Costa or anyone else, and Kilpatrick enthused about Hasse’s lob defense, it was really Biriba’s off-the-bounce penhold attack that most excited Norman:
“…Costa had defeated America’s national champion with a hurricane of pen-hold forehand and backhand drives, from side to side, which left Bukiet vainly moving to the wrong side time after time. Certainly there has not been a display of hitting and counter-hitting like this on North American soil since World War II, at least” (TTT, Mar., 1964, 3).
Not only had our U.S. players been deficient in learning the new techniques, but who among them, or among our embryonic coaches was stressing rigorous physical preparation, training? Alser, in an article that appeared in the 1964 National Team Championship Program, stated still another reason why the U.S. was falling behind:
“…I do not think the US players train as hard as we do in Europe. We train like track-and-fielders, runners and swimmers, which means twice a day nearly the year round….Of course I know the Asian players train even more…” (12).
No better example of which is Japan’s consummate player/coach Ogimura. In talking about the necessity of Condition Training, Ogi emphasizes that “it is not the player with only a command of the technique who is successful, but the true competitor, who has taken the trouble to care for his circulation and respiratory systems, his musculature and his central nervous system” (TTT, Oct., 1967, 10).
And here’s Time magazine suggesting why, aside from their marvelous skill, the Chinese have won three straight World Championships:
“…‘These Chinese,’ marveled Japan’s former World Champion Ichiro Ogimura, ‘play basketball and volleyball and do special exercises. They practice gymnastics to develop agility, lift weights to build up certain muscles.’ They also keyed themselves to fever pitch emotionally. China’s Hsu Yin-sheng explained that his forehand was so powerful because he looked on a Ping-Pong ball ‘as though it were the head of Chiang Kai-shek’” (May 7, 1965).
Heinz Becker, Youth Chairman, TTVN, Germany, in speaking of player development, says ‘Everything must be practiced in training sessions so that eventually we have, not a half, but a complete player. For a player with only a forehand is only half a player” (TTT, Sept., 1966, 9). But France’s National Trainer Charles Roesch says after talking with Chinese trainer Chou Jen-long that…
“…The Chinese place no value at all on all-round ability, since it is impossible to conquer all strokes to the highest degree of perfection….The essence of the Chinese system, therefore, is that their players learn fewer elements of the game, but they learn them with absolute certainty, a certainty that is decisive” (TTT, Apr., 1967, 9).
Compared to the Chinese, what kind of coaching, training, and conditioning, what motivation, have our U.S. players?
Or, since we won’t be seeing the Chinese until the ‘70’s, I might just as easily substitute the late-60’s world-champion Japanese. Only in the latter half of the decade did U.S. Table Tennis seriously start to try to catch up with World Table Tennis. Dick Yamaoka’s coaching articles and sequence photographs from Hikosuke Tamasu’s Butterfly Table Tennis Report reprinted in Topics helped illustrate the disparity. For example, Dick shows us frames of 1967 World Champion Hasegawa serving, and describes how, when he goes into a crouched position to serve, his free hand deliberately hidden under the table, by changing the speed of the ball thrown, can deceptively change the spin. That is, with “a very small, sharp movement of the racket at the moment of impact, effective backspin, side spin, and even top spin services can be delivered.” Thus many a receiver, like those uninitiated players reading Dick’s description here, can but guess what the ball is doing (TTT, Nov., 1966, 6). Dick also points out, so important are the serves, that in a mid-‘60’s meet between Japan and China (with China’s serves technically legal but of devilish ingenuity) “more than 80% of the points were determined before the fifth ball.”
Gradually, the U.S. began to get with it a little. Canada’s Expo ’67 and Geza Gazdag’s ’67-‘69 New York City Invitationals brought half a dozen visiting world-class players to North America (“the most exciting thing that has happened to table tennis in this country,” said former National Champion Bobby Gusikoff). Also of great importance was the coming of the world-class South Korean Dal-Joon Lee to settle in Ohio, and the clinics offered in several parts of the U.S. by the famous Japanese player/coach Ichiro Ogimura.
Dell Sweeris, one of the decade’s two most homegrown visionary player/coaches (Jack Howard was the other), urged prize money tournaments, even tried to start a Professional Association. And perhaps aficionados could be at least a little encouraged by the slow beginnings of play-for-pay events around the country. The availability of Detroit’s huge Cobo Hall for major tournaments and, following Graham Steenhoven’s lead, a well-organized Michigan TTA to run them, was a boon to the Sport—the seemingly unlimited number of tables and events allowing more and more players to become interested in tournament play, especially with the prospect of Howard instituting a nation-wide computerized system to rate them.
By the time the decade drew to an end, the USTTA had set up an International Squad from which a U.S. Team would be sent both to the 1969 Munich and 1971 Nagoya World’s. And then of course there would follow the U.S. Oddity, or Odyssey, of “Ping-Pong Diplomacy”—which I intend to cover separately in Volume V.
SELECTED NOTES.
*I hasten to point out, however, that this same Treasurer, Herb Schindler, Jr., while I think wrong-headed in urging isolationism, was also right-headed in the following way:
“I propose that winners of an event such as the U.S. Open be given from $500 to $750.00, and the runner-up and semi-finalists lesser amounts. Similar procedures could be followed for 3-Star tournaments. To the best of my knowledge, no sport has ever been successful in the United States without financial gain to the participants. This probably would automatically give us very badly needed free publicity. Classes other than men could also be included in the above plan. Our Junior development program certainly could use more funds. It is my belief that all of this could be accomplished at no increase in our overall expenditures and with real benefits to our game” (9).
Schindler’s unique suggestion of offering considerable prize money to winners of the U.S. Open and other major tournaments—which no one took very seriously at the time—was subject to the same argument he himself had raised against sending U.S. Teams abroad. Only a relative few (professionals, you might say) would benefit. Although he didn’t specify where this prize money was going to come from, he was thinking correctly. Money talks, so gives incentives to our players and at the same time makes the Sport seem more important in the U.S.—a view akin to Bobby Gusikoff’s that overseas players should not be invited to the U.S. Open because our National’s should be won by an American player. Ideally, but impossibly, won by a native-born iconic figure—the Bobby Fischer of the Table Tennis World.
Though Schindler and others couldn’t foresee it, the prize money, when it happens, will open up the Game, increase the prestige of the Open, bring foreign players to our shores, make our officials see anew the necessity for International play, and—with just one U.S. native-born player, Eric Boggan, winning that Open from 1974 on—will lead to Gusikoff’s American Champion via an annual U.S. Closed. Thus, both players and spectators will have benefited from the expansion.
