INTRODUCTION | DEDICATION | Acknowledgements

 

            In my last few volumes, I’ve been pretty upbeat about the ups and downs of what’s been happening in U.S. table tennis. But others have not always felt this way. Here’s Lou Bochenski who, as we’ve seen, has risked his and his family’s future in establishing and successfully running his Paddle Palace Club:

 

            “…Table tennis in this country has long suffered because of lack of guidance and action of the USTTA. This was partly because the USTTA has been run by volunteers [including for a time Lou himself] with part-time management and constant bickering among the EC members. Those with the most imagination and who worked the hardest were constantly under attack from jealousy, personality conflicts, and other reasons. Too often the EC members were too intent on keeping the status quo. From lack of change we often stagnated.”

 

            Of course this is a man whose solvency has been dependent on the survival of his Portland, OR Club, and who’s been disillusioned and saddened by the USTTA’s failure to secure the 1979 World Championships which went instead to North Korea. But though Lou and his Club will not get the publicity advantages an imminent World Championships would have brought him, the movement in U.S. table tennis I’ve been pointing out continues. Indeed, by 1979, Lou’s Paddle Palace will no longer exist; he will lease a site to Portlanders for a new Club; and, buying up another’s inventory, will concentrate on building up his Paddle Palace Table Tennis Company’s sales.

            In my Intro to Vol. VIII, I’d said, regardless of my personal passions—my interest in professional-minded play-for-pay tournaments here and abroad, in seeing the competitive advance of my sons, in making the USTTA’s Topics worldly—I wasn’t against USTTA amateur growth. Growth as might be noted “in a proliferation of clubs, leagues, interscholastic and community-based recreation competition.” As you’ve seen in these history volumes, I’ve always been committed, not without controversy, to allowing any USTTA member or groups of members to express a point of view in our magazine. I’d said, with regard to dedicating oneself to a USTTA build-up in grass roots play, in increased Association membership, “Somebody go ahead, bring it about, a consortium of the interested do it.”

            Well, Ron Shirley and his friends were certainly interested in doing it. It was soon obvious with the establishment of his TTCA (Table Tennis Club of America), and then the publication of Ron’s Table Tennis magazine, that he was really, though denying it, creating a rivalry with the USTTA. And if that didn’t advance his advance-table-tennis-in-the-United-States cause and his own centrist place in it, there was an accompanying alternative—wrest USTTA control from the Eastern bloc influence of Boggan, Miles, the Players Association, and establish a Southwestern power.

            Running the 1978 Open—again in Oklahoma City—helped. But control of the E.C and Topics was essential. If the USTTA was going to increase its membership and if those like himself in the table tennis business were to sell much more equipment, all those non-USTTA amateur-minded players had to be appealed to. A stumbling block for the manufacturers and distributors which they’d had to recognize, like it or not, was that the USTTA was really elitist. The Association was for tournament players, and of course, since relatively speaking there weren’t many of them, they didn’t provide a satisfactory market. Yet, paradoxically, Shirley knew that what his prospective non-USTTA members wanted to read were stories and photos of the best professional players and coaches—so he did the best he could with assists from the Seemiller brothers, Ogimura, and his Yasaka connections.

            But, also paradoxically, Table Tennis, though it published some encouraging letters (“Finally someone has published a magazine the way it SHOULD be published”), it just couldn’t get the membership it needed. It may be that an in-group exchange of divergent views was more “Club-like” in the USTTA magazine than in the Table Tennis Club of America one. USTTA readers were exclusive, an in-group family of tournament-goers that had their geographical sections in Topics. Boggan, who wanted to continue being the Editor and had a USTTA contract to do so, was not relinquishing the magazine, despite efforts to unseat him through proposing a new Editor, and casting (though not enough) E.C. votes against Tim’s continued appointment. 

            The 1977 election of E.C. officers was historic. It brought in a slate of officials—Ron Shirley, Fred Danner, Bowie Martin, and Jack Carr—committed to getting the manufacturers’ financial support for a USTTA Executive Director. They chose Bill Haid, who had experience in lithography, printing, and marketing, and a sports background, both as a player and official. He was also an agreeable choice to the Southwest’s Ron Shirley, Gene and Sue Sargent, Stan Robens, and Tom Wintrich, a potential new Topics Editor. Satisfied with Bill, the manufacturers provided the USTTA with $30,000 a year for 1978 and 1979 to pay Bill’s $10,000 yearly salary and set up a headquarters in the St. Louis area.

            Here’s Haid in his first “For The Record” column (TTT, Mar.-Apr., 1978, 4):

 

            The present Executive Committee, acknowledging this [USTTA] dormant stage of so many years [sic], has decided to shake the rafters and lift Table Tennis into the forefront—make it the popular sport it so richly deserves to be. The driving forces towards this goal are Sol Schiff and Bowie Martin. Bowie has so impressed fellow manufacturers of Table Tennis equipment with this fact [referent?] that he was instrumental in the mailing of the necessary donations [the mailing was important?] towards igniting this program into its initial stage. We need this same support from all Manufacturers, from all Committee Chairmen, and of course from every member and player in the USTTA.

            As the new Executive Director of the USTTA, I refuse to bow to the circumstances of the past and will tackle the situation, working for growth until Table Tennis is recognized as a major sport.

            IT”S TIME THIS SLEEPING GIANT IS AWAKENED.”

 

            This not exactly ringing rhetoric, with its hint of a fairy tale wish come true, or not true, depending on what the giant’s like, is linked to Stan Robens’s “Development Fund Drive” that seeks to raise $1,000,000. All that is needed, dear USTTA readers, is “your personal contribution, your table tennis club’s contribution, and your time and effort in soliciting donations from individuals and companies.” That’s all? Think this giant will be awakened? Maybe better not bother it.

            Thanks to Fred Danner’s inexhaustible efforts, however—including a let’s-get-this-straight correspondence with ITTF Secretary Tony Brooks that the USTTA was not, as Brooks had been led to believe, opposed to adding Table Tennis to the Olympic Games—the E.C. initiated our Association’s connections with the U.S. Olympic Committee and eventually to table tennis acquiring a permanent office in Colorado Springs. Danner explains (TTT, Sept.-Oct., 1977, 11; 14) that with the passage of the Tax Revenue Reform Act of 1976, the USTTA became eligible for tax-exempt status as an “amateur sports organization that fosters national and international competition.” The Association was now about to move in a so-called “amateur” direction. The U.S. Olympic Committee (USOC) was named, under a House of Representatives Revenue Bill, as the new U.S. “Central Sports Organization” (CSO)—and so had authority “over all U.S. amateur sports bodies.” Danner, the amateur-minded E.C. member assigned as liaison with the USOC, was of course interested and instrumental in facilitating a CSO-USTTA connection.

            As usual, he knew what he was doing—was alertly successful in getting Table Tennis to be the first USOC Group C sport, be eligible for the Pan-Am Games, and, in conjunction with the inroads and follow-ups ITTF President Roy Evans had been making for a reported eight years, might be said to have initiated, or at least helped to initiate, Table Tennis’s eventual entry into the 1988 Olympics. To read Fred’s hundreds-of- pages of Work-in-Progress Memoirs is to see in or out of our Sport his unrelenting struggle to thwart bumbling bureaucrats who, lazily, disinterestedly, delay his reasonable requests. The creative persistency he shows in accomplishing his aims is admirable.  

            Meanwhile, at the 1977 Birmingham World’s, the ITTF under President H. Roy Evans, was making History (see Bulletin 151, Sept., 1977, reprinted in TTT, Nov.-Dec., 1977, 5). Prompted by cries of “shamateurism,” it had avoided for 42 years the distinction between amateur and professional and regarded all who took part as “players.” Each National Association had been “free to make their own rules regarding payment to players.” Now, however, the many new member-countries of the ITTF, particularly those in Asia, Africa, and the Americas (where countries want to play in the Pan-American Games), needed the financial and development help membership in the Olympic “family” could give them. Plus the fact that maybe Table Tennis would one day be in the Olympics. So they successfully voted in at the ITTF Meeting in Birmingham the proposal that an “amateur” be defined “according to Article 26 of the IOC Constitution and its by-laws.” This meant that each player the world over had to choose to be labeled either a professional or an amateur, and that each ITTF member-country had to keep two rosters.

            The IOC/USOC knew sports was a big business. To counteract the cry that “shamateurism” was back, those in the Olympic movement, including the ITTF, tried to maintain integrity, credibility, by liberalizing the definition of an amateur. Here’s what Evans, speaking for the ITTF (and the USTTA), said was now acceptable payment to an “amateur”:

 

Payments

            “…Assistance administered through the National Olympic Committee or National Association for traveling, subsistence, pocket money for incidental expenses, personal sports equipment and clothing, cost of medical treatment, physiotherapy, and authorized coaching and insurance coverage in respect of accident, illness, disability and loss of personal property;

            Compensation authorized by his National Olympic Committee or National Association, in case of necessity, for financial loss resulting from his absence from work or other basic occupation in which to take part in any competition held under the auspices of the International Olympic Committee or the ITTF, provided that in no circumstances does the amount of compensation exceed the amount which the player would have earned during the same period.

            Prizes won in competition within the limits already laid down by the ITTF. [Those prize-money limits are, importantly, what? Evans doesn’t say—it’s a thorny question].”

 

            There followed what was not acceptable for an amateur:

 

            “Be, or ever have been, a professional athlete (or player) in any sport or have entered into a contract to that end and before the closure of any competition which he has entered as an amateur;

            Be, or ever have been, a professional coach or trainer in any sport, although he may be a physical education or sports teacher who gives elementary training;

            Have allowed his person, name, picture or sports performance to be used for advertising, except under any contract for sponsorship or equipment which the ITTF, his National Olympic Committee or his National Association enters into, any payment under such contract being made to the contracting organization and not to the individual.

            He may not carry advertising material on his person or clothing in any competition held under the auspices of the IOC, either than trade marks or technical equipment or clothing as agreed between the IOC and the ITTF.

            He may not accept payment, reward, benefit or allowances for playing except as provided under “Payments” above.

            A player shall be classified as professional if he accepts any payment, reward, benefit or allowances other than those specified above either directly or by means of a fictitious, apparent or sham profession….”

           

            Though these regulations aren’t as restrictive as the 13 no-no’s the 1932-33 New York TTA Handbook wanted to enforce (see Vol. I, 60-61), they’re restrictive enough. What now of the heretofore burgeoning prize money tournaments? Will they go the way of the dodo?

            Quite the contrary. Gradually the “shamateurism” disguise would be more and more dropped until it wasn’t even appropriate to call an Olympian an “amateur.”* Certainly the Seemiller brothers weren’t going to think of themselves as amateurs. In July, 1977, Danny told a Daily Oklahoman reporter he made a “decent living (around $15,000 to $20,000 a year and a little extra money from endorsements [also Danny, don’t forget the over $9,000 total you made from the 1977 and ’78 World Racquets Championships—and you didn’t even play Table Tennis in those!]”). Here’s professional-minded Danny just returned from playing on the U.S. Team at the Oct., 1977 Hong Kong Invitational:

 

            “What a great trip...being treated first class all the way. What a difference! Actually being thought of as top professional athletes—that’s something we’re often not used to in the U.S.

            Hong Kong was just fantastic. The competition was of the very highest quality, and we were given the red-carpet treatment the whole time we were there. We stayed at one of their finest hotels and had a limousine for own private use whenever we wanted it.” [Actually, the “amateurs” were treated the same way.]

           

            Want to share Carl Danner’s 1977 conclusion? “People who have money, who can allocate money for sports must be educated to “see what an enjoyable sport table tennis really is. You can have all the prize money you want and promote meaningless events to non-existent spectators, but without a wide base and real places to play, U.S. table tennis will never be more than the shabby second-rate spectacle it is now.”

            IS that what it is now? What it was? What it’s come to? Dr. Michael Scott opened the Topics floodgates with his July-Aug.,1978 article “Let’s Save Our Sport,” then others—agreeing or disagreeing that our Sport is threatened by the “malignancy” Michael speaks of—rushed to follow. Scott complains that “Our equipment is not sufficiently standardized….The differences in so-called official I.T.T.F. approved balls and rubber are so disparagingly different that we are really playing a variety of different games under the collective description of table tennis.” Chicago’s Ted Markey agrees: “No other sport allows such a diversity of equipment that so totally alters the characteristics of the game.” Unless a change is forthcoming, he says, “I too will join many others who’ve abandoned table tennis for other sports where just an opponent’s equipment won’t afford him such an advantage.”

            But Delaware’s Dick Blaner argues that to compete against a younger player, an older player “must use his wits, his mind, his cunning in order to upset the youthful player’s rhythm, strokes, and overall game.” He defends the use of combination rubber, says it’s not so easy to flip different sides of the racket effectively, not so easy to play with “Phantom, Feint, Antispins, with different sponge thicknesses, and on different ply and different wood blades!...You must learn altogether new strokes, new spins….Using such a racket is actually a science and must be studied.” This new technology, he says, offers an older player a chance to defeat an opponent “who is better only because of his youth and physical abilities.” Blaner believes that if the younger player is really basically better than the older player he will win—that is, I’d have to add, if he has sufficient opportunity to get used to what he’s playing against.

            Scott fears it’s too late for standardization—the manufacturers have control. He wishes the U.S.T.T.A. could act independently from the I.T.T.F. But our present E.C., though “composed of fine people,” consists of several “who represent various manufacturers of equipment so I can’t imagine they’ll endorse my views too enthusiastically because of their conflicts of interest.” The proliferation of rubbers is as controversial as sponge was on first coming into the hard bat world. Scott has allies— those who abhor the deception that’s now part of the game. It’s not skill, it’s trickery, they say. It’s unfair, it’s unsportsmanlike, it’s playing “dirty.” So the simplistic cry rings out, “Let’s Clean Up Our Sport!” To be countered by the complication inherent in the USTTA’s new pitch-line “Discover the Sport You’ve Always Played.”

            This equipment controversy we’ll continue to follow, for it’s here to stay. Perhaps, as Carl Danner hopes, people can be persuaded to see modern-day table tennis as enjoyable, but perhaps, such has been the drastic evolution, too many can’t. Still, if a wide table tennis base doesn’t exist, will never exist, and there are few real places to play, does that mean I shouldn’t be writing Vol. IX?  Or that I or anyone else shouldn’t be trying to do not what we can’t do for the Sport but what we can do?

            Fortunately for the professionally-minded members of the U.S. World Team, the movement for prize money in North American tournaments doesn’t seem to have been curtailed. True, the ITTF has ruled at the ‘77 moment that a “player may not accept prize money in any one event in excess of 1,250 Swiss Francs” and still retain his amateur status. But so what? 1977 saw the $2,500 Harvard Eastern Open, the $1,200 Ocean State Classic, the $3,500 CNE Open, the $4,220 U.S. Open (reduced to $3,870, though lots of unpaid prize winners, for Tournament Director Gusikoff quickly “ran out of money”), the $1,000 Atlanta Fall Open, the $2,700 Nissen Open, the $4,000 Detroiter-Yasaka Invitational, the $5,000 USOTC’s, the $1,000 Miami Beach Open, and the $12,500 Caesars Palace U.S. Closed.

            In 1978 we had the $2,500 Pacific Coast Open, the $1,200 Lehigh Valley Open, the $4,000 Eastern Open, the $1,250 Albuquerque Manzano Open, the $2,000 Louisiana Open, the $5,000 U.S. Open, the $2,500 Nissen Open, the CNE’s (at which one individual alone, Danny Seemiller, made $625), the $1,000 Louisville Open, the $1,300 Atlanta Fall Open, the $3,500+ USOTC’s, and the $13,500 Caesars Palace Closed. The appearance of such tournament prize money—the 1979 U.S. Open will offer $15,000—didn’t happen in a table tennis stagnant time.

            The difficulty, a constant, will be for the U.S. to continue to try to catch up with the most progressive opportunities gradually offered the table tennis professional in other parts of the world. In the U.S., money talks, allows a sport to be taken seriously. Thirty years later, a press release from the ITTF announces, “The 2009 Kuwait and Qatar Open will have new record prize money of U.S. $300,000. The winner of the Men’s and Women’s Singles event will receive $30,000 respectively….The prize money has been extended to the round of 32 in the Men’s and Women’s Singles.”

            During 1977-’78 there were some opportunities—not enough—for U.S. players to go abroad. In 1977, at the Birmingham, England World’s, our U.S. Men’s and Women’s Teams advanced to First Division play; Insook Bhushan won the Women’s at the Benson and Hedges “Love Bird” Invitational in Kingston, Jamaica; U.S. Men’s and Women’s Teams participated in the Maccabiah Games at Tel Aviv, Israel; D-J/He-ja Lee signed up for League play in Germany; and a Men’s Team went to Hong Kong and afterwards to Tehran for a U.S-Iran  Match.

            In 1978, George Brathwaite reached the Men’s final in the Caribbean Championships, and won the Barbados Invitational; Robert Compton spent a week in England at the Tees Sport Summer School coached by the best of English professionals; a U.S. Men’s Team visited Trinidad/Tobago and played Matches at five different locations in that country; and a U.S. Women’s Team took part in the Korea-Germany-U.S. Women’s Goodwill Games at Seoul, South Korea. In 1979, the highlight trip for our players was the combined one that took them to Pyongyang, North Korea for the World Championships, and to Peking, China for Friendship Matches. With this trip, the Boggan brothers joined the Seemiller brothers for a perennial run as members of the National Men’s Team.

            Also, in 1978, the U.S. Junior Team—Rutledge Barry, Jimmy Lane, and Eric and Scott Boggan—went to Stockholm for the Swedish Junior Open. Hosted there by Nisse Sandberg and his Angby Club, they had some success. Seventeen-year-old Scott would then reach the Men’s final at the Toronto CNE’s. But.15-year-old brother Eric would one-up him—making USTTA history at the 1978 U.S. Closed. By upsetting Defending Champion Danny Seemiller he became our youngest-ever National Men’s Champion—and promptly declared himself, or his father did for him, a professional. Also, there were other meaningful Junior happenings. In 1978 not only did Quang Bui go to Japan to improve his game, but Scott Butler and, following him at the beginning of 1979, Sean O’Neill and John Stillions were off to Sweden for tournaments and training.

            Further, Butterfly-sponsored Danny Seemiller, mindful of his upcoming play at the Pyongyang World’s, took the opportunity in Feb., ’79 to train in Japan for two weeks with former World Champions Hasegawa and Itoh, and then share his diary of those days with us.

            Pyongyang! It had been at least a quarter of a century since U.S. citizens walked those streets. Readers will see in this volume what kind of World Championships that strange country held. Of more than corollary importance was our accompanying stay in China on this North Korea trip. It allowed (and more of this in my next volume) Fred Danner, joined by USTTA President Sol Schiff and Team Leader Gus Kennedy, to arrange a high-level May, 1979 meeting with Sung Chung, head of the All-China Sports Committee, in which China changed their previous policy of boycotting the Olympics and agreed to participate in the Games with Taiwan (“as long as neither one used the former flag and anthem of the Republic of China”). A decision was reached where the U.S. would pursue China’s interest in getting into the Olympic Games, while China, abetted by USTTA President Schiff, would use its influence to restore membership of South Korea in the Asian Sports Federation.      

            Danner, as the Group C Delegate for Table Tennis, could argue to USOC Executive Director F. Don Miller “that we can’t have true World Olympic Champions while we exclude a quarter of the world’s population from participating in the Games.” Fred of course knew that as “a Group C Member Table Tennis didn’t get any Olympic Development Funds, but as a Group A Member we would get a full share of these funds.” So if China joined the Olympic Games, Table Tennis could not be far behind.  

            Thus, in U.S. Table Tennis the decade of the 1970’s, more than any other since the Association was organized in the 1930’s, continues to show not lethargy but movement, and this despite 1978’s worst debacle of USTTA Election apathy in the Association’s history—forced apathy by unwise, restrictive who-can-and-cannot-run-for-office laws.

            I think readers of this volume will conclude that in the U.S. there’s been an increased outreach to both the amateur and professional player. The 1960’s isolating, paralyzing parochialism has given way to a worldly understanding of how not the game but the Sport is played. 

           

SELECTED NOTES.

            *IOC changes will come…though slowly. In 1981 (see Newsday, Oct. 2, 1981), “after electing 331 male members in the 87 years of its existence, the International Olympic Committee elected its first woman yesterday….

            Meanwhile, the IOC, acting under the leadership of its new President, Juan Antonio Samaranch of Spain, also voted to liberalize Olympic eligibility rules, turning over to the various international sports federations much more responsibility for setting their own rules on who can compete in the Olympics.

            Samaranch said that while the IOC intends that professional athletes be banned from the Games, it no longer is proper to use the word “amateur” to describe all the competitors. Under the revised Rule 26, athletes will be permitted to receive subsidies, and athletes from Western countries will be placed on a more even footing with those of the East.

            The rule change was initiated by runner Sebastian Coe of Great Britain, who told the IOC in a speech Monday that modern athletes are forced to make sacrifices to train full time to attain Olympic standards and should be compensated. Coe reportedly is the first athlete in Olympic history to initiate a major rule change.”