A Homage to Mr Miles by Marv Leff

 This is such a sad day for Table Tennis players both hardbat and sponge
    alike that our greatest native born American Table Tennis Player of all time
    has left our presence and seems to leave an obvious gapping wound in all
    those that knew Dick Miles and those that admired him from afar through his
    legendary reputation as a giant killer with an impenetrable defense and
    a magnificent cat like attack forehand. He was a very special talent in our
    beloved sport and an intellect on many levels on a number of subjects. He
    will be greatly missed by us all.  My deepest sympathy's to his family,
    close friends and the world of Table Tennis enthusiasts throughout the
    world.  Rest in Peace Dick, you will remain alive in our hearts.

   -- Marv

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In Memoriam

 DICK MILES (1925-2010) by USATT Historian Tim Boggan

            It wasn’t at Lawrence’s fabled 54^th St. Broadway Courts that Dick Miles learned his first, career-turning table tennis lesson. It was at Mitch Karelitz’s Club at 76^th and Broadway, and from a fellow teenager named Billy Levinson. “Dick,” said Billy, “you’re smothering your forehand. You’re hitting on top of the ball—that’s why it’s going into the net so much.” “Ordinarily,” says Dick, “I wouldn’t have listened to him—wouldn’t have listened to anybody. But I could see he was saying this in a nice way, was trying to help me. So I changed my forehand, learned to hit underhand, and this helped my game a lot.” Underhand. That is, racket-head down, in the manner of a penholder.

            Jack Carrington, the famous English Coach, mentor to World Champion Johnny Leach, describes the unique world-class forehand that Dick evolved: “The ‘Miles Forehand’ threatens to become as famous as the ‘Barna Backhand.’ It is produced by an unbelievably fast circular whip of the forearm and wrist….[If you] try to follow the bat with your eye, you will find it almost impossible. The effect is a fast bounding ball with twice as much topspin as most players use.” And Bill Price, table tennis and Wimbledon-winning tennis coach adds: “Miles, if you watch closely, has a very compact swing. The fact that he takes a sort of loop on the backswing of his forehand causes people to think that he has a real long stroke. But watch his elbow, notice how close to his side he keeps it all through his forehand drive. This gives a feeling of compactness.”

            Young Miles’s addiction to the Sport could be confirmed when at another club he first saw the expatriate world-class Hungarians, Bellak, Hazi, and Glanz, play. “They were hitting balls, warming up, enjoying themselves, talking and laughing in a very intimate, in-group way about their strokes and styles. It impressed me very much that they had a private table tennis language I didn’t understand—that table tennis itself had such a language—and I wanted to know more.”

            And he did get to know more. Later, Dick would attend a university, would be an avid reader (James Joyce’s Ulysses was a great favorite), would be a music and film buff, a writer for Sports Illustrated, a TV colorman for Wide World of Sports, and a world-respected table technician and author. But at one point in his teens he quit DeWitt Clinton High School, would sleep till about two in the afternoon, and would then get up to put in his 11-hour day, or, if it were a Friday, 15-hour day, at Lawrence’s. The Club generally opened around 1:00 p.m. and closed around 3:00 a.m., or later if money matches were still being played. Dick says in those days it was usually safe to come home in the wee hours of the morning. Sometimes, however, there was a problem:

            “My grandmother who lived with my mother and me,” he says, “was a very strict and strong-willed person. Because she so strenuously objected to my obsession with table tennis, she’d periodically lock me out of our Riverside Drive apartment, bolt the door so my key wouldn’t do me any good, and muffle the sound of the doorbell. It’s a terrible thing for a teenager to go back home and find his grandmother has packed his bag and put it out in the hallway in front of a locked door. Some nights I’d be sitting out there in the hall crying until finally someone would open the door and I’d hear my grandmother yell at me, ‘You’re a bum! We don’t want a bum in the family!’”

            Dick also met derogation when in 1945 he played in his first U.S. Open final. “I was a skinny 111 pounds and had a big nose,” he said. (This was before Dick’s cosmetic surgery, forever immortalized in Bobby Gusikoff’s line, “When Miles lost his nose, he lost his forehand.”). “There must have been 3,500 spectators watching this final,” said Dick, “and the crowd was so much for the clean-cut, good-looking Defending Champion Johnny Somael, Polish not Jewish, that on the first point of the match when Johnny scored a net ball, there was great applause. I made no attempt to conceal my irritation, for I thought the audience showed very poor sportsmanship. I was always very conscious of such things, since I myself always wanted to be a good sportsman and believe that I was.”

            Michigan TTA President Graham Steenhoven seemed to think otherwise. (He wasn’t too fond of Miles’s arch-rival Marty Reisman either). When Graham handed Dick the winner’s trophy, he said, “Here. I hope you behave like a Champion.” Half a century of memories later, Dick said, “Oh yeah, those guys in the Midwest were the ‘real’ Americans. We were the New Yorkers, the wise guys, the Jews.” Acidity, humor, pride—50 years later his voice held all in equilibrium.

            As U.S. Champion, Dick went to the 1947 Paris World’s, the first held since 1939 because of the War. But the Sports Hall, with its weak lighting and poor tables, was so cold that “many players donned heavy sweaters or scarves to play. One player remembers seeing a very thin Miles out there on court with two hot water bottles tied to his waist. The venue was a disaster for Miles. He lost in the second round, three-zip, to England’s future World Champion Johnny Leach. A combination of the cold and nerves forced Dick to repeatedly cramp: his forearm would lock, and he couldn’t hold the racket. He thus became fearful of playing long points, and so suffered long-term psychic consequences—that is, in later matches in his career, he said he sometimes felt he had to attack when he didn’t want to, else he feared his arm would tighten.

            More disappointment at the 1948 World’s. In the quarter’s of the Singles, he was leading the Defending Champion Bo Vana 16-9 in the fifth, but—did that arm-tightening fear suddenly rise within him?—he overhit a number of balls in succession and was beaten. After that, he didn’t want to play in the Mixed with Thelma “Tybie” Thall Sommer. But thanks to Tybie’s sun-bursting enthusiasm, Dick thawed a little, and down 2-1 to Leach and Vera Dace Thomas, they rallied to win the fourth 24-22 and the fifth 21-19. Then rallied again in the final from down 2-0 to defeat the strong Vana/Depetrisova pair. “On winning, Tybie threw her racket in the air and came over for a hug,” Dick said, recalling the moment. “But I pushed her away. Didn’t say a word to her, didn’t even shake hands. I acted like a real…you know what. And,” he added, “afterwards good players congratulated me, fussed over me—it was sickening.” If Dick couldn’t win the Singles, the Mixed didn’t really matter? Uh, perhaps….But by presentation time, Dick was smiling right along with Tybie, feeling pretty cool about being a World Champion.

            At the 1949 World’s…Miles suffered still another traumatic Singles loss, deuce in the fifth, to the eventual winner Leach. And in the semi’s of the Doubles, Miles tells the story of how at one point Ferko Tokar serves a net ball, which Dick deliberately lofts up to indicate a let, only to see Ivan Andreadis come in over the table and kill it. Dick says to the umpire, “The serve hit the top of the net.” When the umpire, who apparently didn’t speak English, ignores him, Dick addresses Andreadis. “Ivan,” he says, “the ball hit the top of the net.” “This is true,” says Andreadis, “but we need the point.”

            I myself first saw Dick Miles not on a playing court but speaking to others gathered round him in a U.S. Open hotel in Cleveland, Ohio in 1952. I hovered in the background, and, since I was in awe of him, I was far too shy to even consider speaking to him. Moreover, a legendary figure already, especially considering his close matches with the equally legendary Reisman, he had the reputation of being proud, stand-offish, elitist. I couldn’t dare move closer, for fear of intruding noticeably into even the fringe of that circle, but a snatch of the conversation came to me—Dick saying, “Who’s there to beat me?” An understandable comment when you consider he’d won the last six U.S. Opens he’d played in. This time, however, he lost in the final, in the expedited fifth, to his old mentor, Lou Pagliaro, himself a winner of a third straight U.S. Open 10 years earlier. Actually, it was not Miles that was haunted by that match—he’d immediately go on, undaunted, to win three more Championships in a row, and later, in 1962, would add an unprecedented 10^th title. It was Pagliaro who was troubled—for the winner of that Open was to get a car until the sponsor saw that Miles’s plans had unexpectedly changed, that he’d entered the tournament, and the sponsor, not wanting Miles, whom he thought a lock to win, to get the car, withdrew it as a prize.

             Miles continues his strong play at the World’s. In ’54, he’s 13-1 in Swaythling Cup play. In Singles, he beats Zarko Dolinar, World runner-up in ’55; but then, up 2-0, he can’t hold on against Japan’s Tomita, the 1956 World Men’s Doubles Champion with Ogimura. At the ’55 World’s, Dick and Johnny Somael are beaten in the quarter’s of the Doubles, deuce in the fifth after having four match points. At the ’56 World’s, Dick upsets Andreadis who was twice World Singles runner-up and by 1957 will have won four World Men’s Doubles titles. No World’s in ’58, but in ’59 Dick is really threatening to win the World’s Singles. He has to go five in an early round to get by Houshang Bororgzadeh, but then knocks off two Chinese, including Xu Yinsheng of the great World Champion Teams of the ‘60’s, and then in the semi’s has the eventual winner, China’s Jung Kuo-tuan, down 2-1, but can’t get the clincher. Yep, Dick was the real thing—hard to believe any U.S. player was ever better, especially for such an extended time.

            In 1965, after I myself had gone through a long retirement from the sport, I was living on Long Island and had started playing seriously again—which meant I was going to Bobby Gusikoff’s Club in New York City where Dick hung out, his dog Rex patiently resting under Table #1 while he played. We met casually, and though I never did understand why (was it because we both liked writing, liked words so much?), Dick, who invariably did things with extended thought and purpose, began calling me at home…almost every day. Of course we became good friends…and for almost half a century. (Back in 1952, when I was but an awe-struck average player in far away Ohio, who would have thought such a deep friendship remotely possible?)        

            The Miles Sally and I knew was always extremely loyal and generous, and, as we all had shared interests outside table tennis—books, music, films (especially from foreign filmmakers like Truffaut or Kurosawa)—we spent many weekends at Dick and Mary’s Riverside Ave. apartment in the City. As readers of my History volumes know, Dick looked after himself, was quick and determined to go after what he wanted, but he also had a strong sense of justice and fair play. Once, as an umpire, he called “Let” and said to the player, “Serve like that again and I’ll take the point from you.” I, watching, hadn’t seen anything wrong.

            Dick was travel savvy too. His life demanded it. For one thing he gave many t.t. exhibitions—he worked many USO shows from Iwo Jima to Alaska, sometimes hawking sponsors’ products like Kent cigarettes, Arid deodorant, or Rise shaving cream. Also, for a year or two he joined four-time World Champion Richard Bergmann on a Harlem Globetrotters Tour. “Richard wouldn’t tolerate any hamming up of our exhibition—such as playing with pots and pans, or the like,” said Dick. “Such antics,” Richard claimed, “demeaned the sport.” Then there was Dick’s profitable equipment business with Sears Roebuck and Montgomery Ward that repeatedly sent him to the Orient.

            Dick’s table tennis life with heart continued on…until, hospitalized as he was, that heart just stopped. He wrote his well-received The Game of Table Tennis, met Premier Chou En-lai as part of the U.S. contingent of Ping-Pong Diplomats; and at age 48 qualified for the final Tryouts for the U.S. Team to the 1973 Sarajevo World’s (he cried after beating George Brathwaite, for he knew George so much wanted to make the Team). As USTTA Selection Committee Chair, he’d insisted on such Tryouts to avoid Selection by favoritism (and even had assisted in setting up the local qualifying venue in his N.Y. area—stringing up lights, doing whatever had to be done). Also, in the 1970’s he’d serve on the USTTA Executive Committee and concern himself with the running of U.S. Opens.

            Table Tennis was indeed Dick’s life—and Dick’s wife, Mary, bless her, even into Dick’s eighties, continued to humor him with an exercise robot and table tennis table set up in a room adjacent to their formal dining area. He was always wanting me to hit some with this robot—as if still ready to teach me, as he used to try to teach me, how to make correct contact.

            Over the years it hurt Dick to see the demise of the Sport he’d forever loved—how it’d lost its audience, its grandeur in the Arena. I’d always said that if I had one scene to remember Miles by when so much about him will forever be left unsaid, it’s the one with which I finish paying homage to him now. I take my cue from Dick’s favorite—Beethoven.

            Though Dick didn’t say anything to me, I once overwhelmingly heard and felt the love he had for the Sport—the Pride, the Dignity, the Class he wanted for it and for himself, it’s most fervid practitioner.

            It happened many years ago when I went with Dick into a big sporting goods store called Paragon in New York City where you at least had a chance of getting a fairly decent selection of table tennis rackets.

            Paragon: the word means…a touchstone…a model of excellence…a perfectly spherical pearl.

            Eventually Dick got around to asking about balls. The salesman went over, opened a large box behind the counter, then a smaller one. Balls? It was almost like, “Who’d have them?” Finally he came back with one of an unrecognizable make.

            Which Dick, upon testing, calmly deliberately pushed his thumb through.

            “It’s obviously unplayable,” he said in a very pleasant voice.

            I was shocked, the salesman more so. “Hey,” he said, “I just opened a gross of those balls. You didn’t have to do that.”

            And then I realized…Ah, but he did have to do that.

            Later, in the privacy of Miles’s apartment, I fancied that scowling, glaring Beethoven on Dick’s mantelpiece, deaf to what others might say, allowed himself a little smile—for, deep down, he always heard and knew the score.