January 23, 2014

Emergency Room for Timmy

Things got exciting last night. As I've written about the last ten days, Tim Boggan is at my house so I can do the page layouts and photo work for his History of U.S. Table Tennis, Vol. 14. (Here's info on those books.) We've been doing this for each volume, and it takes about two weeks each, usually one volume per year. He arrived on Monday, Jan. 13. (Tim, 83, is in the U.S. Hall of Fame; here's his bio.)

On Tuesday, I came down with the flu and was pretty much out of it for three days. Then he came down with a bad cough, and we initially thought he'd caught the flu from me. On Friday I took him to see a doctor, who said it wasn't the flu (probably a cold), and gave him some medication (along with a lot of others he takes, mostly because he had a "minor" heart attack 25 years ago).

Tim had some sort of allergic reaction to the medicine, and his skin turned red all over. (I began calling him a Washington Redskin.) I took him to see the doctor two more times, but things didn't seem to get better. Last night, at 10:30 PM, the reaction got worse - his face was beet red, and it was itching all over. So I took him to the emergency room at Shady Grove hospital. (This wasn't the first time; about five years ago he had some sort of chest pains and thought he might be having a heart attack, and so I rushed him to the hospital then as well, but it was a false alarm.) 

All went well. The doctor there thought it was a problem with dosage, and changed the prescription, and prescribed something else. (I didn't get all the details - Tim was keeping careful track.) So this morning, as I write this, Tim is about to go to the pharmacy (again) for the new medicine. His face is still bright red.

Desk Work Affects Play; So Does Better Equipment

I've been sitting at my desk with Tim seemingly around the clock the last eleven days, except of course when I was in bed with the flu. How has this affected my table tennis? When I coached last night, I sometimes felt like I could barely play. Surprisingly, it's my normally super-steady backhand that's most affected; in drills, it had all the consistency of Sheeba's forehand counterlooping. It got a bit better as the sessions went on, but not a whole lot. I'm always a bit stiff, but right now I'm neutronium stiff.

On the other hand, I introduced one of my students last night to the wonders of tensor sponges. He tried out my racket, with Tenergy 05 FX on the forehand, and was amazed at it. He'll likely be making the switch sometime soon. Sponges like these allow players to develop higher-level looping earlier in their development, which hastens the development itself. This is contrary to thinking in the past, back when hitting dominated the game and it was thought best for players to use slower, thinner sponge their first few years to develop their hitting control. That was likely true for a hitting game, but with the modern looping game, players who get good coaching and train regularly should go to high-level sponges relatively early in their development, or the weaker equipment will hinder their development. Bouncy and spinny tensor sponges lead to players looping and counterlooping at much higher levels than with other sponges, and players who use these surfaces develop these shots much earlier than past generations who did not.

Mastering the Counterloop

Here's an article from Table Tennis Master on learning to counterloop. At the higher levels this is the basic rallying shot, so you can't read too much about this shot!

ITTF Media Scholarships

The ITTF is offering three scholarships for media undergraduates and graduates are offered to attend the ZEN-NOH 2014 World Team Championships to be staged in Tokyo, Japan from Monday 28th April to Monday 5th May. 

Fan Zhendong Needs More Time

Here's the article from TableTennista

Aurora Cup

For some reason the last three articles by Barbara Wei on the Aurora Cup went up a couple days late. (I linked to the other articles in my Jan. 20 blog.) Here they are:

January 19: Yue Wu Crowned Women’s Champion at 2014 Aurora Cup

January 20: Women’s, Over-40, Under 14 and 6 Other Champions Crowned on Final Day of 2014 Aurora Cup

January 22: After Successful Aurora Cup, Chicago Poised to Host More 4-Star Tournaments

Seeing Double: Waldner Lobbing to Appelgren

Here's a video (29 sec) of Waldner lobbing and Appelgren smashing - but with two balls at once.

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