April 21, 2015

Ogimura Book - Some Tidbits

I'm nearly done reading "Ogi: The Life of Ichiro Ogimura." It's currently only available in Japanese; I had to have someone send me the English version, which is only available in England. Stellan Bengtsson first alerted me to the English version, which I hope to make available in the U.S. later on. (Don't know who Ichiro Ogimura is? Probably the most influential player in table tennis history!!!)

I'm taking a lot of notes about Ogimura, and plan to incorporate much of it into my fantasy table tennis novella, "The Spirit of Pong." (I blogged about this on March 16 and several times since.) Here are some interesting tidbits I've learned.

  • Looks: thick eyebrows, pencil thin (during his playing days), piercing stare, often wore a light violet shirt during his developing years (dyed that color by his great helper, Hisae Uehara).
  • Often snacked on bread & margarine, and on rice balls wrapped in seaweed.
  • Can't fully straighten his left (non-playing) arm due to a childhood injury when he fell out of a tree.
  • Unbelievably single-minded about table tennis.
  • Practiced serves by putting the lid to a pen on a table and hitting it 100 times in a row. If he missed, he'd start over. When he reached the point where he could hit it at will, he practiced doing it blindfolded.
  • Would frog jump four kilometers with 40 kilogram weight on his shoulders. (This might not be good for the knees.)
  • He liked Van Gogh paintings and other artwork.
  • He liked to sing "Danny Boy."
  • He had some nice quotes about table tennis, but I'll save them for the novella!
  • When he won his first world championships, the coaches were angry at him because he wouldn't follow their advice. He believed in the "51% rule," where if he thought he had a 51% chance of hitting a winner, he should go for a winner. The coaches wanted him to play steadier. When they realize he was right, they were still angry, believing it was more important to do what the coach says than to win.
  • As of 1956, there were over three million players in Japan, and 100 playing halls in Tokyo alone.
  • At least early in his career, he used sponge that was "almost a centimeter thick." (That's almost ten millimeters, or 2/5".)
  • His film "Japanese Table Tennis" was the key to China's rise, according to Chinese players themselves, including Zhuang Zedong. He said, "Japanese Table Tennis was the perfect textbook for us. Watching you and Tanaka practice made us realize that you do not swing a table tennis racket with your arm; you hit the ball with your feet. Once I saw that film [at age 16], you became my mentor, Mr. Ogimura."
  • Players were using sponge in Japan at least two years before Satoh used it to win the Worlds in 1952, including inverted sponge as early as July, 1951. There was a lot of experimenting going on in Japan; the rest of the world didn't know about this until after Satoh won.  

Arm Problems and Getting Substitutes

The arm problems continue. I've received an avalanche of suggestions, but the bottom line is I have to rest it. So I've cancelled or gotten substitutes once again for all my private coaching this week, and hired people to do multiball for me in group sessions. The complicating factor is that two of our full-time coaches are currently out of town. 

Solving Problems and Dealing with Disingenuous Obstructionists

As I've blogged, I've been working on a number of USATT issues. I'm making good progress on some (more on that later, with much of it this fall), while others are not so easy. One thing I'm learning is who the real problem solvers are, and who are the disingenuous obstructionists. I'm doing my best to work with the problem solvers and avoid the DOs, but it's not easy. I have no choice in some cases.

Dealing with DOs (both in running clubs, coaching, and doing USATT work) is the hardest part of my work. (I'm guessing we've all had that experience.) Alas, I'm not very good at it. When faced with someone who's opinionated and not open to reason, I still try to reason with them, which rarely works. I need to take my reasoning one step further and realize that reasoning with the unreasonable is unreasonable! (Specifically, some people mistake rationalizing for reasoning.)

A few times I've been up half the night, too irritated with DOs to sleep. I'm done with that. If I do have to deal with such people, I'll try to do it earlier in the day so I can do my best to forget about them when I go to bed. Because otherwise I'll have a long night, tossing and turning as I try to figure what could possibly be going through the disingenuous obstructionist's mind while holding endless arguments in my mind that always end with the disingenuous obstructionist making disingenuous obstructionist responses.

To paraphrase a famous line from a movie, "As Waldner is my witness, I'll never lose sleep from dealing with disingenuous obstructionists again!" (But I won't do the lying, stealing, cheating, killing part - no matter how tempting the last part might be in some cases!)

Excessive Celebrations: How Loud Should You Be?

Here's the article by Samson Dubina.

Interview with Crystal Wang

Here's the USATT interview, by Rahul Acharya.

These 7 Lessons from Ping-Pong Helped a CEO Grow a Successful Business

Here's the article from Business Insider.

US World Team Member Angela Guan Hopes to Inspire Future Generations of Players

Here's the article by Barbara Wei.

Highlights of Hall of Famer David Sakai

Here's the new video (3 min) from Jim Butler.

2015 US Pan Am Women's Team

Here's the video (8:27) from Jim Butler.

World Championships Promo

Here's the video (1:25).

Epic Rally Between Wang Liqin and Samsonov

Here's the video (76 sec) of this exhibition point.

Slo-Mo Action from Broward TTC

Here's the video (28 sec).

Timo Boll vs. Bojan Tokic

Here's video (4:22, time between points removed) of a nice recent match between these two in the German League.

Angelica Rozeanu

Here's some info on the women who seven straight world women's singles titles, still a record.

Team China's World Championship Song

Here's the video (2:24) of the Chinese team members singing for us!

Mike Mezyan is At It Again!

He's found more hilarious table tennis pictures. Here are my favorites:

Jackalope vs. Platypus Pong

Here's the video (30 sec) as these two creatures go at it in this Smoothie Kabobbles commercial!

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