February 23, 2016

Coaching the Candidates
Before the most recent Republican and Democratic Debates, there was a rumor that the moderators would challenge them to showcase their table tennis skills. And so each candidate quietly contacted me about private coaching. Here are my notes on each of these sessions which took place this past week at the Maryland Table Tennis Center.

=>DONALD TRUMP. He wore his customary "Make USATT Great Again" baseball cap. (It fell off once and took his hair with it, but he paid me $1000 not to tell anyone.) As we warmed up, at first I thought he was just really, really slow, but then I asked to examine his racket, and it was made of solid gold and weighed about twenty pounds – and he insisted on using it. I wanted to go over to his side of the table to help him with his technique, but as we rallied several Mexican workers came by and extended the net in both directions into a six-foot barb-wired fence.

The rallies weren't very good as Trump insisted on attacking everything. Way too aggressive. Most of his shots missed, but he claimed they hit, and a bunch of people wearing Trump shirts kept clapping and screaming, "Great shot!" even when they missed by ten feet. I tried to get him to done it down, but he said, "I have the best forehand and backhand in the world. Everybody loves my technique. I have a beautiful game and I'm very rich."

He told me a story about how at the World Table Tennis Championships, when Team USA lost to Team China, thousands of Chinese had celebrated in the streets of New Jersey, and that he had decided that until we figure out what is going on, he was calling for a complete shutdown on New Jersey natives entering the United States. Now some of my best friends are from the Lily Yip Table Tennis Center and the New Jersey Table Tennis Club, but I didn't want to get into an argument with him. He had some strong opinions on unrated players, and didn't believe they should be allowed to play in rating events. "I will round up every unrated person in American and export them, and make China pay for it."

At the end of the session he slapped a Trump bumper sticker on the table and then took an escalator out. (When did we install that?) Trump said some really nasty stuff during our session, but he also bought the club with some pocket change during a break and is now our owner, so I'll shut up.

=>JEB BUSH. I could already see he was having so much trouble in the election. He looked bushed (sorry!), tottering about like an old man with sacks under his eyes. I asked him what was wrong, and he said, "I have no Tenergy." Now I happen to know that his campaign had raised over $150 million, so you'd think he could shell out $150 – 0.0001% of the money raised – for two sheets of Tenergy. But apparently Trump was right, this guy is always low on Tenergy. He played passively with antispin on both sides, just blocking everything back with a pained smile on his face. We only hit for about ten minutes, and then, pleading exhaustion, he dropped out of the session and the presidential race.

=>BEN CARSON. We never had a session. You see, we have this storage closet at MDTTC, and immediately after entering the club, Carson ran into it, screaming, "I found it! This is where Joseph stored his grain!" He spent the next hour searching through the boxes of rackets, balls, and other TT stuff, looking for that grain. I think he found an old ham sandwich one of the kids discarded back there, and called it a victory. On the way out he stopped by one of the tables and claimed it was the Ark of the Covenant, and my Gatorade bottle the Holy Grail. The guy is nuts.

=>TED CRUZ. He plays with a bible as a racket, with long pips no sponge on one side, vintage Sriver on the other, and both sides are illegally the same bright Republican red – yeah, he cheats. He also insisted on playing on a God Table Tennis Table that he brought himself. He kept moving to his right all the time, and so often was way, way off to the side, making rallies impossible. The session was cut short as he got into an argument with the club's management about his insistence that we not pay our bills, and he went into an absolute rage when he heard we were raising our ceiling (to allow for more lobbing), and  after a few minutes he stormed out. Last I saw he was outside on the steps of the club reading Green Eggs and Ham to an empty parking lot.

=>MARCO RUBIO. He's only five feet tall and looks about twelve. He was a strange student. When I asked him if he'd ever had any coaching before, he said, "Tactics isn't about finding complex strategies to defeat an opponent. Tactics is about sifting through all the zillions of possible tactics and finding a few simple ones that work." This had nothing to do with my question, and of course are the opening lines to my book Table Tennis Tactics for Thinkers. I asked him if he'd ever seen high-level table tennis, and he repeated the same lines. When I asked if I could see his grip, he repeated it again. For the next hour, no matter what I said or asked, that's how he responded, always word for word. And yet, despite this weird repetition, he was probably the most talented of the candidates.

=>JOHN KASICH. I have to apologize. Like everyone else, I'd never heard of this guy. When he came in he seemed reluctant to play, so I practically dragged him out to the table. One of his security guys protested, but we had him kicked out. Kasich kept protesting throughout the lesson about something, but like everyone else, I never really heard what he had to say. At the end, when we shook hands, he said, "I keep telling you, I'm not Kasich, he was the guy you kicked out." In the immortal words of Rick Perry, "Oops."

=>HILLARY CLINTON. All the stuff you've heard about her being dishonest . . . well, it's all true. I was ready to teach her all the wonderful secrets of table tennis, but she only wanted to play games. But her serves were illegal! She used a hidden serve(r), thereby illegally hiding contact. Anyway, halfway through the session representatives from Butterfly, JOOLA, Paddle Palace, and others came by, and she went to the back room to have talks with them. We secretly recorded her speech to them, but we've been bribed to keep them secret. Suffice to say that if elected, table tennis equipment will become tax-free, and so I'm voting for her.

=>BERNIE SANDERS. As you can probably guess, he played with a hardbat. We didn't get much practice – he spent the whole session griping about the sponge conglomerates and how unfair that was to the average hardbat American. He couldn't put any spin on the ball. When I tried to teach him how to spin, he refused, insisting on talking without spin, saying he'd raise taxes, turn America into a (Democratic) Socialist Paradise, and reminiscing about the old days when he'd cheer for his old hitting partner, Fidel Castro and growing up in the 50s (1850s). But at the end he got really hot, and I could feel the bern. 

Today's Todo List
Let's see how much of my todo list I can get through today. Check back periodically throughout the day and night as I cross them off the list. (By making this public it sort of puts pressure on me to get them done – so now I have to get them done. I'll have to stop at 2:15 PM for the afterschool program, but I'll continue tonight. There's nothing in the world more joyful than checking items off a todo list, right?)

  • Blog
  • Update links for MDTTC Opens with direct links for payments
  • Work with translator on questions regarding Korean translation of Table Tennis Tactics for Thinkers
  • Email to ITTF officials regarding hidden service rule
  • Finalize and send last minute edits of SF novel to publisher
  • Two promotional items for upcoming SF novel
  • Updates on Capital Area League webpage
  • Afterschool program (leave at 2:15PM) and 1.5 hours coaching
  • News item on History of U.S. Table Tennis, Volume 17
  • Update Capital Area League Results
  • Letter of Recommendation for top player who's applying for a grant
  • Prepare email to USATT clubs about leagues and state championships
  • Online coaching analysis
  • Order trophies for MDTTC April Open (Thur)
  • Schedule and start plans for Maryland Closed (Thur)
  • Ongoing correspondence with roughly a zillion people on leagues, state championships, regional associations, coaching programs, and other issues
  • Finalize short SF story I've been working on [will likely postpone this for some time - Saturday morning?]
  • Article for Orioles Hangout
  • Browse and procrastinate on the 23 items on my long-term todo list

US National Junior/Cadet Team Members and Top Collegiate Teams to Compete at 2016 Butterfly Arnold Challenge
Here's the article by Barbara Wei.

Ovtcharov Withdraws from 2016 World Championships & Legends Return
Here's the ITTF article. The two returning Legends are Schlager and Primorac.

Table Tennis Hurts
Here's the article by Coach Jon.

2016 World Champs Teams - China
Here are two videos that introduce the men and women who will represent China at the Worlds

China Warm Up Matches for 2016 World Championships
Here are two good ones as the top four in the world go at it!

Spinning on a Table
Here's 28 seconds of a player spinning on a table like a top – balanced on one hand – while rallying. Dear player – you have it all wrong, you are supposed to spin the ball, not yourself!

Alec Baldwin and Jason Schwartzman "Traffic" Commercial for Amazon Echo
Here's the video (30 sec)!

Super Sideways Dive into a Pool in a Captain American Uniform
Here's the picture of Adam Bobrow demonstrating basic movement in table tennis. (Here's the non-Facebook version.)

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