October 18, 2011

The Brad Pitt Story - the Truth, the Whole Truth, and Nothing But the Truth

Yesterday I blogged about the upcoming move, Brad Pitt To Star In Film Adaptation Of "Table Tennis Tales and Techniques." It was all fake - but I didn't do it! I just played along.

Late on Sunday night I received an email from Richard McAfee, who had been table tennis surfing the net and found the story in The Daily Quarterly. I had no advance knowledge of this, and didn't know about it until I received Richard's email. Now readers, brace yourselves - The Daily Quarterly is a satirical website, like The Onion. Click on the "About" section at the top, and it says, "And for the few of you who found your way onto this site by chance, or couldn’t already tell, be advised: This is ALL SATIRE. Honest. If you have no sense of humor, you are wasting your time here." And just below that, it says, "Did we mention this is a SATIRICAL SITE?"

So no Brad Pitt movie. No great exposure for table tennis. No $3.5 million for me. Sigh. But I still love the poster. 

If you are angry at Brad Pitt for this, here's a video entitled "Brad Pitt Ping Pong" which shows Pitt getting hit by cars for three minutes and seventeen seconds. If you are angry at me for this, then buy a copy of the book that started it all, "Table Tennis Tales and Techniques," and use the wisdom of the book to learn to beat me in table tennis. All I have to do is sell about 700,000 copies and I'll get that $3.5 million.

The Fastest Serve in the World

A few days ago videos began to surface of a Japanese kid named Asuka Sakai demonstrating what appeared to be the fastest serve in the world. I was at first skeptical because I literally couldn't see the ball bouncing on his side of the table in the video. But here's a slow-motion version (1:04), which clearly shows that the serve hits both sides, and how he does it. The secret, of course, is lots of topspin to pull the ball down, with the difficulty being in creating the power needed for all that topspin and still having enough left over for speed.

I spent a few minutes experimenting with the serve this weekend, and could mimic it at maybe 2/3 the speed. (I may work on it some more later.) Note that while he seems to set up for a forehand serve, he actually hits it with his backhand side, which allows him to stroke the ball vigorously (that's an understatement), creating great speed and topspin. I can also do this serve with a regular forehand motion or a backhand motion, with lots of topspin, but I'm beginning to think the kid had it right - for this serve, you might need to use his backhand-from-the-forehand-side motion to get that much speed and spin.

Could this be a paradigm switch in the way players serve? Who knows. At the higher levels, top players will have little trouble reacting to the serve and at least blocking or stroking it back. But it might be too fast to loop back, and at the higher levels, a deep serve that isn't looped back gets looped. On the other hand, the serve is so fast that perhaps the server will have trouble doing the serve and then reacting in time to loop the next ball.

Neck Problems

After forehand looping for thirty minutes straight on Friday so a student could practice blocking, my back tightened up. Then, after a few more hours of coaching, my neck tightened up, and I could barely do forehand shots. It was like whiplash. I managed to survive my coaching sessions, and the neck is getting better, but I'm taking it easy today. I cancelled a two-hour practice session I had scheduled (not a coaching session, an actual practice session, since I'm getting back in shape), and have no other coaching today. Hopefully it'll be better tomorrow when I have more coaching scheduled.

USA Table Tennis Coach of the Year

Coaches, it's time to nominate the USATT Coaches of the Year. There are five categories: National, Developmental, Paralympic, Volunteer, and Doc Councilman. I was the 2002 USATT Coach of the Year, and I was a finalist three times for National Coach of the Year. (I wonder if this blog and TableTennisCoaching.com qualifies me for the "Doc Councilman" award? Hmmm....)

Table Tennis Drills in China

Here's U.S. Junior Champion, U.S. Team Member, and U.S. National Men's Singles Finalist Peter Li describing his training drills in China.

Ping-Pong and Pop Culture

Here's a short article on the headline above. (That's the problem with descriptive headlines - they give away the text. For now on maybe I'll just headline each item as "Something About Table Tennis.")

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