I've seen a lot of people's reactions when me and my friends start playing or doing drills.
Good point. Up close, many can appreciate TT without knowing much except it looks cool up close.
The night the SPiN Manhattan DJ had hiz last Hurrah before getting fired, Carl, PPHolic and I were doing simple attacking drills. An older couple parked themselves at chairs and watched live as if we were super-human or something when we were only serving and attacking to a spot for training.
Seing attacking and defending up close is real, no matter how much no one understands the aspects of spin, when you see the ball bend and break at high speed and keep it up, it simply looks cool to anyone.
It is true that seeing things live, up close, looks way better than on TV or video. I also know that watching guys who are 2500-2600 in person looks pretty awesome. And then, I have seen the same match I saw live, on video and it is almost like on video it magnifies the weaknesses of the players and how good they are does not always fully come through.
I am going to ramble and tell some stories here since the subject has turned to what makes TT more viewer friendly.
I used to train with this guy at Spin who is a pretty good defender. He is much better than me no matter how you look at things. We would be hitting at SPiN from about 9:00pm-1:00am. Most of the people there at that time were basement players who didn't really understand the game. And most of them were at the bar drinking and hanging out.
When we did training drills which are more flashy, people were more likely to watch. When we knew we were being watched, Alex would say: "showtime!" What that meant was that we would pretend to be playing a match. We would keep score like a match. But most of the points would end up being me attacking and him backing up and lobbing and every so often counterlooping from way back.
There is no question that, when we did this, we attracted a decent crowd. People loved to watch that stuff. Especially with the fact that we were also making sure the "score" was very close.
As soon as we played a real match, everyone would get bored and stop watching.
At Spin they used to have a tournament on Friday nights that was meant to be a showcase of great players. The guys who would play in it at the beginning were in the 2500-2600 range so they were pretty good. Every so often there would be a player in the 2700 range. 12 guys of that caliber would face off and play a tournament.
At first the first place player would win $500.00. And everyone was fighting for they $500.00. Then they made it that 1st place got $500.00 and 2nd place got $100.00.
People came. But mostly people who play TT. Generally, the same guys would win over and over. They started having rules that if you won x times in a row you had to sit out the tournament x number of weeks.
The people who came to watch were always decent but not that special. For a while they struggled to try and figure out a format that would work. Nothing really seemed to work.
These days what they do is they have 3 matches. Everyone who plays gets paid something. Maybe it is $100.00. I don't know. But the matches are all staged. One player wins the first game. The other player wins the second game and then whatever happens. The last game is sometime a ridiculous deuce to 18, 19, 25....
The players are decent. Well, some of them. But sometimes they have players who are my level who know how to put on a show.
Anyway, the result of the change is that way more people come, watch and are entertained. I am not sure if as many people who know how to play go, but way more people who don't know how to play show up for the show.
Anyway, all of this musing has me thinking about KillerSpin and those staged tournaments they used to put on, where, in every match, at some point one of the players is on defense, lobbing and goes over the barricades. Do they still do those? I used to hate them because they are so fake. But, perhaps that did help viewership of table tennis more than I realized.
And I can't tell you how many times I have had someone, upon learning that I play table tennis, ask me: "do you play really far back from the table the way the best players do?"
And the disappointment when I dispel that belief and show them what the real best players in the world play like during a match. [emoji2]
Sent from the Subterranean Workshop by Telepathy
