Fascinating thread folks.
I can add very little to this discussion that may be helpful in assisting this young man to reach his goal.
But I would like to add something real and tangible to this discussion nonetheless, though I'm also taking a risk here in doing so.
All I want to add is just a few observations about the value of having big crazy dreams, about going for those dreams, and about actually achieving any of those dreams be they realistic or not.
In doing this, and in order to make my point, I need to share a little bit of my OWN TT 'story', how it went wrong, and how it's taken some truly crazy turns lately. For this reason, please treat everything that follows with kid gloves folks if you wish to add any comments... This is all actually quite personal stuff I'm diving into here.
To begin at the beginning, I too wanted to turn pro as a kid, just like the OP... But in my case, my chance at playing greatness ended before it ever began.
I first 'discovered' TT aged 15.. and I instantly fell deeply, madly in love with it.
TT was the very first 'thing' I had ever discovered in my life, that actually had me thinking 'I had finally possibly found a future career.... Something I loved enough to do it for a living, to do it every day'.
Within a week of me first taking up the game, I had decided I wanted to dedicate my life to it.
I decided I would turn pro as a player, dedicate myself to my training, and eventually become the best in the world.
(pauses for laughter)
...and despite me now being 54 as opposed to 15, that dream hasn't gone away -- it still burns as bright in me as ever, and it still motivates me as a bladesmith, to reach the very highest levels as a blade maker and player. I *still* want to be the best in the world at both.
(Pauses for even more laughter...)
The only reason my farcically delusional childhood dream could even exist in the first place, is due to sheer bloody ignorance.
At the time I first found table tennis, I was growing up quite literally, at the very end of the earth.
My parents lived in a hugely remote and isolated part of Western Australia, basically as far south as you can get in the state without swimming. South of my parent's place, lies only the southern ocean, penguins, icebergs and windburn.
The nearest neighbouring house next to ours, was still around about 4km away.
The nearest small town and nearest TT club was 26km away.
The nearest decent TT coach (who actually knew something about coaching the game properly) lived in Perth, about 490km away.
And the nearest opportunity to actually PLAY at a pro level, was several thousand km away.
It was also the 1980's at the time, so there was no internet, no cable TV, no televised TT matches to refer to, and despite the nearest club being hugely popular, it didn't have a single coach, TT book, training pamphlet or singe decent player in it
Added to all that, I was 15 years old. I was starting my playing journey ten years too late, and my parents had neither the money, nor the inclination, to devote hundreds of thousands of dollars towards my playing development.
Basically I had no real opportunities to pursue my goal, or even structure or find/stumble across a life path that might potentially lead towards it.
My dream of a TT career was a fool's paradise.... Pure delusion. I was aiming to climb Mt Everest, before I had even seen a mountain, or watched a single flake of snow fall.
I mean for God's sake... Forget about there being no coaches nearby... At that point in my life, I didn't even own a table, or a bat!
There was nobody around I could play against, and I had no way of dragging my poor, pimply, TT addicted teenage arse across 26 km of unpaved / poorly paved country roads, to reach my nearest club, in order to ask/plead/beg somebody there to give me a game, or a hit, and hopefully, maybe, even a little bit of coaching on how to actually play this game if I was very lucky.
My early coaches were a combination of illustrated library books, and a steady string of mildly annoyed cooks, shearers, school teachers and wharfies, who would give me whatever typically useless playing tips they knew of, in order to shut me up.
But my TT dream wouldn't go away, and wouldn't leave me alone, despite having neither the know-how, the opportunity, nor the funding to do anything about it.
So I decided to do whatever I could on my own to get myself closer to my goal...without help, without money, and without guidance.
It didn't matter that I knew nothing about what I was doing... I had to do *something*, or else I was going to go insane through frustration, isolation and sheer bloody loneliness.
In order to be able to practice, I built myself a full sized table out of a single massive sheet of chipboard and timber offcuts I salvaged from a pile of winter firewood.
In order to get better at the game, I decided to dedicate four hours a day to doing the only type of structured practice I could figure out and conduct all on my own...which was service.
And... in order to have something to actually play with, I ordered a set of Sriver rubbers from the local sports store, along with a box of balls.
The rubbers were very expensive however, and they ate up all the spare money I had at the time
So in order to save myself some money, I put my manual arts / woodworking lessons to good use, and I built myself a blade.
Fast forward 29 39 years from that point (past a whole bunch of wrong turns, lousy practice and a mammoth amount of wasted time)... I'm still here making blades, and still loving TT as much as I ever have.
Did I reach my goal of being the best in the world?
Depends on how you define it really.
If you define it by reaching the pinnacle as a player, then definitely not! Clearly playing professionally was always going to be beyond me, given how late I started. That dream frankly never stood a chance.
If however you define the dream in terms of my success as a bladesmith... well, the jury's still out on that one.
Earlier this year I got the shock of my life, when a certain member, of a certain national playing squad, from a certain TT playing county (who's name starts with the letter "C") approached me out of the blue and asked if I would design a new signature blade for them. (...apparently they came across one of my production blades purely by chance, and actually really liked it 🤣🤣).
Discussions between them and I are still ongoing, everything is up in the air, and clearly nothing may come of all this. But I figure that while I'll never have the chance to play against a world no 1 myself, all of a sudden there's now a small, outside chance a blade I designed and built from scratch might one day achieve what I could not.
I'm not sharing this to hijack the thread or big note myself (this whole crazy unforseen opportunity may well come to naught) -- I'm merely trying to use events from my own life to illustrate the point, that:
1. unrealistic childhood dreams can still morph into something both directly related and potentially achievable over time, even when your life is more than half over;
2. Life loves to throw curve balls at you, and you can never really know what will happen in the future, or how your dreams might possibly pan out, and
3. While the young man in the OP might never be a top 50 player, he might still reach the very highest pinnacles of the game in some other form. One day he might coach a world champion, or be the key administrator that implements a player development program that leads to a TT minnow like Australia becoming eventual world champions.
The only reason I personally dreamed of going pro as a kid, was there was nobody around me with sufficient wisdom or expertise to demonstrate to me just how crazy my dream actually was.
If I knew back then, what I know now, I never would have tried. I would have given up the game for a saner, smaller dream, and the blade-making bug would never have bitten me.
As a result of that ignorance, the dream survived. And because the dream survived, it was able to grow and develop into a form I actually WAS capable of not just pursuing, but now also potentially reaching, or so it seems (I hope I hope I hope!!!).
A lifetime is a long time people... And this kid is just 12. All those folks telling this kid he's crazy to aim big, and his dreams will amount to nothing... I'm asking you kindly to please stop doing so.
You simply never know what's around the corner for this individual, or where his childhood dreams may take him. The future is unknowable... and Table Tennis success has been built on far less than what this kid has going for him right now.
None of us honestly definitively know how far this this kid will go as a player, or what his clear (and magnificent) passion for the game may one day become. We're only making semi-educated guesses based on what we personally have seen.
The only thing any of us can really do at this point, is inform him as best we can, and hopefully replace some of his more misplaced enthusiasm for realism.
Realism is useful in him getting to his goal .. but too much of it too soon can also complete derail somebody's enthusiasm, and rob them of potential greatness on more than just one front. Some of the language used here to describe his aims and chances so far has been very negatively drafted, through necessity. All I want to do is add a little balance to the discussion and temper that realism with hope and greater purpose.
Dreams are our biggest motivators as human beings, and the source of our greatest happiness, and greatest personal achievements.
Dreams *always* have merit.
Even when they're fanciful.
Even when they're deluded.
Even if they're never achieved.
If you paint dreams as only having intrinsic value if they're achieved, then I fear you're possibly missing the bigger picture.
Their magic, and their ability to transform one's existence and bring us untold joy, or unforseen opportunities, lies not in achieving our dreams, but in just pursuing them regardless and accepting whatever benefits that might bring us in the end.
I wish the OP's author the very best of luck in chasing their life goals. Go get 'em mate -- really hope you make it!
