Look. Here is the thing, in tennis, there is no way someone could dink the ball back over and over without ever being able to blast the ball. So many of the things that work well in table tennis would just not work in a sport like tennis.
Now, in tennis they do know how to have soft hands and execute things like drop shots. But, you need ground stroke fundamentals.
In table tennis, a whole bunch of things work, like, the traditional penhold BH, that just wouldn't fly in tennis. In tennis, punch shots would work at the net but not from the baseline. Think about trying to hit any shot while holding a tennis racket delicately the way a penholder holds a TT racket. You just couldn't. It is too delicate. The touch of table tennis's short game, there is no equivalent in tennis.
Table tennis is MUCH more about spin and deception, touch and control, about subtle technical details like whether you made deep contact or thin brushing contact. Because it can be about hard to fathom skillz of touch and contact far more than it needs to be about power and athleticism (even though the top players have it all) it is the only sport I know of where the women can be that close to the men.
The top women in TT are way closer to the top men in level than in tennis or any other sport I can think of.
I also don't think there is any other sport where a handicapped player can play as well as the top handicapped players can play.
Think about that guy who has no arms and plays with the racket in his mouth. He is actually pretty good. In what other sport could that actually happen?
Now you can look at this in more than one way. Some people are going to look and think, something like this "that sucks. TT iz lame. Malder looks pathetic! How could he beat that guy who looks so much better than him?"
Or you could think: "TT is amazing! Look at what these guys are doing with spin and how that old clumsy guy can still play so well because of his eye and his touch even though he is not very coordinated and probably wasn't good at many other sports."
I choose to look at it the second way. And I think a guy like Rich Dewitt or Tahl Leibovitz is an artist with his racket. To me that has its own inherent beauty.
When SPiN had Timo Bill do a demonstration/tournament in NYC a few years ago, my friend Edmund, joking around, said, "let's show Timo what real NYC table tennis is all about. Let's have him play, Rich Dewitt, JP Kadzinski and Tahl Leibovitz."
It was a pretty entertaining comment. But there is something amazing about how these larger than life characters can play at such a high level in this sport.
I personally wouldn't want to change that.
Sent from the Subterranean Workshop by Telepathy
You still have to think differently when playing against anti, because they still doesn't spin the ball.
