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Wa???!!! What are you trying to say, NextLevel? I presume that competitive players of yore, as competitive players of today, did not necessarily stick with the first racket available to them. There weren't of course the bewildering variety of rackets and rubbers to choose from, and almost all players from club or league level to international used preassembled rackets with rubber in horizontal for the most part or occasionally vertical pip configuration and pip size ranging from small and closely spaced (preferred by hitters) to somewhat larger (all-rounders) to still a little bit larger (all-rounders, topspinners and defenders). The MacCrossen brothers and Bernard Hock sold, if a player wished, a blade and a choice of rubber with pip configuration, spacing and size as mentioned above which a player could affix him- or herself, as players do today.
There was no established theory that I am aware of from the early 1930s to the beginning of the sponge era in the mid-1950s as to how table tennis should be played. Most of the instruction books that I have either at one time owned or read (Schaad, Montagu, Coleman Clark, Leach, Barna, Jack Carrington, Peggy McLean, Emily Fuller, others) discouraged the use of the penhold grip as it was felt that a player could neither drive nor chop effectively on the backhand side with such a grip.
Okay, NextLevel: "The Dick Miles story story speaks for itself". What does it say to you?
In the late 1940s, Dick Miles and Marty Reisman were world class players. At the age of 34, Miles, presumably playing with his trusty Hock No. 74, reached the semifinals in the singles event of the 1959 World Championships, losing to the eventual world Champion Rong Guo-Tuan. No one playing with a hard rubber racket has since gone farther in a World Championship.
I am trying to say that you probably know next to nothing about what players at the highest level did or did not do with their equipment. And that most players do not "doctor" their equipment even today if they didn't doctor it in yester years. The fact that Dick Miles wanted his equipment customized a certain way means that people customized what they used to fit their personal idiosyncrasies.
Even the pip configurations- today we see players using equipment for styles they were not originally designed for. I am sure some of that happened as well. Did people use the exact same rubbers on forehand and backhand?
The bewildering amount of equipment today is in part a result of money. Were there a bewildering amount of cars back in the 1940s? Would you then use that as an argument to say that car buying, driving and cars were better in the 1940s?
My point here is that Dick Miles was clearly doctoring his bats to suit him. But why not use the word doctoring since that is the point?