Posts tagged with "table tennis"

Table Tennis Dorks

Aaron has his thing for the snow­board­ing girls, the ones with the pig­tails on the moun­tain who sup­port the Canadian gear com­pa­nies like West 49, Nick has his for long­board­ing girls, Jeff for the hock­ey girls, and Trolley for the…girls. I think the whole idea is hilar­i­ous, and chuck­le to myself when I read about peo­ple like Alexandra Kosteniuk, the attrac­tive Russian girl who became Grandmaster at the age of 13, in the papers. I always imag­ine chess dorks swoon­ing over some spec­tac­u­lar move she makes that’s beyond my com­pre­hen­sion.

Then I saw Biba Golic face some­one in the 2003 Killerspin com­pe­ti­tion, and real­ized that I’m just a table ten­nis dork. It’s not so much the fact that she’s a pro­fes­sion­al table ten­nis play­er, but the fact that she plays aggres­sive­ly, almost uncon­ser­v­a­tive­ly. It’s like Jonathan and his thing for drum­mer girls who play with an aggro-ape stance, instead of the dain­ty, elbows-raised pos­ture that so many female drum­mers seem to have. There’s some­thing about a girl who plays like a guy, whether it’s table ten­nis, drums, or even games. This is going on the updat­ed list soon.

Table ten­nis dorks. I won­der if I’m the first.

Summer Days Are Finally Here

A week­end of relax­ation and intox­i­ca­tion.

The first time that I’ve known Pat to be Jen-less, he calls me up, wants to hang out. Fucking cool. We go for the break­fast spe­cial at a Greek Souvlaki house, he takes the sausage, I take the bacon. After, we head to the table ten­nis club (some­thing I hoped he’d do for a while now) for a few match­es. He beats me 5–1, and I find out that he’s run­ning on three hours of sleep. He goes home to run some errands, I go home to sleep. He comes back here to meet up with me and Trolley, after cook­ing some burg­ers on his grill and putting togeth­er fix­ings, corn-on-the-cob, and pas­ta sal­ad. We eat, watch some Harvey Birdman, play games for eight hours. Part and crash.

Today, wake up with my cat stretched out on my pil­low. Trolley and I head to the table ten­nis club, play for an hour, head down­town to buy a few albums. The weath­er being so nice, we go to the Highlander with their dis­tract­ing uni­forms, and sit down for a pint on the patio. Clink. Come back, and I get to orga­nize while lis­ten­ing to my new Modest Mouse album.

Don’t want to lose this feel­ing.

16% Win Ratio

I end­ed up los­ing all my match­es yes­ter­day. Out of 18 games, I won three. Two match­es should have been easy wins, and one was tied at 2 games, 12 points. I get too ner­vous when I’m play­ing new peo­ple. I’m not quite used to the entire idea of com­pet­ing, espe­cial­ly for rank, espe­cial­ly with oth­er peo­ple depend­ing on me. My team­mates told me that it was notice­ably affect­ing my per­for­mance because it seemed as if my shoul­ders were stiff and I was try­ing too hard. I’ll be accus­tomed to every­thing even­tu­al­ly.

A Good Experience, I Tell Myself

I have anoth­er five hour league meet today. My team is matched up against two oth­er teams of inter­me­di­ate play­ers. When I first played in the league at the begin­ning of the year I had no hope of beat­ing these peo­ple, but now I’m not sure. I think that if I can con­cen­trate well enough, and play smart enough, I’ll have a good chance. The prob­lem is that being ner­vous always puts me at a dis­ad­van­tage; I usu­al­ly only win when I’m calm and focused. I’ve only played two of the sev­en play­ers, so there’ll def­i­nite­ly be some styles that I’m not used to, and that’s what scares me. Either way, it’ll be good expe­ri­ence.

The Pat Benchmark

I just played the best three hours of table ten­nis in my life. Pat and I head­ed to the games room on cam­pus, and had three match­es to the best of 19, a total of 43 games. Every sin­gle mus­cle in my body is com­plete­ly exhaust­ed. The worst are the soles of my feet, which are more sore than when I stood for five hours at the Strung Out con­cert.

We’d been plan­ning to play for more than three months now, and I haven’t been able to stop think­ing about it for a while. All week, I had been try­ing to devel­op some strat­e­gy to beat him, but could­n’t come up with a sin­gle idea since he plays with a strong back­hand with a pen-grip. I decid­ed to sim­ply play more aggres­sive­ly than him, and fig­ure out his weak­ness on the fly. In the end, I just ran him around a lot, putting the ball on alter­nat­ing cor­ners or at an angle he did­n’t expect. I can serve con­sis­tent­ly now, and have got­ten much bet­ter at con­trol­ling how long or short they are.

Almost none of his pre­vi­ous strate­gies worked on me. His quick serves to my right don’t do much any­more because I’ve been suc­cess­ful in bal­anc­ing out my posi­tion at the table. His down­spins don’t work any­more because the peo­ple at the club real­ly make me work on my chops and my push­es. His ral­ly hits to my left don’t work any­more because I’ve been improv­ing my back­hand for the last two weeks. My short game has become as good as his. The only thing he could do was serve a down­spin to my left to force a weak return, which is some­thing he fig­ured out rather quick­ly.

I end­ed up win­ning all the match­es, 10–5, 10–3, 10–5, but both of us agreed that they were the finest we’ve ever played. It was three hours of pure inten­si­ty, not only phys­i­cal­ly but men­tal­ly as well. Concentrating on the serve, the strat­e­gy, try­ing to fig­ure out a weak­ness, adapt­ing to an oppo­nents, keep­ing track of the ball, I was ready to col­lapse when I got home.