Xu was speaking Chinese at a dinner in his honor during his visit to Dallas. About 50 TT people and families attended. He was not speaking Chinese, but friends of mine were interpreting as he spoke. His face was straight and his topic was on the problem of how to grow TT.

1. The proposal was shocking but such things as 44mm big ball game have developed so I did my part to try and prevent such a perversion from arising. I wrote my comments on a yellow legal tablet and another Chinese fellow read it to him and gave it to him. Xu responded that China TT has been sponsoring coaches to the US (one of our Dallas clubs has been getting professional practice partners from China every 6 months.) and that China will continue to support developing TT in the US.

I think that holding the Junior Wrld Chmpshps at Stanford is another example of joint efforts to try and gain visibility for TT in the US.

2. I saw nothing at the ITTF web site that showed illogical "reasons" for banning fr-less rubbers. Certainly, what I did read was more carefully written than the argument's I have been poking holes in on this thread.

I did read a number of responses to people pursuing an email campaign to thwart the ban. I also saw that the sources of change were associated with the equipment committee and country associations requesting the change. I could only infer that the change regarding treated rubber surfaces was stimulated by the "random" behavior of the resulting "treated" rubber. This seemed consistent with the earlier reduction in pip aspect ratio as the behavior of a long beam (high aspect ratio) pip under collapse is "chaotic" i.e. governed by non-linear strange attractor math wherein chaotic systems don't follow a predictable trajectory (orbit) through phase space but that the unpredictable trajectories often do exhibit "strange attractors" in their orbit. In other words, the long ratio pips collapse chaotically and thus produce chaotic alterations in surface contact with the ball and thus chaotic friction coefficients during contact with the ball.

The issues behind fr-less pips may be due to similarly unpredictable behavior. I don't know. Many long pips advertise their random return nature and so that suggests to me that this is the case and is also the source of much of the difficulty in learning to use them. A good way to test if this is the case is to see how hard it is to use fr-less anti-spin and perhaps even fr-less SP. I've not heard of players using such rubber so I am only guessing that such rubbers don't randomize the return enough and thus leave the users to vulnerable as the ball is too predictable to the attacker.

It seems that an obvious diagnostic question is "Why isn't anti-spin popular anymore?"

3. Regarding Sharara, I don't know him or really care who heads the ITTF. I have however read his P4 goals for TT and find them to be good ones.
Accomplishing these goals is however a path of discovery and is the subject of much debate.

So in response to my defending Sharara, I would say that I am not defending him. I am instead defending against sloppy thinking and unjustified radicalizing.

Report Abuse