About rackets – R. Hudetz

The stories about the development of table tennis rackets are part of table tennis history. In the ITTF table tennis museum in Switzerland, rackets of all shapes and made from various materials are exhibited and can be viewed. There are some that are a hundred years old, but what I know about them is only what I have read in various historical accounts. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, ping pong was played with balls made of rubber or cork, and rackets were similar to today’s badminton rackets – their handles were up to 50 cm long, and the hitting surface was usually made of parchment. Over time, the handles became significantly shorter, people started playing with wooden rackets, then sandpaper, cork and animal skins started being glued to the wood, and finally, in 1902, Englishman E.C. Goode was the first to put rubber on the racket. The well-known story about how he came up with the idea says that after he saw a round piece of rubber on a cash register in a pharmacy that was used to put the customers’ change on it, that rubber ended up on the racket. Along with the appearance of the celluloid ball, wooden rackets with rubber coverings actually marked the birth of a new sport – table tennis. Wooden rackets with rubber linings, which later got pips and a linen base added to them, enabled the ball to be rotated in the game in order to better control the shot. Rackets with pips rubber covers undisputedly ruled table tennis until the early fifties, that is, the appearance of sponge as a racket covering. The first player who had a sponge racket covering was Austrian Waldemar Fritsch at the 1951 world championship, and the real sponge covering racket offensive started only after the 1952 world championship in Bombay, when the Japanese created a whole series of sensations with such rackets. I started playing table tennis in 1946, in the era of pips rubber rackets, the sponge had not yet appeared. From the past, I like to remember stories about table tennis rackets, stories that have mostly been forgotten. In the years immediately after World War II, it was a big problem to get hold of a racket or balls to play with. The first racket I used to play with in my first tournaments was a racket that had pips rubber on one side and a cork covering on the other. These were the usual rackets, you played forehand with the rubber and backhand with the cork! This “pips rubber” term was mostly not accurate because the pips in the middle fell out after a while, and it was almost impossible to get spare rubber, so the rubber in the middle often had no pips! Over time, I began to practice more seriously and play tournaments, and after a lot of trouble I managed to get a “Richard Bergman” racket – it had an unusual pear shape, red rubber with pips on both sides, and it was made of layers of South American okoume wood – at that time, we all dreamed of rackets made of such veneer! I played with that racket for years until it was stolen from me at a tournament. I thought my world had collapsed. I tried several other rackets and after a short period of wandering continued with the “Alex Ehrlich” racket – it was no longer okoume, it was “faster” wood, with an unusually shaped handle – the handle was cut diagonally. I started playing with that racket sometime in 1955 and today when I play table tennis occasionally, I still play with that racket!! Countless rubbers were changed on that racket – I ended my active career with a classic pips rubber covering. In later occasional performances there was backside on the forehand and backside, antispin and long pips rubber (“grass”) as well as short pips rubber and sponge (“soft” or “sandwich”) on the backhand. My more than fifty-year-old wood obviously arouses the interest of certain veterans, and I have received lucrative offers for wood on several occasions! Popular rackets in the mid-20th century – In the 1950s, there was no store where you could go in and choose the right wood and rubber, pay, and have the racket you wanted! Firstly, there were generally no shops where you could buy rubber and wood for rackets separately – if you could buy anything, that was pre-assembled rackets. The most popular racket by far was the famous brown “Viktor Barna” racket produced by the Dunlop factory. That racket was still considered the “classic racket” for decades after pips rubber rackets were retired from excellent table tennis, and it still remains the “classic racket”, popular among veterans and recreational players! The Barna racket, together with its namesake, the great champion Viktor Barna, last appeared in the world championship finals in 1954, when Barna competed in the men’s doubles final. Barna and Hagenauer lost the final match to Vilim Harangoza and Žarko Dolinar, who was the only player in that final who played with a sponge covering! In addition to “Barna”, there were other popular rackets such as “Johnny Leach”, “Richard Bergmann”, “Alex Ehrlich”, “Guy Amouretti”, “Cor du Buy” and various others. The most famous rackets in Germany in the sixties were “Conny Freundorfer” and “Martin Ness”, and the “Eberhard Schöler” racket had an almost cult status for decades. I spent most of my playing career with the “Alex Ehrlich” racket, so of course I was also tickled by the stories related to the player Alex Ehrlich, three-time world championship finalist, after whom the racket was named. I had the opportunity to meet him in his “old” days, when he lived in Paris. He was a very unusual man, he could not be fitted into any mould. As a Jew from Poland, he went through the horrors of Nazi Germany, and survived the war in the Dachau camp. His family perished in the Holocaust, but that did not make him a bitter man. He lived in Paris, led a bohemian life, worked as a coach, and was constantly on the road in his old Mercedes. When pornography first appeared in Denmark, he saw the possibility of making good money, and illegally brought cars full of pornographic magazines from Denmark to Germany and France, which he then sold for a good profit. I attended the opening of one of his private training camps and I almost couldn’t believe my eyes – Alex lined up all the participants, gave them a speech about the importance of the upcoming training camp and then gave each one of them the “Alex Ehrlich” racket, saying that everyone at camp must play with the best rackets available. This introduction was followed by a technique demonstration – Ehrlich used to be a world-class player, but he had a very specific backhand shot and I have never seen another player successfully execute that shot using that technique the way he did it! It was uncommon for such a technique to be one of the first, basic lessons at his camp! Sponge Rackets – In the nineteen fifties, great changes took place in terms of rackets. I witnessed various “historical” changes in table tennis, but also all kinds of local stories regarding rackets. The previously unknown Austrian Waldemar Fritz competed in the 1951 world championship in Vienna, playing with a black sponge on his racket, and made a real mess in the team matches of the tournament. In the individual part, he played against Hungarian Ferenc Sido, whom he defeated in the team matches, along with other big names. Sido prepared well for the rematch, figured out how to play against Fritz and his sponge, and won. At the next world championship in 1952 in Bombay, India, only 15 men’s and 7 women’s teams appeared in the team matches due to high costs! The defending world team champions, the national team of former Czechoslovakia (!!) and the national team of former Yugoslavia, who won the bronze medal a year earlier, among others, did not compete due to lack of money! The Japanese were a sensation in their first appearance at the world championship – the women won the team championship and their fourth player Satoh won the individual world championship! Everyone attributed that success, partially justified, to Satoh’s 1 cm thick yellow sponge that he stuck to his penhold racket. His opponents were completely unprepared for a game against the sponge racket. The European giants did not take the warning seriously given by Fritz to everyone with his black sponge a year earlier! It is interesting to compare how table tennis was back then with today’s table tennis – can you imagine today’s world champions not coming to defend their title at the next world championship due to lack of travel money?? Besides, can you imagine the world champion being kicked out of table tennis because of professionalism? This is exactly what happened to the world champion Satoh shortly after the world championship, when he was disqualified by the Japanese federation for his “tendency to be professional”?? After Satoh won the individual world championship in 1952, taking it by storm and playing with a sponge covered racket, rackets with sponge covering spread throughout the world of table tennis like wildfire. My first encounter with such a racket was when Žarko Dolinar showed up at the club during practice in the fall of 1952 and started trying out a new racket with sponge covering. Playing against an opponent with such a racket was an unusual experience – the impact of the ball on the thick sponge (1 cm or more!) of the opponent’s racket could not be heard at all, and the balls came much faster than after a hit made with a classic rubber racket. Playing with that racked already paid off after only one month and to everyone’s surprise, Žarko won the very strong International Championship of Austria, driving his opponents crazy with his new racket. Žarko was not the first to start playing with a sponge racket, but he was certainly the player who profited the most from this new material. His career was almost at its end, but the new material launched him to the very top of the world, he became the world men’s doubles champion and the world runner-up in singles competition. Even before he put the sponge on, Dolinar had a very unusually shaped racket – it was a big square piece of wood, he himself called it “the shovel”. He held the racket in a peculiar way, similar to a penhold, but it was closer to today’s racket grip of players who have a classic racket grip and release the racket from their hand for a forehand serve. At one time, there were several players in Yugoslavia who held the racket that way, so this way of holding the racket was even called the “Yugoslav stop grip”, but later completely disappeared. Žarko’s racket was also special because on the other side, the one he was not playing with, it had a skull and crossbones on it, as if it were a pirate flag! Jurica Barlović, a young man from Opatija, also put a sponge on his forehand soon after Dolinar, so everyone avoided the sponge and tried to play on his backhand, where there was still a classic rubber covering. But largely thanks to this new weapon, Jurica went to play at the world championship in London in 1954. There, Japanese player Ogimura and Swedish player Fliesberg met in the final, both of them playing with sponge covered rackets. There was almost no playing, it was played mainly as a one shot match, so the audience attended a “silent” table tennis match. Today, it sounds almost unbelievable that Ogimura came to the world championship by collecting private donations to finance his trip. In addition, he brought a racket covered with a 10 mm thick sponge to London. After the first few practice sessions, he found that his sponge was too thick, replaced it with a 2 mm sponge and won the world championship with that new racket!! The 1955 finale, same as in London, saw both players using sponge covered rackets. Japanese player Tanaka and Žarko Dolinar played the shortest final in the history of table tennis – after only 13 minutes, the result was 3:0 for Tanaka! I saw a similar final at the International Championship of Yugoslavia in Belgrade in 1954, when Dolinar beat Hungarian player Szepesi – it was a table tennis match where you could not hear the ball hitting the racket at all and the points were mostly pimple followed by a one shot that scored the point. It was a match with no playing! Many racket models with sponge covering were available on the market, among the most famous were the Stiga-Fliesberg with rectangular shapes on the sponge surface and Dunlop-Barna with a sponge that had large diameter pips on the surface. At the end of the fifties, the world realized that pure sponge meant the end of table tennis, so this type of covering was banned in 1959. However, the permission to use sponge under the classic rubber covering made room for new revolutions in table tennis. Stories about rubber – At a time when sponge was entering the world of table tennis, the classic rubber still existed simultaneously. In those days, you played until the pips in the middle of the rubber began to fall off due to wear, and the rubber became “bald” in the middle. My dear comrade Marko Tarle who later became a distinguished scientist and with whom I played on the team, solved the “bald rubber” problem in a very unusual way – he replaced a piece of rubber that had lost its pips with another piece of rubber covering that was already worn out in the middle.  Because of this, his racket soon began to resemble a mosaic composed of rubber pieces of various colours, which was not prohibited by the rules, so his racket was a real sensation at tournaments! On the other side, there was Veljko Gospodnetić, organizer of traditional open tournaments in Zagreb, and a table tennis lover who everyone loved dearly. In addition to his volunteer work in organizing table tennis, he was also well known for his racket and for his habit of singing at the top of his lung at farewell parties at the end of tournaments – he had a very strong voice, but he didn’t always get the notes right! His racket was a large wooden “shovel”, a racket with a much larger playing surface than what was considered common. But it was not just the shape of the racket that was unique, it was also the fact that it was a wooden racket without any covering, without any rubber! When he played, the sound of his big wooden racket echoed throughout the hall. He played with that racket until he was very old – the recreational league in which he played for more than half a century had a special rule allowing him to continue playing with his wooden racket, even though by then it had already been forbidden by table tennis regulations!! In the mid-fifties, classic rubber rackets with no sponge were still widely used in parallel with rackets that had sponge covering, and were becoming more and more popular and increasingly harming the development of table tennis. I kept playing with classic rubber rackets, but one of my team partners, Ivan Stojić, later a prominent lawyer, was not satisfied with classic rubber or sponge, so he came up with the idea of ​​combining the two – he glued a classic pips rubber covering onto a thin layer of sponge and started playing using such a “combined” rubber. It was a real revolution, this new racket created huge problems for the opponents – the sponge gave the racket speed and the classic rubber enabled better control and ball rotation. But my friend did not get the fame (or the money) for being the inventor of the “sandwich” racket – I’m sure that before he made his racket I had never seen or heard of such rubber anywhere. It was only a little later that the “sandwich” rubber appeared on the international market, which had nothing to do with him! A little later, pre-assembled rackets with such rubber that came from Japan became very popular – at that time, Japan still had no competition. They could also produce medium-class rackets, such as the then popular St. Brite, but it didn’t take long for China to completely push them out of the middle and lower class racket market with lower manufacturing costs! After the appearance of sponge based rubber with outward facing pips, sponge based rubber with inwards facing pips also appeared. With the smooth surface of the rubber turned inward, it was suddenly possible to strongly spin the ball. A new shot that became the dominant shot in table tennis from the beginning of the sixties onwards appeared – the topspin. After the banning of rackets with sponge covering and the permission to use sponge as a base under classic pips rubber in the 1960s, there was a sudden development of different types of outward and inward facing pips rubber. While the first generations of great Chinese players (Chuang Tse-tung, Li Fu Jung, Hsu Yin Sheng and others) used rubber with outward facing pips, Europeans used rubber with inward facing pips (backside) and started playing topspin. Topspin was not a European invention, it came from Japan in 1960, where they developed that shot as a devastating shot that will destroy the European cut defence! However, Europe wholeheartedly accepted that shot. It was easier and more efficient to perform it by holding the racket the classic way, rather than using the Japanese penhold. Due to their “cultural revolution”, the Chinese were forced to suspend all international sports contacts for 6 years. When they returned to the international scene after that period of abstinence, they found themselves in the dark – they didn’t know how to play against the newly developed topspin, they didn’t know what to do with antispin rubber, which appeared as the defenders’ response to topspin in the meantime. The sixties were tumultuous times for racket development and, therefore, table tennis development. The development of increasingly high-quality rubber with inward turning pips (backside) enabled stronger ball rotation. At the end of the sixties, a completely new generation of rubber led by Sriver rubber appeared, – by that time I was only a coach. When I first got my hands on that kind of racket to test it, I could not believe the spin and speed of the shot that could be achieved with that rubber. It was the same leap forward as fifteen years later, when speed gluing became widespread in table tennis. Antispin changes the rules – Dragutin Šurbek, as one of the leaders of the new wave of so-called “spinners”, players who attacked by hitting topspin shots, won the 1968 European Singles Championship playing with an older generation backside rubber, a rubber that, compared to the new generation rubber, was like a carriage compared to a modern car. In that 1968 final, Šurbek played against Borszey, a Hungarian defensive player who used the newly discovered antispin rubber, which made it easier for him to return topspin serves. A few years later, in 1971, when the Chinese returned to the scene after years of isolation, French defender Weber massacred them using that kind of antispin rubber because at that time they had no idea how to play against it! The antispin rubber disappeared from top-tier table tennis relatively quickly because the possibilities of using it for a more active game were almost non-existent. It returned to the scene only for one short intermezzo when it became a dangerous weapon in combination with the same coloured backside rubber – both rubbers were the same colour, the player would turn the racket, and it was very difficult for the opponent to find out which side of the racket the player served with, or hit the ball with, in time – due to the very different characteristics of backside and antispin, when the play was not “read”, there were many direct errors in returning the ball. The most famous player using such a combination was Chinaman Cai Zhenhua, two-time world runner-up – he had two types of black rubber on his racket, one backside and the other antispin. His serve was particularly unpleasant because he would simultaneously stomp the floor with his foot hard so that the opponent could not even by sound determine whether Cai hit the ball with backside or antispin. In Europe, English player Hilton appeared out of nowhere. He was a totally average defensive player who also played with two black types of rubber – one backside, the other antispin. Same as Cai, he would turn the racket and win many points. At the European Championship in Bern (1980), he won the individual European Championship playing that kind of match – he was also quite lucky because in the semi-finals, the main favourite of the tournament, Hungarian player Gergely, got annoyed due to an argument with his coach Berczik and played listlessly, practically giving up the match. On the other side of the draw, Czech player Dvoraček, who was terrible at playing against defenders, surprisingly made it to the finals! That’s how Hilton got his only career tournament win, never before or since did he become a champion of England individually, let alone win an international tournament! The combination of different rubber coverings with completely different characteristics but same colours was a new danger that loomed over table tennis – such table tennis did not make the players, especially those who had to play against such opponents, or the spectators happy. For the spectators, it was a disaster. Completely incomprehensible but at first glance simple mistakes were made one after the other. Until then, the rules allowed all colours. There was yellow, brown, green, black and red rubber. Due to the increasingly frequent combination of two black rubbers of different characteristics, a rule stating that the racket must be two-coloured, red on one side, black on the other, was adopted at the ITTF congress (1983) in the early eighties. This eliminated the great advantages of using the antispin-backside combination when serving, because it was no longer possible to “cheat” the opponent by turning the racket – it was immediately clear what kind of rubber the ball was hit with, so the element of surprise, which was the main reason for such a combination, was absent. A funny situation occurred at the 1983 ITTF congress, where the rule on two-colour rackets was adopted because of antispin – in the desire to reduce the effect of the antispin-backside combination serve, it was proposed that loud stomping of the floor that had the aim of disabling the opponent from hearing what side of the single-colour racket the ball was hit with, be prohibited. Since the introduction of the two-colour racket made such an advantage impossible, the congress missed the fact that the accepted package of proposals included a proposal to prohibit stomping the floor during the match. After the adoption of the new rule, the Dutch delegates “woke up” and asked for a revote and deletion of that proposal, saying that their best player, the then female European champion Vriesekoop, would be handicapped because she played her forehand attack by stomping the floor loudly. It was only at that moment that all the delegates became aware that an impossible proposal to change the rules, according to which the referees should penalize any loud landing of the players feet during the match, had been adopted. By revoting, the already adopted rule was abolished!! One of the stories at that time was the story about the racket of Sarkis Sarkhoyan, a Russian table tennis virtuoso, later a respected coach. Sarkis had a great forehand topspin and a great backhand shot, which was even more unpleasant due to the fact that he had an old rubber covering on his backhand that he had not changed for years. His old rubber backhand covering practically took on the characteristics of anti-spin and while the new rubber on the forehand always gave the ball a strong spin and high speed, the balls hit by the backhand side flew much slower and with much less spin, which was quite a problem for the opponents. The appearance of long pips rubber – Europeans first encountered long pips rubber, or “grass” as we popularly called it, because these long pips swayed like grass in the wind when making contact with the ball, at the world championship in Calcutta in 1975. I was the coach of the women’s national team of Yugoslavia. Our team’s superstar was Eržebet Palatinuš, who was in great shape and made it to the quarterfinals of the individual competition. There she encountered an unknown Chinese penholder called Ke Hsin Ai. We believed that Eržebet had a chance against her, but the match was over in the blink of an eye – it was a smooth 3:0 for the Chinese player. Eržebet hardly managed to even return the ball. Only then did we realize that the opponent was playing with a completely new type of rubber, which we did not even know how to play against at that moment! We already saw something similar in the team part of the competition, when the unknown defender Lu Yun Sheng whom we called “Grasshopper” because of his small stature and his jumping around the table, came to play for the Chinese team. The first match he played in Calcutta was the final match between China and Yugoslavia! It was a complete surprise, all the more so because he was a hunter and Yugoslav players Šurbek and Stipančić were masters at playing against defenders! Lu lost to the great Antun Stipančić in a tied match and defeated the great Dragutin Šurbek, a specialist in playing against defenders, all with the help of “grass”. At that moment, nobody in Europe really knew how to play against “grass”, that material was a complete unknown. Šurbek watched the match between Palatinuš and Ke Hsin Ai, and was angry at the seemingly ordinary mistakes that Palatinuš made over and over again. Unfortunately for him, he later played mixed doubles against Ke Hsin Ai and was just as powerless against that, then unknown type of rubber, as his partner! In the season after Calcutta, the Chinese sent a new defender, Huang Li, to Europe, and he smoothly defeated the entire European elite in his first European appearances. As the European top players lost almost all sets with less than 10 points made, every new player who fell victim to the Chinese master was said to have become a member of the “tailor” club (when someone won less than 10 points in a set of up to 21, it was said that this person was a “tailor”, or that he remained “below the small one”). Long pips are still present in table tennis, but today the basic education of players includes learning to play against long pips rubber, it is no longer an unknown field. Wood for rackets – Wood for racquets was and remains a special story because of the various shapes and the various compositions of premium wood veneers. More than half a century ago, the South American okoume wood, a slow wood that could be well controlled, was mega-popular.

Gradually, faster woods came that culminated in single-ply Japanese hinoki wood – it is a single-ply wood from the heart of the hinoki, a wood that is hard to control but super- fast. I remember that our champion Zoran Primorac and some time before that Dragutin Šurbek also played with such hinoki. Since it was easily breakable wood, there were always problems. There were two masters, table tennis fanatics, “wood doctors” in Zagreb and Belgrade to repair these and similar woods, who “patched” all the damaged wood for the players. Primorac’s hinoki was “patched” countless times, and when it finally “got crushed” Primorac asked for a new single-layer hinoki. It turned out that his old hinoki had very different characteristics from the new hinoki and that it no longer suited him, he was used to the different characteristics of aged wood! It is no wonder that for such reasons many players play as long as they can with the same old wood! For a while, many European players were obsessed with heavy Chinese woods. Chinese penholders, who at that time only had rubber on one side, played with relatively heavy woods, much heavier than European or light hinoki. Many Europeans bought their rackets in China, removed the rubbers and glued their own – when such woods had rubber on both sides, the racket became very heavy, so this fashion did not last long among top players. Today, wood manufacturers combine veneers of different woods with different characteristics, so we read about the unsurpassed properties of these “cocktail” veneers in detail in advertisements. Very thin layers of other permissible, usually very hard, materials such as carbon, aluminium, etc. are often placed between the veneers! In addition to various veneers, there were of course experiments with all kinds of rackets. Today, numerous patents are gathering dust in patent offices! Various asymmetric forms of the racket plate were tried out, various “anatomical” handles, handles that were not an extension of the racket sheet but were placed across the racket sheet, which should allow maximum flexibility of the hand joint. The most serious attempt based on scientific research was the attempt of the German scientific worker and hobby trainer Dr Joachim Kuhn. He asserted that it is impossible that the ideal shape of the table tennis racket was found from the very first day and that progress is not possible. With the help of students at his faculty, he conducted various researches and in the end, using scientific methods, undoubtedly determined that the ideal shape for a table tennis racket was a shape that resembled the shape of a violin. The exact proportions by which the wood had to be made in order to obtain the desired “sweet spot” were determined and it was shown that the wood in the shape of a violin had better control and greater speed than the same wood in the classic shape of a racket.! The famous French champion Eloi, the Canadian champion Pradebaan, some Yugoslav national team players played for a long time with such wood, but in the end tradition prevailed, that “strange” form of racket did not survive despite its advantages. One of the reasons was that players complained it was difficult to change rubber on this form of wood. In addition to TIBHAR, some other manufacturers of table tennis equipment have tried to produce and sell woods of quite unusual shapes – for example, Yasaka pistol grip wood (handle perpendicular to the length of the wood board), Donic Dotec blade (thick, diagonally cut handle), Sanwei pistol grip carbon T-502, Yinke special penhold, Uhno shark attack and others. When we talk about table tennis today, we are aware of the fact that the so-called “gluing” of rubber or “speed gluing” was only one episode in the development of table tennis, an episode that ended with the banning of this method of “doping” rackets. “Speed gluing” was discovered quite by accident by Hungarian table tennis ace Tibor Klampar and it quickly became a widespread practice throughout the table tennis world. The top players each developed their own special ritual of gluing rubber, thus achieving higher rotations and higher hitting speeds in the game, but now any “tuning” of rackets is strictly prohibited. Today, there are countless types of quality rubbers and wood on the market, so everyone can find a variant that suits them best.