The story of topspin – R. Hudetz

The editor of “Deutscher Tischtennis Sport” table tennis magazine asked me to write an article about the origin of topspin. Here is that story, not as an objective historical account, but as a story I experienced. In the nineteen fifties, great changes took place – table tennis turned from “ping-pong” into a competitive sport, the first professional players and coaches appeared, and the development of materials used to make equipment radically changed the way of playing, the techniques. In the early fifties, it was played exclusively with pips rubber rackets, until sponge racket coverings appeared. Japanese player Satoh won the World Championship with a sponge covered racket in 1952, as a complete outsider. In the years that followed, an increasing number of players played with a sponge covered racket, among them was our great Dr. Žarko Dolinar, who became world champion in doubles and runner-up in singles with such a racket. Sponge covered rackets were used to play “silent” table tennis. It all mostly came down to one powerful shot, without much play, which started to harm the development of the sport. In the late nineteen fifties, sponge coverings were banned, but a compromise was made, and sponge was allowed as a base for pips rubber. The so-called “sandwich” covering, a combination of pips rubber and sponge, appeared. Soon after, the rubber pips were turned inward, so the game started to be played with the “backside”, that is, the smooth side of the pips rubber. Even those first “backside” rackets made it possible to give the ball a lot of spin at that time. Hungarian player Bubonyi was the first to start playing defence with the backside by throwing balls in a high arc with strong forward rotation, instead of a cut ball. Hungarian players like Fahazi and Rozsas followed, playing such a forward-spinning shot more like an offensive shot from mid-distance. I really don’t know if there were such attempts elsewhere at that time, but I experienced firsthand what kind of problems the opponent’s way of playing caused us. It wasn’t a real topspin yet, but it was definitely a step in that direction. And then the new decade came. In 1960, the European Championship was played in Zagreb. There were still players, including me, who played using pips rubber rackets, but most of them were already using various “sandwich” rackets. The absolute ruler of Europe was Hungarian player Zoltan Berczik, a great defender, who played “backside”. His defence consisted of cut balls with very strong spin. After the championship, an invitation for the European team consisting of Zoltan Berczik, Ferenc Sido, Vilim Harangozo and Josip Vogrinc arrived. They were invited to come to Japan for a month and play a series of matches with the Japanese teams. At that time, Japan was still the world’s leading power in table tennis, China had just started to reveal itself as a future superpower. All the players that were invited to the European team were great defenders, but only Ferenc Sido was considered an all-round player and a quality two-winged attacker. The Japanese had problems with the European masters of defence and wanted to try new weapons in a series of practice matches. While we were practicing at home over the summer, the European team cruised around Japan. We kept track of the results and were shocked by the heavy defeats they suffered in matches against teams of Japanese students. Joža Vogrinc was from Zagreb, and we couldn’t wait for him to return and tell us how it was in Japan. When he came back and started to practice he immediately told me that we were going to play a few sets so that he could give me a Japanese lesson and “crush” me. I laughed, because Joža usually won, but there was never any “crushing”. I couldn’t crush him, and he couldn’t crush me, so scoring points often meant long exchanges of shots! But early on, after only a few shots, I couldn’t understand anything anymore – Joža played a light forehand attack, the ball came slowly, I cut it, and it flew towards the ceiling. This would happen over and over again! It turned out that Uzorinac, who had the same thing happen to him right after, and I, were the first victims of topspin in Zagreb. After practice, Vogrinc told us the story of the European team’s suffering in Japan. According to his story, there were two groups competing in the federation – student table tennis organizations and worker table tennis organizations. The students, in search of a weapon to break through the European defence, discovered the forehand topspin, a shot that made life very difficult for the players who practiced cut defence. The European team players had never before played against topspin and ended up embarrassed, just like Uzorinac and I in our first practice session against Vogrinc. The rival worker club players had not yet mastered topspin completely, but they showed the players from Europe how to hit a topspin and how to play against topspin. At that time, the simplest way to play against topspin was to prevent the opponent from hitting a forehand topspin – backhand topspin was not being played yet, and topspin was played only on cut balls. Of course, the European team did not manage to get ready to play against topspin right away. At first, as the only two-winged attacker, Sido was the only one that managed to somewhat neutralize the topspin of the Japanese students. The two-time European champion Zoltan Berczik had big problems with topspin, he was a great defender with cut defence, a “heavy hand” and he never managed to adapt his defence to the topspin of his opponents. Because of this, he suddenly went from a defender who rarely attacked to an attacker who didn’t even try to play defence anymore! With such an exclusively attacking game, topspin, which would today probably be called “little topspin”, he managed to reach the final again at the 1964 European Championship, only to lose to Swedish player Johansson. The first players who managed to master the topspin technique became overnight stars. Karkar, an Indian player who was a student in Germany and was an average attacker, mastered the topspin technique and could hit the ball against cut defence very well. Although he knew almost nothing else, it was enough to make him everyone’s nightmare at tournaments in Germany, and he was for a short time invincible. Topspin spread here quickly too. Young people in particular turned to this new technique of playing. Soon after, many young players played topspin quite well already. Young Marijan Bišćan reaped the most benefit by sensationally winning the Yugoslav Championship in 1961 with his topspin attack. As topspin spread, all players had more opportunities to use it, and practice playing against it. That way, the technique of playing against topspin also developed, and it was no longer enough to hit one spin to win a point.

In 1961, I graduated and ended up wearing a grey-olive uniform for a year (meaning I was drafted), and had no contact with table tennis. When I started playing for my club Poštar again, the coach of the junior team, Strelec, left due to a misunderstanding with the club management. He was a student who was a part-time coach, and his team had great respect for him. But life went on, and I took over the junior team consisting of Dragutin Šurbek, Zlatko Čordaš, Boris Turina and Ratko Roth. Šurbek later became a European and world champion, a legend of our sport, Čordaš was a European top 12 player and coach of the German national team, Turina a Croatian champion and a respected coach in Germany. The only one who did not play table tennis for long was Ratko Roth, even though it was he who won the individual junior championship of Yugoslavia twice in the two years I was with them! I accepted the job and experienced the explosive development of topspin with that team. Šurbek was one of the first players to start playing topspin as a counter topspin, that is, to counter an opponent’s attack – until then, topspin was played exclusively on a cut ball. It took a few more years for a new generation of topspin specialists to mature. Already from the mid-60s, The European kings of topspin, our guys Šurbek and Stipančić, Hungarian players Klampar, Jonyer, Gergely and many others, reigned as early as the mid-sixties.

Since the 1961 World Championship in Beijing, the Chinese started dominating arenas around the world. Their penholders with “sandwich” outward facing pips rubber, such as Chuang Tse-tung, Li Fu-jung and Hsu Jin-sheng, sovereignly ruled the world of table tennis at the world championships in 1963 and 1965. European topspin players, such as the very unpleasant Romanian player Dorin Giurgiuca, German player Erich Arndt and others, could not seriously threaten the almighty Chinese. In 1965, Mao Zedong launched the so-called “cultural revolution” in China, and until 1971, China was completely closed, and any international sports contacts ceased. It was during this period in Europe that topspin was developing unusually quickly as a response to a fast attacking game without rotation. At the 1962 European Championship, German player Erich Arndt used a backhand topspin, which was an unknown shot until then. Arndt reached the European Championship final that year and was the first player at that level to play a two-winged topspin attack. It should be mentioned that backhand topspin was for a long time considered a specific shot that can and should be played only exceptionally by some players. It took many years until players like Stipančić or Jonyer gradually made the backhand topspin one of today’s basic attacking shots. After the 1965 World Championship in Ljubljana, where the Chinese dominated, they did not appear anywhere until the 1971 World Championship in Nagoya. During that period, the Japanese and the Europeans fought for the top again. At the 1967 World Championship, the all-Japanese final was won by Hasegawa, a player who played with a somewhat unusual version of the classic racket grip and was a typical Asian spinner. In contrast to Europeans who played topspin with emphasis on strong rotation, Asians, like Hasegawa, played fast topspin with less rotation. At the 1969 World Championship in Munich, which was again played without the Chinese, Japanese player Itoh triumphed in the final. He was a penholder who played Japanese fast topspin with his forehand, used his backhand only when necessary and blocked. He defeated German player Schoeler, one of the best defenders of all time. Schoeler led 2:0 in that final, but then Itoh crushed him and won 3:2. That was the first time in table tennis history that there were various speculations regarding doping in the press! At the end of the sixties, a new generation of rubber appeared, and its performance far exceeded anything seen before. Back in 1968, Dragutin Šurbek won the European single championship in Lyon playing with Butterfly D 13 rubber. The characteristics of such rubber would barely satisfy beginners today, and it was only after Sriver rubber appeared as true, new generation rubber, that a much faster game with much more rotation could have been played. Soon after, thanks to Hungarian player Tibor Klampar and our Šurbek, the so-called “speed gluing” began to spread – it turned rackets into real rockets! Klamper often changed rubber on his racket and noticed that immediately after sticking the rubber on the racket, it becomes faster, and more rotation can be achieved while playing. He soon started to deliberately glue rubber on the racket before a match, and thus achieved the later well-known speed gluing effect. Dragutin Šurbek also noticed this effect around the same time and started using it for his game as well. Klampar’s teammates noticed that his racket sounded completely different, louder than theirs, and they noticed that he always went to a secluded place before the match. They secretly watched him to see what he was doing and saw that he was removing the rubber from the racket and then putting it back on. At least that’s the story of how the gluing technique came about and how the other players discovered it! In Europe, the topspin attack became the basic way of playing, while all other systems gradually died out – defensive play, penhold, and outward facing pips, are now almost extinct in Europe. However, in the strongest Asian countries, not only in China, the classic grip and penhold are equally cherished. There are also defenders and players with all possible types of rubber. In the seventies, topspin continued to develop rapidly. New materials and the beginnings of speed gluing, the tactics of changing the rotation and the tempo, fundamentally changed the sport of table tennis. One of the innovations from that era was the parallel topspin – the diagonal spin was mostly used until then, and Dragutin Šurbek was among the first to start playing the deadly parallel. After the “cultural revolution” in China ended, the Chinese grandmasters led by Chuan Tse-tung, Li Fu-jung and other stars, stepped back on the scene at the 1971 World Championship in Nagoya, after 6 years of complete abstinence. In those 6 years, the Chinese completely missed the explosive development of topspin because they had no experience with the game, which had completely changed in the 6 years of their absence from international competitions. In Nagoya, the Chinese played the same way the game was played in Europe after the first appearance of topspin – they tried by all tactical means to prevent the opponent from hitting a topspin. As soon as someone managed to hit a good topspin into the penhold backhand of the Chinese, it was a point right away. They simply had no counter-weapon! Thanks to their great game, the Chinese managed to be a match for the topspin players to some extent, preventing them from hitting the topspin at all, but it was clear that they would urgently have to learn how to play against topspin. In Nagoya, in addition to problems with topspin, the Chinese had huge problems playing against antispin, which was actually developed as a counter-weapon to topspin. Antispin was already a well-known rubber in the world, but for the Chinese it was also a complete unknown, so an average hunter like the French player Weber took several Chinese scalps thanks to the effects of antispin, which were unknown to the Chinese. After Nagoya in 1971, the Chinese retired their entire generation of great champions, led by Chuan Tse-tung and Li Fu-jung. Immediately after the 1971 World Championship in Nagoya, after radically rejuvenating the national team, the Chinese started looking for an antidote to topspin. For political reasons, immediately after Nagoya, they invited the weak US national team to visit. It was an action taken to open a political dialogue between the world superpowers China and the USA, known today as the legendary “ping-pong diplomacy”. Immediately after that political action, a sports action followed – the Yugoslav men’s and women’s national teams were invited as guests for training and friendly matches. The intention to bring topspin masters such as Šurbek and Stipančić to train with the then friendly country was obvious. The men’s team was led by Dušan Osmanagić, and I led the women’s team, and therefore had the opportunity to see the first steps of the Chinese in mastering the topspin game. The Chinese filmed our grandmasters hitting the topspin from all angles. Their grandmasters were fighting over who would train with Šurbek and Stipančić first and who would train more, and they were not really interested in penholder Karakašević or defender Mesaroš. The Chinese coaches asked to talk to Osmanagić and me, and most of their questions revolved around topspin technique, topspin training and playing against topspin! Soon after those first steps, big changes could already be seen among the Chinese. Suddenly, players who had a classic grip and played topspin, appeared. In the first phase, they were actually just sparring partners for their first team, which thus had the opportunity to improve counterplay on topspin. At the next World Championship in Sarajevo, their penholder Hsi En-ting already became the world champion next to elite European players such as Johansson, Šurbek and Stipančić – the Chinese found answers for the European players’ topspin. Hsi En-ting was a grandmaster of tactics, he knew how to completely deaden the ball with his backhand stop, he played a topspin with his forehand that was not a copy of the European topspin – it was a topspin in which speed with rotation was more emphasized than rotation with power as with players from Europe. With great placement and change of tempo, he managed to make up for the weaknesses of the penhold. In the years that followed, Asia, and especially China, started moving on separate paths from Europe. In Europe, all other game systems died out relatively quickly, everything revolved exclusively around topspin. Penholders like Karakašević, Kalinić, Judita Magos, Zoja Rudnova or defenders like Syed, Mesaroš, Martin, Chetinin are the only ones of their kinds, apart from Chinese “imports”. Europe has remained true to topspin characterized with lots of rotation and power, and forehand topspin has been joined by backhand topspin, so European attackers actually use their forehand for only 2/3 of the table. Contrary to this European trend, all existing game systems are still used in China – there are great penholders with backside and soft, there are defensive players with all possible materials, there are spinners and two-winged players, those who almost exclusively play the forehand. Chinese and Asian spin still puts emphasis on speed. It is not a “heavy” spin as the European one, but it is faster. Asian players such as the last Olympic champion, Chinaman Ma Lin, or the 2004 Olympic champion, Korean player Ryu Seung Min, are only partly penholders, covering the entire table with a forehand spin attack, using great footwork, only playing backhand as a last resort. Multiple world champion Wang Li-chin, who plays using a classic racket grip, plays that way too. There are no players in Europe like Šurbek was in the past, players who were focused exclusively on the forehand, except for veterans like Saive or Legout!

In the early nineties, one could already read in a Chinese table tennis magazine that their coaches were looking for a solution for their penholders who cannot play topspin from the backhand, so they cannot safely launch an attack on the cut ball with a spin, except by jumping out with a risky forehand. There have been suggestions to try to play the penholder’s backhand with the other side of the racket, as it is played by players who use the classic grip. The Chinese did not stay only with theoretical discussions about this problem. Many young penholders started playing backhand topspin with the other side of the racket. When 18-year-old Wang Hao appeared on the Pro-tour in Cairo in 2002 and “took the scalps” of Saive and Samsonov, playing as a penholder and hitting a very certain and uncomfortable backhand topspin with the other side of the racket, most were ready to believe that it was an exception, an individual occurrence. It turned out that the result was the same as in the early sixties when German player Arndt first started playing backhand topspin and everyone believed that it was an exception. But just as Arndt was soon copied by many, Wang Hao also became the leader of a whole army of penholders who play backhand topspin with the other side of the racket! This is how the Chinese solved the most delicate problem they had with their penholders – how to launch a safe attack on a cut ball with the backhand, how to play the backhand when the player finds himself at mid-distance by chance. It is not possible to play it well with the classic penhold backhand, but even penholders can do it with the new backhand topspin technique. Topspin, as a basic attacking shot today, is continuously developing further. Top players perfected the placement of shots, changes of rotation and pace, introduced sidespin, counterspin, tablespin, flip with spin. The rapid development of new types of rubber and especially the speed glue technique also contributed to the lethality of spin attacks. When speed gluing was banned, rubber tuning started but was also banned. Due to the ban on speed gluing and tuning, as well as the ban on balls bigger than 40 mm, which was introduced in 2001, players today have to be far more athletically prepared in order to be able to compensate for the loss of the speed gluing effect and the effect of a larger ball in offensive spin shots. More than half a century has passed since topspin appeared in 1960. That shot completely changed table tennis. How much? Watch recordings of giants from the pre-World War II era such as Barna, Ehrlich, Szabados or Perry on video, CDs or on the Internet and you will see that only the table and the ball have remained the same, just enough to prove that it is still the same sport. Table tennis has been constantly evolving, constantly changing, and I’m sure it will continue to change and evolve.