legal boosters?

Baal wrote: Because Berndt pro athletes are constantly looking for gains no matter how marginal. Maybe it is enough if tbe match you are playing is likely to go to 11-9 in the 7th game. Also if you have enough of tbem it adds up. It is why pro road cyclists shave their legs.

but the claim is 100% of pros do boost their rubbers (I am skeptical of this claim but for the sake of argument...). so no one can claim any moral high ground!!!

I understood Baal's cyclists' leg shaving reference to be a argument for exhibited effort for the sake of marginal gains, not a moral justification.

CraneStyle wrote: APW46 wrote: Crikey ! are we still on about this ? I know personally a player who played through the transgression from the hard bat era to the modern era, he became world over 60's champ, and I can assure anyone, players were doing things to their bats back then to gain advantage with their Barna super brown rubbers. There were no spotlights or rules to bother about it back then though, so maybe the game was not as pure as you think berndt.  I have also recently acquired the full set of world sport magazine issues from 1950 to 1960, Victor Barna wrote a monthly section in that Magazine and it is absolutely amazing how the predictions of doom for TT were constant. Anyway twiddling was NOT invented in the sponge era, if you put one side of your Brown Barna super in the sun for a few days, it played differently enough to to mess you opponent up spin wise. (allegedly)  Another trick was to use acetone on the pip tips, increasing spin over and above the norm for the factory produced rubbers. Then there was Taking off the underlying gauze using acetone, and re applying without the gauze making the bat faster but with less control, in essence, you could do what ever you bloody liked to your hard bat back then, and they really honestly did ! It is just that it was not under any kind of scrutiny.  Oh I forgot, sandpaper across the pips was common to rough the edges up and more spin.  My point is, players have always done stuff to their equipment to gain an advantage, although I have to admit, the advantage gained in the hard bat era would have been less than now.  X-Files! "The truth is out there..."

I myself played from the twilight of the hardbat era in the United States through the 40 mm. ball and the speed  glue era (had to stop in 2005).  And I used to, but no longer have, a nearly full compliment of table tennis magazines from both the USTTA and the English Table Tennis Association from the late 1930s through the late 1950s.  I also had brochures from Jimmy McClure's Pla-Good Shop, Hock Table Tennis, and the MacCrossen brothers, Ed (a good player) and John Pershing.

Table tennis rubbers used by top players in the hardbat era did not all come in Barna brown.  The Bergmann Popular bat, a beautifully made 3-ply mahogany/birch? core racket, had a deep blue rubber affixed to it.  MacCrossen rubbers, made possibly by an American company, the Hodgman Co. (I do not know, except for ads by that company in Table Tennis Topics), came in several different colors, as did Hock rubbers and Slazenger rubbers.

Even the Barna racket wasn't always covered with brown rubber.  Jeff Ingber, one of England's best juniors in the 1950s, whom I met in Manchester England for a team hardbat match between England and the United States (England won) played with a nearly mint condition Barna bat more oval shaped then the Barna bats of the '50s and '60s covered with dark green rubber.  The late Henry Buist, England's best veteran fulltime hardbat player, played with a somewhat keystone shaped Rowe Twins bat (the Rowe twins being Rosalind and Diane, English internationals).  I don't recall the color of the rubber on Mr. Buist's blade, but I don't think it was brown.

I cannot dispute this gentleman's allegations as I don't have access to his reference materials nor of course to his reminiscences, and since Ivor Montagu, President of the ITTF during both the hardbat eras of the mid-'20s to 1939 and the postwar period from 1947 through 1955
deliberately made the rules governing equipment and for that matter what you could do to it extremely lax, I've no doubt that some players took advantage of those lax rules and as today regarding boosting oils nonexistent enforcement.

I'd be inclined to doubt, however, that the best players of the hardbat eras of the 1930s and the late 1940s-mid=1950s, pulled all of the tricks, or even any of them, that the gentleman you know describes.  For one thing, neither Dick Miles nor Marty Reisman, world class internationals of the late '40s-early'50s, used "Super Barna" brown rubbers on their 3-ply Hock No. 74 hardbats.  Richard Bergmann did not use a brown rubber on his Bergmann Popular racket.  And quite probably even Victor Barna played with a rubber other than brown on his Barna Personal blade.

None of the shenanigans your friend describes could have given any player from Roland Jacobi in the mid-20's to Angelica Rozeanu in the mid-1950s, both World Singles Champions, any significant advantage.  Can anyone say for certain that the use of boosting oils by today's top professionals, which pretty much constitutes first-degree cheating, does not give those who use them some sort of advantage, particularly when it comes to crunch time, with the match on the line in the seventh, which if I understand Baal correctly, is the only reason the pros boost in the first place.


Edited by berndt_mann - 11/02/2017 at 8:01pm

the_theologian wrote: I understood Baal's cyclists' leg shaving reference to be a argument for exhibited effort for the sake of marginal gains, not a moral justification.

Yes. In answer to a question from Berndt which was if the effects of boosting are ratively small, why do people do it. Berndt then jumped on my reslonse as a moral justification. I do think it is an idiotic rule but morality was not my point in that response. Berndt knows that. But he loves to troll.

And of course APW is right. Athletes have always obsessed about their equipment and look for marginal gains.

http://blog.tabletennis11.com/table-tennis-racket-history-evolution

 At the end of the day berndt I am not sure what your problem is, There is a healthy hard bat movement and I love it along with many other TT fanatics. But please don't be romanticised by the 'gentlemanly conduct' of the classic era, I have the fortune to have played and socialised with many players from that era, England is a hotbed, I played against many players in the English local leagues in my early days (1970's) who saw it all, some who played in the 1930's, through American finger spinners to the early sponge bat players so have heard it all. The 'gentlemanly conduct' vision you so love was just not true, Its just that it was a different era and any kind of accusation of cheating was seen as seriously as an accusation of Murder back then !! so it was not talked about. Nobody wanted to be seen as a 'Cad' but they were rife, its just that it was done in a gentlemanly manor. 

Do you have any verifiable evidence, APW46, that English internationals such as Leach, Pinkie Barnes, the Rowe twins, and Johnny Leach doctored their rubbers in the manners you have enumerated?  Or expatriates to England such as Barna and Bergmann?  Or three-time World Singles finalists Alex Ehrlich and Laszlo Bellak?  Or Sandor Glancz?  Or Vana?  Or Sido?  Or Ruth Aarons or Trudi Pritzi?  Or Ivan Andreadis or Connie Freundorfer?  Or Amouretti?  Or Gigi Farkas?  Or Angelica Rozeanu?  Or for that matter any player of international note from 1926 to 1955?

Edited by berndt_mann - 11/03/2017 at 5:52pm

FYI, APW46, I'm not, and have never claimed to be, "the self-confessed oracle of everything hardbat classic TT".   Hell, I played more with inverted both sides than with a hardbat.  I became a born again hardbat man in 1997, the year Marty Reisman defeated Larry Hodges, himself a hardbat singles champion, to win at age 67 the 1997 U.S. National Championship Hardbat Open.  I finally took, after six years of fooling around with speed glue and trying to become a sex-crazed vampiress of a two-wing 50 plus year old speed glooper, coach Zhi Yong "Rocky" Wang's advice, who, after watching me defeat three of his teen-aged students at the Eastern Traning Center at Columbia, Maryland with a Hock hardbat back in '91, said to me "why to you want to learn how to walk all over again?  You already know how to walk."

Edited by berndt_mann - 11/03/2017 at 7:55pm

Fulanodetal wrote: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AhEKOewo-s4 Sums it up quite nicely. FdT

Lol! I forgot about these videos.

berndt_mann, this is important:

Fulanodetal wrote: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AhEKOewo-s4 Sums it up quite nicely. FdT

Yep.  Hey.  Is that a liter of Old Dianchi No. 7 Seamoon Preferred next to Per Gerell over there?  Gotta go.


Edited by berndt_mann - 11/04/2017 at 9:15pm

"And the same danger is now impending over H3 rubber... FACTORY boosting is now regarded as illegal treatment."

There is such a thing as unboosted H3 rubber. 

Tough nuggies igor!! try again sometime lol

FdT