HISTORY OF TABLE TENNIS

This is my 1st assignment in TARC.....hopefully everything goes fine~~~^^


Table tennis also known as “Ping Pong”, is a sports in which two or four players hit a
lightweight, hollow ball with rackets. This game is invented by an Englishman named David
Foster at 15 July 1890 in England. The game was played amongst the upper-class as an after
dinner activity commonly known as “Wiff-Waff”. The history of table tennis shows us that it
was popular in Europe at this time and so is Australia, Czechoslovakia, England, Germany,
Hungary, India, Sweden and Wales who were all invited to become the original members of
International Table Tennis Federation (ITTF). The rules of International Competitions were
approved on a meeting on 12th December 1926 were based on the English rules of the game for
singles and the Hungarian rules of the time for the double. Early rackets were often pieces of
parchments stretched upon a frame, and the sound generated in play gave the game its first
nicknames of “Wiff-Waff” and “Ping Pong”. A number of sources indicate that the game was
first brought to the attention of Hamley’s of Regent Street under the name of “Gossima”. Ping
Pong was trademarked on 20th September 1900 by Hamley Brothers who become “jointly
concerned” with Jaques as the game was renamed to “Gossima or Ping Pong” then ‘Pimg Pong
or Gossima” and finally Ping Pong. But there was another name too. Wiff-Waff is made by
Slazenger&Sons or 10 Ducksfoot Lane upper Thames Street, London, England was registerd as a
new game on 31st December 1900. So, the ITTF had a research and have the definitive answer- it
was Englishman David Foster who invented the game of table tennis. In the 1950’s, rackets that
used a rubber sheets combined with an underlying sponge layer change the game dramatically,
introducing greater spin and speed.


RACKETS GRIP STYLE

Grip tightness refers to the idea of having different amounts of tightness in your grip of the table
tennis bat, depending on what shot you are trying to play. Using a firm grip when you want to
impart your own spin on the ball also makes sense. In these situations you usually want to get as
much spin or speed out of your stroke as you can, so a firmer grip will allow a better rebound
from the racket, increasing the spin and speed. The shakehand grip is so-named because one
grips the racket similarly to the way one performs a handshake. The grip is sometimes referred to
as the "tennis grip" or the "Western grip," although it has no correlation to the Western grip used
in Tennis. The shakehand grip is traditionally popular among players originating in Western
nations and South Asian nations. This is primarily due to the increasingly fast nature of the game,
making the backhand stroke more prevalent, a stroke which is difficult to execute consistently at
a high standard.