Sponge rubber bats and glory days

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Joanna Ma takes part in the Otago Table tennis Association A and B grade club finals at the Lion Foundation Arena in September. Photo by Jane Dawber.

When Bryan Foster began what would become a distinguished table tennis career, the game underwent its most radical change - the introduction of sponge rubber bats.

"The impact was huge," recalls Foster.

"Suddenly the game was all counter-attack, meeting top spin not with defence, but with more top spin."

The Japanese pair of Ogimura and Tanaka had brought these fast-rubber high-spin bats to the 1954 world championships, and the game would never be the same again.

Foster, like many other young New Zealand players, faced the dilemma of changing from traditional hard bat pimple rubber to sponge.

And unlike the Japanese, New Zealanders had no access to the new rubber, and had to make do with non-table tennis industrial rubber, sometimes half an inch thick.

Foster changed to sponge in 1957, the year he played against world champions Ogimura and Tanaka on the Dunedin Town Hall stage.

He was just 18, the first of many appearances for New Zealand.

He was initially unsure about the change and actually went back to pimple before returning to sponge in the 1960s, a decade in which he won two New Zealand men's singles titles.

There was always a table tennis table in the Fosters' Leith Valley factory, and Foster learned his craft there with brothers Ron and Ray, and father Frank.

Frank was an important and memorable figure in Otago table tennis history.

He used a sandpaper bat and did not grip the handle, instead holding his thumb across the blade.

Hitting everything on the same side of the bat, he was effectively a moving volleyboard, and even the touring world champion Victor Barna found Frank a handful, losing to the wily Otago player.

But it should be added that on that tour, the shot-making genius Barna played local opposition from behind his back.

Sponge rubber thickness was soon standardised after proper rubber became available in New Zealand in 1959, and the legality of all bat surfaces was also standardised.

Frank Foster was forced to strip his sandpaper off and played right through until his 70s with an uncovered wooden blade. You could hear the "block, block, block" of Frank's bat 100m from his stamping ground, the old North East Valley town hall.

I remember changing from pimple to sponge in 1962 as a 12 year-old, arriving at the Mornington club and finding I could not beat Dennis Wong.

I convinced my parents a 1 15s Butterfly bat would do the business, and a few months later, I was being coached by former New Zealand champion Bill Fogarty out at his Oxford St, South Dunedin, home, every Sunday night.

The Fogartys, like the Fosters, had a quality table on tap, this one in a room at the bottom of their garden, wallpapered with old photos and the certificates the Fogarty children were already winning in junior tournaments.

Coaching would involve me first playing the older children - Joan, Maree (later NZ Under 18 champion), Yvonne (later NZ women's singles champion) and Kevin, before Bill would teach me long table defence and boxer's footwork.

"Seventy-five percent of your points will come from opponents' mistakes," he would say, but Bill didn't make many.

Afterwards I would walk all the way back home to Roslyn. Very Duncan Laing.

At home I would practise on the kitchen table against a window, the incessant noise often interrupting the lessons of music teacher Johannes Giesen next door.

We had a table on tap too, in our basement, but effectively, it was a tap that destroyed it, when my father's home-brewed Japanese saki burst its glass surround and poured through the kitchen floor above. Our table was always too slow for tournament practice after that.

Table tennis was almost a clandestine sport then.

I played lower grade interclub games in cricket pavilions, school gyms and church halls, last ones finished putting away the tables. Even in A grade, I played my first game in the Union Steamship Company building.

Then in the mid-1960s, the Otago Association bought its own hall at 171 Kaikorai Valley Road.

Otago became the leading table tennis province in the country, and in 1967 there were 84 interclub teams, a peak in playing numbers which, sadly, may never be reached again.