Bigger Better Tennis - Paul Dale

Many years ago I was watching a match in Japan between Andres Gomez and Aaron Krickstein. I was sitting close to the court and realized that I was watching something very different from anything I had ever seen before.   I was watching a table tennis rally!   Both Gomez and Krickstein were trying to produce a rally that was dominated by the flight of the ball rather than where the ball was bouncing . They were controlling the ball inside a tight “funnel” of arc through the use of topspin. Today that might seem normal but back then it was the beginning of a new era in tennis. Long before this, Bjorn Borg had changed our perception of topspin in tennis.   Borg hit the ball with much more arc than any other player at that time and years later while watching   that match in Japan I was witnessing the beginning of a post Borg era. The younger players coming through such as Krickstein and Jimmy Arias were hitting tremendous topspin on the ball and in the process were increasi