Like so many other things in life, I decided to dig a little further than the average nerdy boy when I developed this unexplainable ping-pong fever.
This kind of temporal fever (thank God) I had also for ridding motorcycles, airplanes, skydiving, foosball, kinky sex, drugs and many other things. When the fever sets in I can only seem to tune my brain to a single frequency. On the summer 1995 the station was Ping-Pong Galore FM.
One month after the fever set in, I had already built my own ping-pong table and I had my friends coming for tournaments at home almost everyday.
Two months after building the table, I joined the table tennis basque association and began my research on this fast paced sport.
I played a few tournaments and lost most of my games. One thing and amateur player finds out as soon as he/she enters the competitive arena is that it is very likely that he/she will suck regardless of how good he/she thought he/she were. I also thought I would do alright because before competing I had beaten all my friends and relatives hundreds of times.
I bought a couple of books on table tennis techniques and spent many hours training by myself. Yeah, I got better but even though my game improved considerably I kept losing most of my matches, but why?.
Another thing I learned about competing was the importance of psychology when playing on a high tension situation such as in a tournament. I could not keep my head cool and being so nervous all the time
my opponents, even the less skilled ones, would beat me just by taking advantage of my multiple errors.
After the table tennis fever was gone what remains today are a few good memories of long afternoons losing countless ping-pong balls and bonding with my many times defeated friends. Have you ever seen the pros playing? isn’t it amazing?.
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