| Surprising Superstars of Table Tennis |
| In the 1950s, there weren’t any stores where you could custom-design your ideal racket. The idea of going in to choose wood and rubber to your liking, pay, and have the racket just like you wanted was completely foreign. |
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| First of all, there were no stores where you could buy rubber and wood separately – you could only buy the finished product. |
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| By far the most popular bat at the time was the famous brown “Viktor Barna”, manufactured by the Dunlop factory. Decades after pimpled rubber had retired from the world of top table tennis, the “Viktor Barna” still remained what was considered a “classic racket”, popular in the circles of both veterans and recreational players! |
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| The “Viktor Barna” racket appeared for the last time in the finals of the 1954 World Championships where its namesake, the great champion Viktor Barna, used it in men’s doubles. Barna and Hagenauer lost the finals to Wilim Harangozo and Žarko Dolinar, the only player in the finals to use the sponge bat! |
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| Along with “Barna”, some other popular rackets were the “Johny Leach”, “Richard Bergman”, “Alex Ehrlich”, “Guy Amouretti”, “Cor du Buy” and many others. In Germany, the most famous bats in the 1960s were the “Conny Freundorfer”, “Martin Ness”, while the “Eberhard Schöler” racket enjoyed almost cult status for decades. |
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| I used the “Alex Ehrlich” bat for the most part of my playing career, so naturally, I was intrigued by stories about Ehrlich, the triple World Championships finalist, after whom the racket was named. |
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| By a fortunate turn of events, I had an opportunity to meet him in his “old” days, when he lived in Paris. He was an utterly unusual man who would not fit into any mould. As a Polish Jew, Ehrlich had experienced the horrors of Nazi Germany, survived the war in the Dachau camp, and lived to see his family killed in the Holocaust, yet he did not become an embittered man. He lived in Paris, led a Bohemian lifestyle, worked as a coach, and traveled constantly in his old Mercedes. |
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| When pornography first appeared in Denmark, Ehrlich realised that here was an opportunity to earn a lot of money, so he decided to smuggle carloads of pornographic magazines from Denmark into Germany and France, and sell them at high profit. I attended the opening of one of his private training camps, and could not believe my eyes – Alex lined up all participants, held a speech about the importance of the forthcoming training camp, and then gave each one of us an “Alex Ehrlich” racket, saying that at his camp everyone should play with the best racket. |
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| After a brief introduction, he demonstrated his technique. Ehrlich used to be a world-class player, but he had quite a specific backhand. I have never seen any player use this stroke technique with success, but nevertheless, a demonstration of this technique was still one of the first basic lessons in his camp. |
