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Tournament favourites default their matches @ US nationals
This may be old news for the experts but I thought It may be interesting to read what and how players in other countries "complain" about their association.
Six leading players opted to boycott the national championships after they've reached the quarterfinals in protest of the ~in their view~ low prize money (3000$ for the winner). The players were Ilija "Lupi" Lupulesku (former Plüderhausen player and vice world doubles champion with Z.Primorac while he was playing for Yugoslavia, WR 157), David Zhuang (WR: 246), Mark Hazinski (WR 371), Raghu Nadmichettu and Fan Yi Yong. The players representative, Han Xiao chose to drop out due to a conflict of interests. He negotiated that the prize money for the next nationals will be (as demanded) to 10000$ for the winner. USATT refused to raise it for these nationals, resulting in the players not appearing to their scheduled quarterfinal games.
Result was that the 15-year old Michael Landers (WR: 1198) is the new (and youngest) US TT-Champion (won in seven sets against Samson Dubina.
Full story:
Zitat:
Quarterfinals
Ilija Lupulesku (IL, 2780) vs. Han Xiao (MD, 2602), Double Default
David Zhuang (NJ, 2697) vs. Mark Hazinski (IN, 2604), Double Default
Samson Dubina (OH, 2476) d. Raghu Nadmichettu (MD, 2380), Default
Michael Landers (NY, 2361) d. Fan Yi Yong (WA, 2748), Default
Semifinals
Samson Dubina (OH, 2476) advances by Default
Michael Landers (NY, 2361) advances by Default
Final (to be played tonight)
Samson Dubina (OH, 2476) vs. Michael Landers (NY, 2361)
Now that your mouth is hanging to the floor with your eyes as wide as ping-pong balls, here’s what happened. Led by Player Rep Han Xiao, the eight men’s quarterfinalists had a meeting on Friday, and decided to protest the low prize money at the Nationals. (Men’s Singles: 1st $3000, 2nd $1700, 3-4 $1000, 5-8: $500, 9-16: $225.) Han thought USATT had the money available, though there were of course different opinions (from USATT's point of view) on how that money should be allocated. They voted 7-1 (Dubina opposed) to refuse to continue unless the prize money was increased. They asked for 1st $10,000, 2nd $6000, 3-4: $3000, and 5-8: $1500. From the perspective of most of the players, striking now was the only time they’d have leverage; from the USATT’s perspective, they had entered the tournament knowing the prize money.
USATT officials met extensively. They refused at this last minute to increase the prize money at this Nationals, but after negotiating with Han, agreed that for the next Nationals, USATT would try to double prize money in the major events, as well as some other items the players requested, such as a players’ lounge. USATT Player Rep Han cautioned that they would still have to go through a budgeting process and look for ways to raise money, so there would be a lot of details to work out. However, he thought he had a deal.
Most of the quarterfinal men didn’t like the deal, and the discussions grew rather heated. Han said that he thought he made it clear that their original request or demand (it’s not clear which word better fits) was just a starting point, and that they were willing to negotiate. Others thought he was firm that they should not continue unless USATT met their demands. Several accused Han of backing down, while Han thought he had gotten the best possible deal.
Five of the men refused the deal: Lupulesku, Fan, Zhuang, Hazinski, and Nadmichettu refused to play. Dubina, who had never supported the walkout, would play. Xiao, after reaching the agreement with USATT, was going to play, but decided that it would be a conflict of interest to play—it would look pretty bad—and so defaulted as well. Meanwhile, 15-year-old Michael Landers, the only junior in the quarters (he’d just won the Youth Olympic Game Trials and finished second in the Junior Singles & Team Trials) was in a difficult position. Several of the players put pressure on him to withdraw as well, but Han told me that Michael thought the concessions by USATT were enough, and so he continued. (I wasn’t able to find Michael to speak with him directly; hopefully I will be able to do so tonight.) So the six were out. They were given their $500 for making the quarterfinals, though there was discussion and a close reading of the rules to see if defaulting players should receive prize money.
The men were scheduled to play at 12:45 PM. About 20 minutes afterwards, they were told they had five minutes to play or they would be defaulted. Five minutes later, six were defaulted, and so the final will be Samson Dubina vs. Michael Landers. (Side note: It so happened that Samson and Michael were on opposite sides of the draw. I checked with the referee, and if they had been on the same side, he would have authorized a redraw to put them on opposite sides so that there would be a final.)
On to the Final!!! With one other interesting note—if 15-year-old Michael wins, he will apparently become, by a few days, the youngest USA Men’s Singles Champion ever, beating Eric Boggan’s record from 1978. The reason we put in “apparently” is because Michael Landers was born on Aug. 16, 1994, while Eric Boggan was born on Aug. 14, 1963. Today is Dec. 19; if the final of the USA Nationals in 1978 was on Dec. 17, they will be tied; if after Dec. 17 (as some here believe, though none are sure), Michael will be younger when/if he wins. (If you have this info, email me at larry@larrytt.com!)
Addendum added on Monday, Dec. 21
On Monday, Dec. 21 (two days after the Nationals), I spoke at length with David Zhuang on the phone, and afterwards with Han Xiao. Here is the gist of these discussions.
David believed strongly that Han had assured them that USATT had the extra funding available, and that if they stuck together, USATT would increase the prize money fund. He said that he questioned Han closely on this, and decided to follow his lead. He was adamant that he did so for the sport, believing the prize money had been too low for many years, and not just for himself. (The other players I spoke to at the tournament also had emphasized this, including Han.) He felt that Han was clear that they should not play unless the prize money was increased for this year.
He also said that when Han told him of the deal by phone on Friday night, he thought the others were in agreement. When he came in Saturday morning, he said he was ready to play if the others played, and was surprised others did not want to play. He thought Han should have called a meeting to go over the deal, and wondered if Han had contacted everyone. He felt that Han had let them down by insisting USATT would agree to their demands, and then backing down when they would not do so for this year.
I then spoke with Han on the phone. Han said that the whole thing started when Barney J. Reed (who was seeded eighth, but defaulted due to a back injury) spoke to him on Friday about the funding that might be available. Han agreed to represent the players as the player rep if there was a meeting of the eight quarterfinalists in men’s singles, and Barney gathered the players, though he was not in the meeting. Once the meeting began, Han said he told the players they would have to ask for more than they expected to be in a good bargaining position. He doesn’t believe he misled the players or said that they absolutely shouldn’t play unless prize money was increased, though Lupi argued this.
He said that he tried contacting everyone on Friday night, and that at that time, only Lupi rejected the deal. (He spoke directly with Lupi, David, and Michael, and left a message for Fan, but couldn’t reach Raghu or Mark.) On Saturday morning, he still thought they would agree to the deal, but led by Lupi, the others rejected it, leading to the defaults.
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taken from http://www.usatt.org/magazine/2009_U...ps/walkout.htm
Story about the champion:
Zitat:
The Ping-Pong Genius Michael Landers Is the Youngest Champion
One coach says Landers could soon be “a very good asset” for the U.S. table tennis team. Three times a week, Michael Landers takes the Long Island Rail Road to Penn Station. He rides the subway downtown for two stops, then walks two blocks to SPiN New York, at 23rd Street and Park Avenue South, where for three hours he practices table tennis in his quest to become the best player in the United States. On the train home, he does his math homework.
At 15, Landers is the youngest player to win the men’s national singles championship. He overcame a three-games-to-one deficit in the best-of-seven final on Dec. 19 in Las Vegas, where controversy almost derailed his bid. Six of the eight quarterfinalists defaulted after protesting what they considered to be insufficient prize money. Landers was ushered straight to the final, where he defeated his higher-rated opponent, 26-year-old Samson Dubina.
The title is expected to boost Landers’s national ranking into the top 25. On a broader level, he is hoping it will enhance the sport’s popularity in the United States. He is drafting letters to athletic apparel companies like Adidas to get involved with table tennis.
“As opposed to a 30-year-old guy, I’m so young that people might actually listen to me if I write in about Ping Pong,” Landers said.
He is a sleek 5 feet 8 inches, generating power on his punishing forehand from strong legs and hips. He bears a faint resemblance to the actor Michael Cera, likes music — he plays the bassoon, loves his new keyboard and, according to his older sister, Sara, “has perfect pitch, the little monkey” — and enjoys sports and hanging out with friends.
Most of those friends are fellow table tennis players, but Landers stands out. Hardly anyone else employs a coach to work exclusively on fitness.
For the last 14 months, Goran Milanovic, a former discus thrower from Serbia, has pushed Landers in grueling 90-minute workouts two or three times every week. Medicine balls are staples, as are plyometric exercises, running drills and weight training, and the location varies from session to session — a nearby gymnasium, the Landers’s backyard and on a recent afternoon, their basement. There, Milanovic bounced six-sided balls that Landers had to touch while backpedaling.
“I train the athlete first, then the table tennis player,” said Milanovic, who works mostly with top junior tennis players and Olympic hopefuls in track and field. “Michael was my first table tennis player. He was my challenge.”
Milanovic works in tandem with Ernesto Ebuen, a top-10 player in the United States and a member of the Philippine national team who is in charge of Landers’s skills and mental game.
Landers said meeting Ebuen, 29, was “the greatest thing I ever did,” and he is less a coach than a big brother and a baby sitter. When Landers wants to deconstruct an opponent’s style, he consults Ebuen. But he has been known to call Ebuen at 2 a.m. to ask what color shirt he needs to wear for a tournament.
“If he doesn’t do good in school, his mom calls me so I can remind him about his priorities,” Ebuen said. “I’m always there. I’m like his better half.”
On days he trains at SPiN with Ebuen, Landers is permitted to leave the Wheatley School, where he is a sophomore, at 1 p.m. His mother, Joan Landers, drives him to the train station in Mineola. His guidance counselor rearranged his class schedule so physical education would be in the last period, and Landers is excused from that because of his intensive training, which can exceed 30 hours a week.
“I got an A in gym with, like, 27 absences,” Landers said. “That must be a record or something.”
Proof of Landers’s early aptitude can be found in a photograph, taken when he was 2, of him holding a paddle and standing on a couch to reach the table. Tennis, baseball and soccer competed for his time, and table tennis might have remained a hobby had he not broken his left arm while playing hide-and-seek when he was 9.
Days away from attending a summer sports camp, Landers had barely climbed into a garbage can with wheels before it toppled over. He needed surgery after sustaining three fractures, including two near a growth plate. His left arm is a mite shorter than his right.
“You try to find something to do for an energetic kid with a cast on his arm,” his father, Stanley Landers, said. “We found it.”
They found a table tennis club in Flushing, Queens, where Landers started taking lessons from Hui Yuan Liu, a national coach. Liu shortened Landers’s looping tennislike strokes, and within four months, Landers was playing in tournaments. Within a year, he had finished first in under-12 doubles and second in singles at the 2005 Junior Olympics. One by one, Landers dropped other sports to focus on his new passion.
“I didn’t know how serious I wanted to be about it,” he said. “I just kept playing and loved it. I guess when you love something, you just keep doing it because you enjoy it so much.”
So much that Stanley Landers said he had discovered his son watching videos of championship matches on his computer late into the night. Studying, Michael Landers called it.
A two-disc set featuring the Swedish legend Jan-Ove Waldner, who has been called the Mozart of table tennis, is on his desk. Other greats are immortalized on posters adorning a basement wall, painted a soothing shade of light blue.
“The color’s a little misleading,” Sara Landers said. “It gets pretty intense in here.”
As she spoke, Ebuen was filling a silver bowl with about 150 orange balls to fire at Landers from across the table. The drill is designed to improve reaction time and muscle memory. Within two minutes, the bowl was empty, the balls scattered along the floor.
Ebuen said Landers’s next objective was to place high at a tournament in February in El Salvador so he could qualify for the Summer Youth Olympic Games next August in Singapore.
“What I like about Michael is that he’s very humble as a player, very modest, not like other players who say that they’re stars,” Doru Gheorghe, the high-performance director for USA Table Tennis and the coach of the women’s national team, said in a telephone interview. “He’s become a high-level junior player, and he could be a very good asset for our national team in the future.”
As long as he continues to improve, Landers is considered a solid candidate to compete in the 2012 Olympics in London, the summer before he would enroll in college. Princeton, which has a strong table tennis team, is an early favorite.
“I’m still 15,” Landers said. “Let me pass 10th grade first.”
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from http://sports.iflove.com/the-ping-po...gest-champion/
Videos of the final:
http://www.outpost81.com/usnationals...a_M2U00160.htm
http://www.outpost81.com/usnationals...a_M2U00161.htm
http://www.outpost81.com/usnationals...a_M2U00162.htm
http://www.outpost81.com/usnationals...s_M2U00163.htm
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Geändert von TSC (05.01.2010 um 01:23 Uhr)
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05.01.2010, 01:21
