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Tahl Leibovitz
Tahl Leibovitz told an interviewer that he’d started going to New York City’s South Queens Boys Club when he was 14-15 years old. They had two tables there, and everyone was playing with sandpaper or wood rackets. Tahl liked the sound of the ball and the long rallies. Mostly he liked that there was some…
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Mitchell Seidenfeld
Marcy Monasterial, who with one arm had been a member of the able-bodied 1957 U.S. Team to the Stockholm World’s, points to the 1990 World Championship Games for the Disabled to introduce Minneapolis’s 26-year-old Mitch Seidenfeld to us. Who, we want to know, IS this dwarf, er “little person”? Unseeded in Men’s Class 8, he…
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Jimmy Butler
Before he was 11…13…15…17 and out of the Junior’s, Jimmy Butler had won a remarkable 24 U.S. Open and Closed Championships. Already he stood tall in the History of U.S. Table Tennis, and, as was apparent to everyone, his stature in our Sport could only continue to grow and grow and grow. From the beginning,…
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Jasna Rather
Jasna Rather (nee Fazlic, formerly Lupulesku) was born Dec. 20, 1970 in Foca, a town in Bosnia not far from the Montenegro border. Following in the footsteps of her uncle and older sister, always an important influence in her life, she began playing table tennis at age 8, maybe got a Christmas present of a…
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Patty Martinez-Wasserman
Patty Martinez began winning tournaments when she was a little girl in San Diego wearing long, ankle-length dresses and patty-caking the ball back with gum-chewing, not to say exasperatingly casual, regularity. Continuing to play with an anachronistic hard-rubber bat, she grew up to win three U.S. Open Women’s Singles Championships, not only because of that…
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Richard Hicks
It’s not yet 1960 and Richard Hicks is playing out of Lyndon, Kentucky. Since that’s somewhere between Anchorage and St. Matthews, what are the odds that four decades later he’ll be in the USATT Hall of Fame and that its founder, Steve Isaacson, will be up at the podium introducing him for Induction? And introducing…
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Donna Chaimson Sakai
In the late 1950’s, Bob Chaimson was not only President of the Washington, D.C. Table Tennis Association, he was also USTTA Membership Chair–with his chief and only Committee members being his wife Leona and daughters Barbara (born 7/07/42) and Donna (born 1/12/47). As Bob doubtless began to visualize, he was about to have much more…
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Sean O’Neill
Courtesy of Tim Boggan Sean O’Neill came to the Sport when he was seven—began going to a local club with his dad Pat who as a teenager played in Ohio tournaments. The O’Neill family had hosted the newly arrived Thailand Champions, Charlie Wuvanich and Chuchai Chan, and in the summer of 1975, after the Thais…
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Laszlo Bellak
Way before the inimitable Laszlo “Laci” Bellak came from Hungary to play in the 1937 U.S. Open, he had an unmatchable reputation as an on-court entertainer–a world class player with an impishly unique and maddeningly effective style. The first U.S. player to see Laci in action and to marvel at his virtuoso serio-comic performance was…
US Table Tennis Hall of Fame
Recognizing athletes and contributors in the sport of Table Tennis in the United States