The Inventor of the Sponge Racket Deceased

Waldemar Fritsch passed away on 15th May 2008 at the age of eighty-five at his home town Bregenz. The Austrian shocked the table tennis world on the occasion of the World Championships in Vienna 1951.Fritsch remained unbeaten in the team event by using his revolutionary three millimetres thick black sponge.

Milestone in the History of Table Tennis
In Zdenko Uzorinac’s book Table Tennis Legends, Waldemar Fritsch described the genesis of the sponge as follows. “Sometime in early 1951 one of my fellow players in our table tennis club, who had been taken prisoner by the Americans, gave me a racket with very worn-out rubber. At the time you couldn’t buy new rubber linings. By chance, completely by chance, I remembered seeing a sponge-like material in the basement, so I cut it, patterned it to match the racket, glued it on the wood and tried to play with it. I hit the ball as strongly as I could and was amazed – the ball flew away noiselessly as if catapulted!”

A Multi-Talent at Sports
Waldemar Fritsch had an academic degree of political science and was a successful business man. He kept on playing for his club in the Austrian table tennis top division until the age of sixty.Dr. Fritsch was not only an excellent offensive table tennis player but a highly gifted athlete competing also in swimming athletics, gymnastics, handball, skiing and football.

Kokutaku 868 Blutenkirsche German 40-43deg sponge 2.2mm

I finally had a good session with one of these rubbers. These are probably the highest quality Chinese made rubbers I've seen to date, with good performance to match! I was quite impressed... This is probably why the Japanese Kokutaku let them make their rubbers for them...

Although the sheets are a little tacky, they still have good speed and are very spinny. They are not all that fast in the short game (which is good), but have a the benefits of tacky rubbers for that part of the game.

When you dig the ball into the rubber a little further, the German sponge really starts to shine, giving good spin and speed. This is where you get a bit of a kick, where presumably the explosion III technology starts (whatever that means?). In general it a very nice rubber for most parts of the game, particularly for looping.

When I glued up this rubber, I got a huge dome even from a single layer of my Tibhar long lasting glue. The effects were very obvious, a further significant boost in performance! Particularly for hitting and powerlooping this rubber was fast, and loud (glue sound)!

I would expect the Kokutaku 007 (with German sponge) to have similar performance, but probably a little faster. Although both use German sponges, the sponges on these rubbers are different types, so they may excel in different areas...