I've been writing this blog now for about 10 months, some 63 entries in all.  Entry #2 was about my crappy forehand and guess what?, entry number 64 will also be about my crappy forehand.  There's just something really really wrong going on the forehand side - I don't feel it at all, I just close my paddle, turn my body, swing at the ball and hope something good happens.  There's no feeling to it, nothing there to latch on to emotionally.  The backhand is a different story.  When I see a ball coming to my backhand I can see and feel in that split second what's going to happen next.  It's like my old tennis playing days when my strokes were really grooved.  About the time when the ball crosses the net on its way towards you all sorts of options flash through your mind: where you're going to move, how you're going to hit the ball, how much spin, pace, what direction, depth, and so on.  Three or four scenarios flash through your mind at once and you see and feel all of them so that when you finally go and hit the ball you can forget about what's going to happen because you've already done it.

Of course in table tennis getting to that state is much harder simply because of the compressed time scale of the sport.  But still on the backhand side I'm starting to feel that feeling again.  The forehand is lost, as lost as it was last year and the year before.  It's just a collection of movements, a laundry list of body part sequences.
  The only thing I know is that my current stroke, which is a very flat, horizontal, Chinese-ish sort of thing, is not working for me.  For a few months in the spring I tried a Timo Boll, chicken wing style stroke but succeeded only in injuring my playing arm with it.

My only guess as to this unfortunate state of affairs is that in tennis both strokes, forehand and backhand (if you have a one handed bh as I did), are very wristy and my many years on the court taught me to time the stroke according to the wrist snap.  In table tennis only my backhand has wrist in it, on the forehand side the wrist is locked.  Perhaps somewhere in my brain a deeply embedded tangle of neurons is preventing me from being able to hit a ball with a stick without using my wrist.

Ok it's a dumb theory, a long shot, a pot shot, a hail mary, call it what you will but it's all I've got right now.  So over the next couple of weeks and months I'm going to try putting various wrist motions into my forehand and see what happens.  Really, it can't make things any worse.