Last week, despite the unfamiliarity to the new rules about the banning of oranic ahesives to attach the rubber surface to the paddles, Chinese table tennis players swept all five gold and silver medals from the World Championship held in Japan.

As I have written not long ago, following the Chinese athletes' dominations in diving and table tennis, the world bodies of those sports have been making many changes of the rules aiming at giving more chances for athletes from other nations.  As far as I could recall, here are some of the changes with in the past few years:

1) Changing the size of the ping pong ball to a bigger size

2) Changing the match score from 21 points, alternating 5 services each, 2 out of three in early rounds and 3 out of 5 in the final round to 11 points game, alternate 2 services each, playing 4 out of 7 in all matches, thus, giving those players with lucky strokes a better chance.

3) Specifying the color of the rubber surfaces of the pingpong paddle to black and red.

4) Limiting new immigrants from representing their new countries in international championship, until after 7 years of their immigration and naturalization toa new nationality.

5) Limitation of the number of representatives from each country in the international diving championship.  And limiting the number of first to third place each nation can won in any one contest.

Honestly, I sympathize with those big tall players trying to bend their 190-200 cm body to play, rather clumsily,   on that approximately 75 cm high pingpong table, when a 150 cm from China, Deng Ya-Ping simply moved swiftly like a fish in a fish tank or a bird in the sky.  Well, will they change the height of the ping pong table to 140 cm or even 150 cm then.  If they do, Ms Deng, the world champion for a whole decade will have a little difficulty defending her title.

In basketball, I remember the first visit of the American Christian Team to our school in Taiwan.  Despite the fact that the tallest player on their team was only 6' 6" then, they have dwarfed our skinny and bonny tall center who stood at about 6'.  In one play, one of our fastest forward, a very short guy at about 150 cm, simply ran through between the legs of the American player to score.

In yesterday's NBA play off game, the Los Angeles Lakers played two 7 footers, Odom and Gasol.  However, these two giants were relatively "dwarfed" by the 236 cm Yao Ming from China.  Hays, who stood 6' 9" barely reached the shoulder of Paul Gasol.  So, if you were 5 footers like myself and most of the Thais, Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, Malaysian, you simply have to forget basketball, at least the international aspect of it.

If I were in the FIBA, international basketball association, I make a few change for basketball.

1) The basket will be put on the ground, just like the golf, rather than hanghing about 3.4 meters from the floor. 

2) Players must roll their basketballs to their team mate instead of passing it high over head.  Or at least, like in table tennis, each time their pass the ball, the ball must touch the floor at least once.  All players must be limited to certain, height x weight sizes.  Those over that size would be in another league called "SUMO."

3) Once the ball is on the floor within the scoring zone, everybody must get out of the zone, or facing a "goal tending" penalty.

In soccer, I would suggest two pairs of oppossing goals and  two soccer ball being play at the same time, a red ball for the home team and a white ball for the visiting team.  Each team can only score with their own ball.  This might make the game more interesting and less physical.  This should be more of a team sport than what it is now.