Table Tennis Tennis

The big advantage of table tennis over lawn tennis is that you always know if the ball was in or not. There are no arguments. There’s either a “ping” as the ball hits the table, or there’s a “pong” when the ball hits the floor. There is no middle ground.

Lawn tennis suffers from this lack of precision. Heated exchanges arise over whether or not a shot was “in”: relationships are broken, lifelong friendships severed – all of which may detract from the flow of the game itself.

The solution is simple. Take a normal tennis court, and dig a three foot wide, three foot deep trench around it, following that strict yet tenuous chalk line ever so carefully. Players enter via a drawbridge that is immediately raised when they’re both on court

Then let the game commence. Robbed of all ambiguity, misplaced balls simply end up in the trench, thus lending no further momentum to the otherwise endless arguments.

Of course, with this set-up the game does become a little more dangerous. One can imagine the initially empty moats quickly filling up with the tangled corpses of broken ex-players who reached a little too far for that difficult return.

We solve this potential problem by installing trampolines in the trenches. Angled slightly towards the court. So not only are over-zealous players assured a soft landing, expert players can also anticipate the trajectory of the ball and use the trampolines to strategically ensure a death-defying smash from thirty feet above the court.

Extra points for gaining enough loft to slap Cliff Richard in his box.