Why you shouldn’t get better art tools

Two months ago I started playing ping pong at a local club. I picked ping pong because I love the sensation of bouncing that ball, the rhythm is great and I think it looks pretty cool when it’s played well.

But this is actually not the first time that I join a ping pong club.

The first time was when I was about 10 years old. My dad thought me and my younger brother should start practicing some kind of sport, just to get out a bit more and make more friends (we played a lot of video games). I was very shy at this age and that was probably the only reason that I didn’t want to do any sport at all. After some convincing he managed to get us to go to ping pong.
During one match, my opponent (my brother or dad) shot a ball at my side of the table, it bounced low and flew past me. When the ball was a few centimeters above the floor, I took a long, leaping step towards it, with my ping pong racket following just behind my foot. Somehow, in this attempt to catch the ball, I managed to slide the ping pong racket underneath my foot. It cracked loudly when I stepped on it. One side of the handle broke off, exposing the flat plywood on that side of the handle. People laughed a bit, I felt awful, I had just destroyed this nice racket that my dad had bought me, I felt like the worst player ever. Who steps on their racket while playing? When we got home dad super-glued it back on, he did a good job, it was hard to tell that it had been repaired unless you knew.

Soon after that, my brother switched to judo because he had friends there, and my dad stopped coming, hoping I would start playing with the other kids. But I was too intimidated by playing with anyone else, so I stopped after having only played for a few weeks, maybe a month.

Skipping forward 13 years, there was a ping pong table in the office at my first and last workplace in Stockholm. We played nearly every day. We ran circles around it, sometimes 10 people at once, there were some tournaments and we often played matches just for fun for way too long. It was one of my favorite things about working there. During a lunch break we found a box with stickers in it, so we decorated our rackets. I stuck a pair of eyes, a nose and a mouth on the black side of my racket - the same racket that I had stepped on. Later I bought some small bottles of hobby paint (to make a fruit bowl), I used that to paint over the ugly design on the handle of the racket.

Now, 4 years after that, I’ve moved to France and I started playing at a club again, the one I mentioned in the beginning. Probably inspired by how much fun I had playing with my old colleagues and maybe to show myself that I’ve grown since my ping pong fiasco as a kid. Again, with that same old racket.

At this club there’s a mix of beginners like me and people who have played for more than 10 years and go to competitions. I’m barely keeping up with anyone. The last exercise of every session is something the coach calls “mont et decent,” when you lose, you go down one table, when you win you go up one table. When your match is determined you gotta shout “stop,” and then every match is settled by whatever score they’re at. I usually plummet to the bottom pretty quickly.

One time I asked the coach at the end of a session if he could give me any tips on how to play better. He showed me some basics about how to move your arm and how to aim, and made me practice them for a bit. At some point I asked him about rackets, so he bounced a ball a few times with mine and said “not bad.”

Every time I miss a ball or screw up I think through everything he told me that time. Which is often, I miss a lot of balls, but less and less.

Since then I’ve been thinking about different ways to improve my game, I’ve been reading about strategies, techniques, listened to podcasts and watched videos. One time I asked a player how he could get such effective spins on his ball, cause mine were so dull by comparison. He said it was because he had a better racket. He told me that he tends to not change his racket very often, only about two times a year or every month (can’t remember exactly what he said). I was shocked that he changed this often, he told me that was nothing, some of his friends change every week. This made me feel unsure about my repaired, 20 year old racket, which I store in a bag with a broken zipper.

I removed the mouth sticker because it looked too much like a black face stereotype.

I haven’t thought this intently about tools since I was a kiddo learning about pencils and light tables. Back then I tried a bunch of different pencils, markers and papers to try and make my art look more like the printed comics that I owned. To my disappointment the answer was always some kind of digital processing, you can’t really get perfect, flat, black colors with a marker, you will always see the pen strokes in it. No matter how thick the marker is.

Despite learning that as a kid, as an adult I wanted to believe that tools don’t matter at all.

There’s this situation where someone asks Stephen King “what pen do you use to write?” Which he mocks by basically saying it doesn’t matter at all, you can write with anything. And I’ve long believed him, it doesn’t really matter if I have a 1000 euro Cintiq to draw on or an entry level tablet for 80 euro. I can’t really tell the difference by looking at the drawings.

When you see someone’s art you never think “wow, they must own a very nice drawing tablet.” You assume it’s because of experience (or talent, which is just another lie).

But sports are so different, it’s about physics, which is heavily determined by the objects that are involved. It’s more like traditional art, than digital art or writing. I know very well that certain pens feel way different from others, I’ll go for my Pilot G-Tec-C4 before my Pigma Micron 03 most days, because I know the Pigma pen feels floppy and slippery compared to the Pilot which is super light and tight.
When I doodle in my sketchbook on a train and a stranger asks me if they can borrow my pen for a second to fill in a form, I doubt that they can tell what a nice pen they are using.
And just like with traditional art and pencils, I’m sure there’s a huge spectrum of feels for ping pong rackets. Right now I would probably be more like the stranger on the train if I were to try an experienced player’s racket. So the best thing I can do is to just keep using whatever I like to use, for as long as possible. I’m sure even Stephen King writes with a pencil which he likes the feel of.

In traditional art you need to resupply regularly, you will inevitably use up a pencil as long as you keep sharpening it. Artists give up on pens at different stages, some grind them down to a stump, other’s throw those stumps out.

There’s no right answer.

I wish I could just stick to the same racket forever and not have to think about it. The ideal is that the tool just behaves exactly as I want forever. But nothing does, even pens can change the way they lay lines throughout their lifetimes.

I believe what would happen if I bought a new racket, is that I would improve my playing. But mostly because I get a small boost in confidence by owning a new piece of equipment that is supposed to make me play better. Which is fine as long as it helps. The risk is that when the confidence wears off I’ll be tempted to get another better racket yet again to get the same kick. Getting used to paying money in exchange for confidence is what I’m afraid of falling into.
I know that I can draw way better with a crayon than any 3 year old, so experience definitely plays a much bigger role than equipment. I think you can use any excuse you want to upgrade your tools. As long as the excuse isn’t “it will make me play better.”