Otago players from the late 1960s and early 1970s golden era will form a significant presence at the world veterans championships in Auckland in May.
National individual and team titles were won regularly by Otago back then, and two-time New Zealand singles champions Bryan Foster and Yvonne Fogarty have both come back to the sport and are training seriously for the event.
In addition, two other Otago representatives, Gary Williams and Martin Duffy, have recently joined the Table Tennis New Zealand board, and are putting in huge hours handling an entry expected to reach just under 2000 by the March 15 closing date.
Finally, another former Otago representative, Kevin Fogarty, leader of the hit-making '70s band The Knobz, has written, performed and produced a video which has been adopted as the event's official song.
Williams has just moved to Auckland after a long period in Nelson, where he managed the successful Giants basketball team.
''We're hopeful of having two former Chinese world champions, and plenty of well-known internationals from the last few decades,'' Williams said.
Australian centurion Dorothy de Low, a star of last year's Ping Pong documentary, is coming, and Williams said there had been some amusing requests from the older players, including rooms to lie down in between games.
''Perhaps they mean in between points,'' he said.
Foster came back to the sport after a 38-year break last season, and is playing at least three times a week in his Leith Valley table tennis room.
He still plays an excellent game, though he finds the ''funny rubbers'' that came into the game during his absence ''extremely difficult''.
For that reason, he has been playing as often as possible with Otago's domiciled Chinese player, Wang Qi, whom Foster says is probably the best exponent of the troublesome long pimple rubber in the country.
Foster will turn 75 this year, which makes him eligible for the 75-79 age group.
He will therefore be one of the young guns in his event, although he is wary of how the round robins will be composed, with many players not known to the selectors.
Yvonne Fogarty, who returned to competitive table tennis in 2009 after a long break, will be a Swaythling Club VIP at the tournament, joining such greats as Diane Rowe, one of the celebrated English twins who won world titles in the early 1950s.
Rowe (80) and Fogarty will be two of 10 awardees of this honour in Auckland.
Fogarty attended the 1994 world veterans tournament, which she described as absolutely fantastic, and Auckland will form part of a four-year plan to play more seriously, culminating in the 2017 veterans championships in Spain.
Five Fogartys will be playing in Auckland, watched by their mother, although Yvonne said she had been unable so far to get sister Maree and her husband, Gary Murphy, who won the New Zealand men's title when playing for Otago, to make the trip.
