The previous best performer at representative level was the late Dave Christie who claimed five Bay men's singles titles.
Winkley says it's a game people tend to play "reasonably well" as they get older.
Perhaps the 2014 Napier club women's singles champion Willy Farrell sums it up best: "You can start playing it from any age."
A sixty-something Farrell and Winkley weren't surprised to find 90-year-olds chopping, top spinning and smashing their way to success at the World Veterans Championship in Auckland in May.
"You can play it from the time you can look up at the top of a table to the time you depart from this world and people with any ability can compete," says Farrell who claimed her fourth club singles women's title.
The grandmother picked up a bat shortly before she gave birth to her first child but after a 25-year hiatus following motherhood, she gravitated to table tennis. She had lost patience with injuries picked up from lawn tennis.
"With a torn calf muscle running was a problem," says the Napier office assistant who finds the sideways and forward rocking motion of table tennis is less taxing on the body.
Farrell, who moved from Whangaparoa, half an hour off the Auckland harbour bridge along the Hibiscus Coast, to be closer to her grandchildren in the Bay, only got into competitive table tennis six years ago.
"The older they get the more cunning they become. It's a lot of fun," she says.
Enticing youngsters to the 30-member club and code is imperative to its success, something the more than 100 high school pupils are stoking with a Thursday night competition at the Rodney Green Centennial Hall Events Centre in Napier.
Says Winkley: "There's so much available for young kids these days and so much has changed in the sport, too."
The advent of rubber that offers reverse spin is one change while the ball is made from plastic now rather than celluloid.
"It's very similar but better to play with," Winkley says, adding the celluloid balls were apparently inflammable.
"They [plastic ones] are also slightly slower and bigger but have the same spin."
Farrell says the sport also negates the need for brute force, providing an even keel for the fairer sex.
"Women can play against men and it's not like tennis because it's equal for both. It's so much fun when you beat a better player," she says with a laugh.
Winkley will attest to that, having some royal ding-dong battles against Barry Winks, QSM, of Palmerston North, who has one arm and leg.
"Barry broke his artificial leg in the men's singles final in Napier against me one year in the 1970s. He replaced his leg with another artificial one to beat me," he says of Winks who is equally adept at lawn bowls, having added high-profile players such as the Skoglunds to his hit-list on the way to Commonwealth Games honours.
A chuckling Winkley hastens to add he and Winks have combined to claim a couple of North Island men's pair titles.
Winkley started playing at 12 when his father, the late John Winkley, built a table which they played on outdoors at their garage-less home in Marewa.
"Dad built it from dunnage, timber taken off ship packaging, so the table had a few cracks.
"It was tricky so we had to pick a still day to play," says the man who joined the now defunct St Pat's junior club for two years before gravitating to Napier club at 16 to compete under its banner for more than 40 years.
The Napier club was then based at Pirates gym at McLean Park but when that was demolished he played for the Tech club.
Almost a decade ago he got a little ping-ponged out.
"I lost interest a little but kept playing," he says, finding the world vet champs this year got his top-spin juices flowing again.
"I'll just keep going," he says when asked how long he thinks he'll play for.
