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Hobby Forum Index » Sport - Table Tennis » GQ Magazine Article - American Gladiators
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| Ellen Eastman |
 Posted: Sat Jul 24, 2004 11:23 pm |
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American Gladiators
Behold the glory that is American Pong: Olympic hopefuls, has-been
foreign stars, bitter up-and-comers, the socially inept, and a dwarf
who could blow you away. The only thing missing is the fans.
By Matthew Klam
It's the middle of my second day at the United States National Table
Tennis Championships, the sudden-death game of this best-of-five match
between two pretty good players, top forty in the country, Tuan Le
leads, 8-5. His opponent, Courtney Roberts, moves nimbly, but against
Le, gravity isn't helping. Courtney stands six three; he's 220
pounds, a light-skinned black man with a jacked physique and shaved
head. To train for elite Ping-Pong, he benches 375, squats 565. I
don't know why; he says the real key is vitamins an plyometrics. Tuan
Le weights 120 pounds, grazes five feet one. He plays without
recognizable flourish, with no visible happiness, a tiny medical
doctor with a cube-shaped head.
On the next point, he lets one float longishly; it hangs. Courtney
bounces lightly on th balls of his feet, then smokes it down the line.
Le dives, gets a racket on it. Courtney does it again. He really
puts the plyometrics to work. He wheels around, his feet come off the
floor, the striated muscles of his thighs pop as he cranks another
down the line, an outside side-spinny thing, whizzing corkscrew. Tuan
Le digs and lobs, and now they're trading full baseball swings,
standing five paces back from the table, about forty feet apart,
ka-pock, ka-pock, both guys backed to the rear barriers of the court,
hitting big topspin, crushing backhands to forehands. The ball moves
through the air as if it were solid rubber, it cuts sharply, drops
suddenly, explodes off the table.
Tuan Le comes around late on maybe the ninth ball of the rally and
frames one off the edge of his paddle, and the ball sprays thirty feet
into the air, ten rows up into the stands, then disappears beneath the
seats. Roger, the kid sitting next to me, the only other spectator at
"center court," claps.
If this were Europe, he tells me, and we were watching near-great
players at a major championship, there would be hundreds, or more
likely thousands, of paying customers howling, waving banners; if this
were Sweden, where talented teens are sent to table-tennis high
schools, there'd be fans dressed like Vikings, with plastic helmets,
plastic pigtails, face paint; if this were Austria, where the great
Werner Schlager's likeness now appears on a postage stamp, or the
big-money leagues of Germany, they'd be drunk on stadium beer,
screaming these players' names, blowing trumpets. If this were China,
Singapore, Japan, if this were England or Ireland or Itally or Qatar,
hundreds of thousands more would be watching on TV. But we're in
America, in the Las Vegas Convention Center, during one of the slowest
weeks of the year. And since Tuan Le framed it, it's up to him to
step over the barrier and crawl under the bleachers and find the ball
himself.
The match grinds on, the table game versus the power game. There's
the infuriating, nauseating insolvability of Le's spin, the agonizing
quickness, the sweet touch of his drop shot. Courtney is tall and
noble and made of granite. He appears so dedicated and tormented, so
out of place in this small, weightless foreign sport. He should be
throwing bodies, trying to stomp the quarterback. He should tear Le's
head off and eat the inside out. Instead, he loses the match.
Table Tennis has been around for at least a hundred years. One
version of its origin has it that British soldiers overseas, bored
witless, put sculpted champagne corks into play using cigar-box lids.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, the sport had a brief boom
in England and the United States as a parlor game played on a
dining-room table, and maybe because of its addictive nature, it
developed a reputation as something that mad you google-eyed. For a
time, it was even banned in the Soviet Union.
I hadn't seen a Ping-Pong table in years until the people I share an
office with invested in one and we crammed it into a little
table-sized room. We painted the walls green. I invited friends
over. I'd been struggleing over a book about family and death, and
the Ping-Pong table became an object over which I could lord control.
The babyish ease of hitting balls, the predictable plonk, it killed
anxiety. Some friends who came to play got the fever, too, and while
it had started out as a kind of ha-ha fucking-around thing, the good
times sort of tapered off, and I cooked up a few vendettas. During
the day, I'd take breaks and spend time alone with this garbage can
full of balls, practicing trick shots. If someone heard me
practicing, he might appear, paddle in hand. And then the shit was
on.
The people who beat me the worst were a somewhat bald-headed dude who
eats chicken wings with a knife and fork and is quick as a rabbit and
happens to be a tremendous squash player, formerly top-five in the
country; and a musician buddy, one of those scowling, obsessed
geniuses with now girlfriend who wears sandalwood oil and needs a
shower. The musician and I had one or two close matches among many.
The squash guy beat me 600 times in a row without ever seeming to feel
guilty. The two of them had something, an attribute that, from the
outside looking in, went beyond mere mechanics. There was, frankly,
something freakish in their ability to concentrate. I beat the crap
out of a few people, too, but while I kept at it, I couldn't beat
either of these guys and felt there was something wrong with me.
After a while, I bought a book on technique and another on the
history of Ping-Pong and an instructional video that, if you rewound
over and over, could help break down the fundamentals. Then I found
the Maryland Table Tennis Center in Gaithersburg maybe the best
known training ground in the country which is really not much more
than and unadorned garage. The place is run by Cheng and Jack, former
Chinese National Team members. There were a dozen or so
tournament-grade tables, a row of dusty couches, a shabby little
office by the door, Chinese newspapers an magazines, and a television
playing video of the 2001 Osaka World Championships. Fifteen or
twenty people drilled intensely as a small thin man with a wispy
mustache walked around picking u balls off the floor with a
long-handled fishing net.
In studies on sports in America, table tennis is stuck in the "indoor
games" section, with bowling and darts. While some vast part of the
world considers it not just a valid athletic activity but in fact the
athletic activity, Americans don't. In this garage, though, the gravy
was bubbling. I watched the warm-up of a microscopic boy who
should've been home watching television in his Spider-Man pajamas but
instead was snapping perfectly grooved crosscourt forehands at a woman
who was either his mom or sister or coach. She wore high-heeled
mules, no socks, a tight belly shirt, jeans, gold dangling earrings,
metallic blue nail polish, and matching eye shadow. Her body rocked
back and forth in metronomic rhythm, flicking machine-gun backhands.
The ball stayed an inch or two above the net. They sped it up, really
cranking on it, and kept the ball in play for fifty, then a hundred,
then 200 hits. There was something unbelievably ant like and
insistent in their tenacity. Their form was perfect, elegant. It
looked like a deeply gratifying meditation. She had eyeglasses on top
of her gelled hairdo. The father sat beside them on a plastic folding
chair, lost in reverie.
The sport I witnessed that night was definitely not the thing we
played in my office, not the thing you play at home with a sandwich in
one hand. It made me want badly to understand what had gone wrong
with Ping-Pong here, why it had never caught fire.
The number one leisure sport in America is bowling. Crash, boom.
Football, baseball, basketball these sports now live almost solely
for the spectacles. Whatever else you want to call them, these are
release sports. That's what Americans seem to want: release. Or
miserable, dependable fitness. Consider these wildly popular no-fun
American activities: swimming, jogging, Pilates, StairMastering
mindless pastimes designed to keep you fit. Elliptical training.
Cripes.
In this garage, though, in an industrial park in Gaithersburg, I
found a small flourishing sports counterculture, like a band of
rebels, determined to make American table tennis into something else.
Not corporatized, not jacked up on steroids, not expensive, not easy,
not dull. Standing there amid the clatter, I thought that maybe I
could look further and find a pure sport in a moment of beautiful
evolution, not yet tainted
which is why I came out to Vegas.
The Name of the tournament is a little misleading. Only a handful of
players here are actually contending for the National Championships.
For the rest of the gladiators, it's a chance to win a couple hundred
bucks in whatever bracket they qualified for: the elementary-school
championship, the over-80, the wheelchair singles, the standing
disabled.
I notice, among the participants, entrant number 785, an older man
with a piece of electrical tape wrapped around his ear, catatonically
plinking forehands to another geezer. In the far quadrant opposite
the hot-dog cart, a man in a flesh-color hard-plastic body brace,
Velcroed front and back, plays a guy with a long gray beard and a
lumberjack shirt, in gym shorts, with two full-size black knee braces.
Everywhere you look, there are athletic specimens shunning the latest
fashions. A potbellied guy with the ruddy face, distracted glare, and
bowlegged walk of a high school calculus teacher, in a worn-out thick
tracksuit; another man with muttonchops; many more flicking, snapping,
cracking balls; others just hanging out with towels around their
necks, gassing with Ping-Pong buddies from years past. There is an
ancient timelessness to this group; they're like the hobbits. Here's
a guy seventy pounds overweight, his comb-over taking wing, floating
an elegant underspin backhand chop. And past the toupeed guy who
whines that the Vegas altitude "makes my balls float" and the father
in anll white who tells his 10-year-old kid to "get back in there and
take care of business" just when you think you've seen it all
there's a dwarf, Mitch Seidenfeld, and he's kicking the normal guy's
ass. Until recently, Mitch was the number one player in Minnesota. A
full-time coach and family man, he has a whip-cracking forehand and
twenty different kinds of serves. He turns out to be a really nice
guy and used to rank in the top one hundred in the country. According
to the guy he's beating, the book on Mitch is: "Compact strokes. Plus,
you look across the net and see a dwarf and get confused and never
catch up"
There are moments when I think that the passion for this sport is
itself not unlike a physical deformity, because it stays with you
until you die and seems incurable, and its strangeness makes you an
outsider in your own land. Consider Eric Boggan, the best American
player in the past fifty years. He played professionally in Europe
for most of his career and peaked in the early 80s, ranking as high
as eighteenth in the world. Boggan is lanky and shy and was known for
smashing paddles and screaming at himself, "You play like dogmeat!"
He'll be inducted tonight in to the USA Table Tennis (USATT) Hall of
Fame, at a banquet in a rotating Stratosphere Hotel. Since 1991 he's
been a postal carrier, plays no exhibitions, doesn't coach. "That's
the perfect job for Eric," one of his disciples told me. "He's very
introverted. Got a little bit of the Rain Man going. He wants to
concentrate on zip codes."
Mark Hazinski, seeded fifth here, is 18 years old and has a kid's
scruffy goatee, a silver hoop earring halfway up his left ear, and
purposely messy hair pushed into his eyes. He has a broad-shouldered
frame and is easily six feet four. He caught the attention of the
most prominent American coach when he was 9 years old. At 12 he beat
the top men's seed at a statewide championship; in 2001 he made the
U.S. National Team, taking out everyone who mattered along the way and
finishing in a three-way tie for first. In this second-round match,
he hits big, terrible forehands that so overwhelm his opponent it
almost gets painful to watch.
Hazinski was raised in Mishawaka, Indiana, and is midwesternly polite
and well liked. (On Saturday, when he reaches the semifinals, the
announcer introduces him as the "Hoosier Thunderbolt," which causes
him to hang his head in shame.) He has reached the squeak point for
an American star. If he stays in the United States, he'll travel to
regional events that he's already won a bunch of times and compete for
the same old trophy and $300. He'll probably have no choice but to
focus on college, which doesn't make any sense, considering that he
doesn't even go to school. Hazinski's been home-schooled sin age 14
so he can train all day, and he has no other goal than to make it as a
table-tennis pro and attain Olympic glory. The time is now, if that's
what he wants, because the lightning-fast reflexes drop off in a
player's twenties. The only choice is to move overseas, to compete
against young players whose whole world is table tennis.
Unlike Boggan, and maybe Hazinski, most studly American-bred players
never make the trip; they accept the foregone conclusion that the game
will never catch on here, will never be loved by crowds, and rather
than move to some place where the food stinks, they wean themselves
from this thankless game and find new obsessions accounting,
medicine though they know they'll never re-create Ping-Pong's
excitement. One guy who hasn't given up is Barney Reed, ranked fourth
here and on a hot streak. Barney sees the shitty standing of
Ping-Pong in America as a conspiracy of negative forces, most notably
the table-tennis establishment's crusty m.o. and its total inability
to market the game. "I could sell this to anybody." He says. "You
gotta stage exhibitions where you see guys running over the barrier,
lobbing, getting back, smashing, the crowd going crazy. Americans
need a show. We can do that."
This week, nobody is more talked about than Barney, who this past
summer finished serving a two-year suspension for using a banned
substance. He looks on the whole ordeal now as a blessing. "Every
talk show across the nation mentioned it," he says. "A table-tennis
player being suspended for steroids? I mean, the Paul Harvey show,
and Jay Leno mad a joke about it. It was huge. Now I'm the bad boy.
I got a full-page story in Sports Illustrated. I've won all these
titles, four-time U.S. National Team member, but this is how you get
ratings."
Unfortunately, the stars need more than ratings. Beyond the lack of
seed programs and facilities and funding needed to inspire or support
talent, I couldn't shake the feeling that the people who administer
this tournament are somehow invested in keeping the sport to
themselves. At the highest level, the event seems firmly in the death
grip of people who are territorial and woefully unhip like the
former president of the USATT, who shows up each day in a different
jackass ensemble: an American-flag tracksuit on opening day, zany
genie pants the next, an Uncle Same costume after that. And then
there's the problem of Marty Reisman, who in 1952 was ranked number
three in the world, the highest ranking ever held by an American.
He's still playing. This week he's here, striding the hall dressed
like a cruise-ship lounge singer in a Panama hat and big Phyllis
Diller sunglasses. He's also the figurehead of a retrograde movement
against the sport's only technical advance of the past half century,
the sponge paddle, a modification that did for Ping-Pong what graphite
rackets did for tennis: sped up the points, made the game more
explosive.
On the final day of the tournament, Marty will play an exhibition,
still using his spongeless hard bat, to which Barney will respond,
"This exhibition is disgusting. This is the fucking pathetic story
they want told. Marty Reisman and his hard bat. The old-timers will
not release the sport. It's sad."
There are some other things here that make Barney crazy. On top of
everything else, there's his ex-girlfriend, Jasna Reed, formally Jasna
Fazlic, whom he refers to as a "psycho Commie bitch." Jasna is the
top-seeded women's player. In the tournament guide, her photo is not
a candid action shot but a posed portrait, the camera looking down on
her as she slides off the edge of a bench, grinning, her paddle laid
against her bare outstretched thighs. Jasna has an adorable
wooden-puppet's perfect upturned nose, large brown eyes set close
together, a small mouth, shiny short brown hair, and a bouncy samurai
ponytail. She plays every match in a different-color pastel
miniskirt.
Whatever personal animus Barney might bear, he inadvertently tipped
me off to what other players have voiced, an ugly little xenophobic
current in the American Ping-Pong world that becomes more and more
detectable as the tournament goes on. The best players here the
ones who dominate year after year and who make up the bulk of our U.S.
national teams and will play for us in the Olympics this month have,
for the most part, nothing to do with "American" table tennis. They
come here from China or war-torn Eastern Europe, former greats in
their home countries who finish out their waning days destroying the
field while growing old and out of shape, regretting the lack of real
competition, acting pissy or vaguely pleased as they take the trophies
that might otherwise grace the mantels of our greatest pongists, who
happen to be better at this game than you'll ever be at anything in
your life.
As one top-twenty American-bred player put it, "If you take away the
foreigners, I'd be, uh, higher up." In the past nine years, exactly
one guy from this country has won the U.S. National Championship. Two
Chinese guys (they're Americans now, just like us, but you know what I
mean) won it a combined seven times, and a guy from the former
Yugoslavia, this year's number one seed, is the same guy who won it
last year. Everybody hates him.
The first time I see Ilija Lupulesku, he's hitting with Jasna.
Lupulesku doesn't look athletic. He's beefy and tends to scowl. He
wears black socks. He looks like a cross between Ben Affleck, with
that enormous head, and Ernest Borgnine. As the tournament
progresses, Lupulesku will justify his ranking. He'll play with a
mixture of big power and the most graceful touch. In gact, he'll show
the same plodding, brawny confidence Borgnine showed as Major General
Worden in The Dirty Dozen, the same cunning in battle, unembarrassed
by his nostrils and tooth gaps.
Jasna, on the other hand, appears almost mournfully intense on the
court and screams at her own winners in a squeaky, high-pitched voice.
The tournament's number one seeds are both Yugoslav, former teen
superstars, both medal winners in the '88 Olympics, raised in a nation
that fostered young talent and treated its table-tennis heroes to
salaries and free apartments and cars. Jasna and Ilija were married a
dozen years ago, but then the war broke out, and Jasna, being from
Croatia, was now living with the enemy.
Everyone here knows the stories. One guy sitting behind me explains
that Lupulesku lost his doubles partner, Zoran Primorac (who is
Croatian too and is still one of the best in the world), and that
Jasna dragged Ilija all over Europe, and that their careers and their
marriage fell apart. Then an umpire who has just finished a match
overhears us and tells me that everyone loathes Lupulesku because this
pas August, when he was slated to play for the United States in the
Pan-Am Games, he called and said he had thrown his back out playing
soccer in the former Yugoslavia. The team went a man short and was
destroyed.
Lupulesku slides his paddle into a little zippered case and takes his
bag and says something Slavic to Jasna, who cocks a hip and leans
toward him. As he leaves, I try to get his attention, but he turns
away. "I can't talk to you without translator," he says, his face
glistening, and walks off. Jasna sees my tape recorder and sits
beside me.
She explains that it's humiliating, sometimes, to play here. That
Ping-Pong is the fastest sport in the world, but also sometimes
boring, and that you have to live inside it your whole life if you
want to be a champion. She tells me that her nation turned against
her when she left Croatia. She tells me that when she first got to
the States, in the mid 90s, she lived at the National Team Training
Center with Barney Reed an that she changed her name to Reed, not
because she wanted to marry him or was anxious for a green card but
because she thought his name sounded American, whereas people
pronounced her name so that it sounded like phallic. They broke up,
and she has nothing bad to say about him. But when a man in a
tie-dyed T-shirt calls out to her and interrupts us, she just can't
believe it and shakes her head in amazement. "These people, they come
to you like, Hey, dude, what's up? How do I hit my serve better?'
If this was a real sport here, they can't even talk to us. They would
have to pay for tickets to come and see."
She looks out over the tables an erupts in a repertoire of Slavic
scowls at the state of the American sport. "You come to see great
players," she says, watching her old boyfriend and a few of the
higher-ranked Americans fight it out. "This is ridiculous. Any real
players can kill these guys."
It's Saturday. I've been in this overgrown warehouse for four days,
and I've seen enough Ping-Pong up close for eight lifetimes. Staring
at Jasna throughout the women's final, watching her hop up and down in
her skirt, it occurs to me that matches on TV would need constant
slo-mo replay, because the ball moves too fast to see and, more
important, that when she plays, Jasna gets a look on her face that is
the look of someone whose whole heard is possessed by something. It's
the kind of face I'd like to kiss when this is all over, for about an
hour, smack on the lips, on a big soft couch.
As one after another of the homegrown guys get knocked out, I try to
look beyond the obvious finesse crap and blazing assaults to see the
difference between players who are all one thing, who are living
inside it, and the merely amazing ones who lose.
In the men's semifinals, Mark Hazinski faces a heavily favored David
Zhuang, four-time national champion, two-time U.S. Olympian, and blows
him off the table. The prospect of Hazinski going all the way is
looking very good. He has the wingspan, the quick hands, the
emotional void and bamboo nerves that set a player apart, and in these
last hours he has maybe begun ridding this hall of some of the shame
and mockery that shadows American players.
But as Hazinski's miracle run continues, and as Ilija Lupulesku
wrecks whoever gets in his way, some little bit of exhaustion or
sadness grows in me. For what? Neither Jasna nor "Lupi," as she
calls him, has an awesome career to look forward to. They can't help
but love their moment of glory here, and they hate us for it. Which
makes this whole event even sadder and makes me want even more for
Hazinski to beat Lupulesku once and for all, as if that could somehow
make things right.
For the finals, the bleachers are teeming. The national anthem is
broadcast over the sound system. The CD skips so badly they shut it
off. The audience is quiet as a golf gallery. I'm dying for a
trumpet, a drum, some face paint, anything to signal the moment at
hand.
It starts bad, and Lupulesku wins the first two games before Hazinski
can play through his jitters. Down 3 to 5 in the third game of this
best-of-seven series, Hazinski finally starts to wail. But Lupulesku
is comfortable on the defensive; he's like a speedy lizard loping,
bounding, fishing for smashes, trying to tire Hazinski out. These are
big points, five or six in a row, where both players take up the full
backcourt, Hazinski mostly bearing down, trying to crush it, Lupulesku
practically falling into the front row of spectators as he chucks
these honking lobs that boomerang around the net, then bounce dead.
But then Hazinski cracks three whopping forehands, and for the first
time in the tournament he utters a sound. He yells. He wins the
game, and the crowd roars
Lupulesku is 36. When he was a teenager, he was ranked in the top
twenty in the world, and while he was at his peak, the war took apart
the delicate mechanism that was his world-class pairing with Primorac;
or maybe having his country torn apart ruined him. Mark Hazinski is
currently ranked number 366 in the world. His favorite food is Taco
Bell; his favorite movie is Happy Gilmore. He's a big, polite,
dedicated kid, playing his guts out. A year ago, he was the best
junior in the country, and now this. As game 4 continues, it's a
great match, but the audiences is wildly for Hazinski. Everyone in
here feels it. Fore the moment, this match is about America, and the
new kid busting out, and the end of Communist sports Gulags and
old-would domination.
I hate Lupulesku like everyone else does. I hate him because I love
Jasna and because Jasna wears pastel-color miniskirts and because an
hour ago, when she won the women's finals, and before that, when she
won the doubles and also the mixed doubles (with her ex-husband), I
realized she still loves Lupi. It's obvious, and now I watch her as
she sits in the front row, cheering madly fore him, best friends with
his wife, kissing his baby on her lap. Jasna loves him so much that
every time he takes the court, she's somehow in the periphery, not so
much trying to please him but because she seems to feel protected by
his presence. He is her home.
"Lupi can return many balls far from table," she explained to me
earlier. "He's famous for his defending. He's practically a wall.
He can't let anything get away."
In the fourth game, Hazinski goes on an all-out offensive, driving
Lupulesku into the weeds until he finally misses. Hazinski wins the
game, and now it's even, we're in the fifth game, and the stands grow
more and more noisy as Hazinski goes up, 5-2. Then somehow he loses
five points in a row. At 5-7, Lupulesku moves in close and grunts and
unleashes a perfectly grooved forehand hook. He nails it so cleanly,
something pops. I think he's broken the ball as it rips past Hazinski
and smacks the nylon tarp barrier behind him with a loud snap.
Lupulesku calls for time. It wasn't the ball. He smashed his hand
during that point. He's busted his racket on the table edge, he's
bleeding, his thumb may be broken. Jasna is up and running, glowing
with excitement, and hands him her own racket. He clenches and
unclenches his fist.
The match finally resumes, but now there's now hope for any of us.
Lupulesku is a sort of monster, and woken up, the beast plays even
meaner. He wins that game 11-8. The final game is worse. He rolls
over Hazinski.
At match point for the championship, the entire hall is stunned
silent. Lupulesku strides to his corner, touches his towel, then
turns and exhorts the crowd with both arms straight up in the air.
"Awww, come on!" he roars, half pleading, half accusing. It's a weird
moment. He knows everyone hates him. But now people cheer, because
he yells at us to cheer, because we're lucky to have him here, beating
the crap out of us, showing us what it'' like when theis game is your
only way out. And I can'' help it; I cheer too. And then he gets
down to the business of crushing American Ping-Pong.
Maybe we won't be able to turn the Hoosier Thunderbolt into a
Lupulesku. Maybe this country will never find room for a sport that's
hard to televise, that doesn't require good looks or youth or even a
sense of fashion, that just needs loads of mental energy. And maybe
now is not the best time to push a sport that gives the rest of the
world another chance to look down on us. This game may never get more
respect here than air hockey.
One of the first guys I met this week, a veritable institution of the
American sport had been kind enough to agree to his with me before the
tournament's end. Some hours before the men's finals, when I still
held out hope that Hazinski would pull it off, when I hadn't yet
exactly accepted America's fate as kings of beer pong, Larry Hodges
and I found an empty table.
Larry is a typical table-tennis nut: a middle-aged guy with great
reflexes and a personality disorder stuck somewhere between
high-functioning autism and dorky social misfit. He's a terrific
athlete, has written more than 800 articles on Ping-Pong, and is the
winner of eighteen national titles.
I didn't bring my own paddle to the tournament (I'm not that stupid),
so I borrow a very spongy one from a little kid nearby, and with the
kid glowering, Larry makes me a deal. If I can touch his serve just
get a racket on it -- I win the point. And if I can touch his return
of my serve, I win the point. It seems easy enough as we warm up, but
then he serves me a few, and I'm not even close. And on my
super-speedy-topspin serve, he steps in and knocks it past me with a
graceful follow-through, then winces from tendentious. I have to go
find the ball three courts away. Then he takes my tape recorder from
me and holds it in his hand, using the back of it as his paddle. I
still have the recording of him jabbering as he beats me, 11-4. "He
misses again," he says, and then gives a little lecture on form in his
nasal monotone. The tape recorder is a trusty ten-year-old Sony. You
can hear the crack of each hit on the case as he narrates his history
of beating pikers using foreign objects. It started back in college,
giving out handicaps in the dorm, like the time he played somebody
using a Magic 8 Ball and someone else using a hockey stick. Listening
to the tape, I start to consider that this invisibility, the freedom
to acquire expertise in a field no on cares about, the luxury of doing
something just because it's a kick in the pants this is growing on
me. Sure, the powers of U.S. table tennis could market the sport
better. Sure, Mark Hazinski and Barney Reed and all the other
Barneys-in-waiting deserve to have someone bring their sport out of
the closet. But maybe this is just who we are. Maybe Ping-Pong
should remain in our basements, the balls covered in dust under our
pullout couches, forever a haven for skid-mark nerds like Larry
and
me, I guess. The tape goes on. One time in college, he beat somebody
with a gerbil in his pocket and a book balanced on his head. Crack.
He's beaten people using a credit card crack a forty-pound cooking
pot crack and ice cube (though he actually had to use three ice
cubes, because they melted). He rallied once wielding a 3-year-old
with a sheet of sponge stuck on the kid's forehead. "It's my life's
dream," he says, "to beat someone with a frozen fish." |
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