Serve’s up: How ping-pong can help us all live healthier and happier lives
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When it comes to sports and games, there is cross-country skiing. Skating on natural ice on lakes and rivers. Crokinole. But one stands out above all others: ping-pong . But while its status as sport or game can be hotly contested, as well as its chosen moniker, its prowess at knitting people together cannot be debated.
other than, say, barefoot running or skinny dipping with lower barriers to entry, I’m not aware of it. If you can’t find a bat in your basement or attic, a perfectly adequate one can be bought for about $20, a set of four with net and balls thrown in for less than $50. And the game can be played on any table of reasonable size. Indeed, when first dreamt up, there was no such thing as a ping-pong table – it was meant to be played on the supper table.
Less dignified, a bit déclassé perhaps, but as a name I much prefer the alliterative, onomatopoeic, two-syllable simplicity of ping-pong. Like much of postwar suburban North America, I grew up playing ping-pong against siblings and friends in the basement of the family home when we didn’t have anything else to do and there was nothing to watch on the black-and-white Zenith. It was a pastime, a. The real sports were hockey and soccer or making smoke bombs with saltpetre and sugar.
The game seems to have originated in the 1880s as a postprandial entertainment around some of the finer dinner tables in England, including that of Lord and Lady Swaythling, Ivor’s grandparents. Lawn tennis was by then a thing so it is hardly a leap to imagine enthusiasts of the game re-enacting the afternoon fun by carving a champagne cork into a sphere and using books or cigar boxes to bang it back and forth across the table.
Chicago suffered a severe shortage of balls that winter despite having received a shipment of 15,000 a few months earlier. Aheadline in one paper read, “Got A Ping-Pong Ball? If So You Can Exchange It for precious jewels.” A few weeks later, a break-in was reported on swanky Lake Shore Drive by another paper. Six ping-pong balls were stolen but “the diamonds left undisturbed.”
Before he was 20, he had codified the rules – no one, it seems, had thought to do that before – and become president of Britain’s Ping-Pong Association. By then, he had been at Cambridge for three years and a fervent socialist for seven, which, if embarrassing for hisbanker family, led him to become chummy with HG Wells and George Bernard Shaw, among others.
After the Communists finally took power in China in 1949, ping-pong had an inside track when it was time to decide on a national sport. Millions of yuan were thrown at it and when a Chinese player won the world championship in 1959, Mao heralded it as “a spiritual nuclear weapon.” Since then, Chinese players have dominated the sport in an almost suffocating way.
I began appreciating this again a bit late in life – circa 40 – at the cottage. There you do things differently. Bring water up from the lake in buckets. Saw and chop firewood. Use the wood to heat the stove upon which you cook porridge. Actually eat porridge. And at night read, or play euchre if there are four of you and someone remembers the rules.
At the time, I was working for the city of Montreal and we were overhauling a tired park which had a shuffleboard court and horseshoe sandbox which hadn’t been used, it seemed, since the early 80s. John suggested installing a ping-pong table or two. There was no negotiating. I missed the ping-pong tournaments that took place a half-dozen times a year at a high school in Laval, and that we would sometimes attend. There would be about 40 or 50 tables spread over three gymnasiums and players would come from afar – Manitoba, the Maritimes, the northeastern states. There would be wheelchair ping-pong and doubles ping-pong and seniors and kids and semi-pro ping-pong with $5,000 purses.
Lines were painted on the concrete slab of the arena, basketball hoops and nets for badminton and pickleball installed and, yes, three quality ping-pong tables appeared. The next time I went to the arena, I found myself playing with Akhat who, I soon learned, was probably responsible for the tables in the arena in the first place.
As the slightly reluctant leader of the wonderfully diverse community of ping-pong players who descended on the arena, Akhat set up a Facebook group so that those showing up alone could be certain there would be others with whom to play. He organized doubles games when there were too many players, or just because.
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