Follow The Bouncing Ball

Ping-pong has played a key role in establishing US-China relations. It continues to provide a hopeful back-and-forth between the two peoples, as CHRIS DAVIS reports from New York.

Ping-pong - aka table tennis - is arguably the world's most widespread sport. The International Table Tennis Federation recently announced that it has more countries affiliated with it than any other Olympic sport.

And China is the table tennis capital of the world. Of the top 10-ranked players in the world at any given moment, six to seven are Chinese - and there would be more if more were allowed to compete in international tournaments.

"China's B Team and C Team and D Team would beat anyone else's A Team," according to Will Shortz, owner of the Westchester Table Tennis Center in Pleasantville, New York, about a 50-minute train ride north of Manhattan.

How did a novelty pastime that started as a parlor game in Victorian England evolve into such a global and competitive sport? And how did China rise to dominate the whole field?

Maybe Shortz could offer some clues. "In some ways," he said during a tournament at his center last weekend, "it's similar to crossword puzzles - my other field."

Shortz referring to crossword puzzles as "my other field" is kind of like having a conversation with Einstein about his violin playing and having him say, "It's kind of like physics - my other field."

Ping-pong fanatic

Editor of The New York Times crossword puzzle - the undisputed gold standard of the game - Shortz has also been a table tennis fanatic since he was a kid growing up on a rural Indiana horse farm with a table in the basement. He also constructed his first crossword puzzle when he was still a kid. So what's the similarity?

"People think they're the best because they win their game with their family or friends and they think they're champions," he said. "And then they come to a tournament, and they find they're nowhere near champions. They have no idea what champions look like."

New York Times crossword puzzles - Shortz turns in a week's worth in a single batch - start out easy on Monday and grow incrementally more difficult each day. A top crossword solver, he said, can do a Monday puzzle in a minute and a half and the much larger Sunday puzzle in six to eight minutes.

"It's unfathomable to most people, but that's what they can do," he said.

Table tennis is also fast-paced and strenuous. "When I'm playing (and he plays every day), I will be drenched in sweat in 15 to 20 minutes. It's an all-over body workout," he said. "It's also a brain game. Part of what I like about the game is that you are using your brain the whole time -and table tennis attracts intelligent people."

Practice your moves until they're instinct. Analyze and exploit your opponent's weaknesses, cover up your own and play to your strengths - at a lightning pace. Little wonder it's been called "chess on speed."

And watching some top level players go at it can also inspire unfathomable wonder. One such champ is Zhang Kai, 19, who was at the tournament last weekend (favored to win) and may also offer a clue as to how the sport has evolved into what it is today.

Zhang was born in Beijing in 1998. The son of a policeman and a pharmaceutical worker, Zhang was in kindergarten at the age of 6 when a ping-pong scout came to the school "to choose potential table tennis stars," he said in between preliminary matches at the tournament.

One out of 30

"It was pretty crazy. He touched our shoulders and our body to see who had the better potential, better physical condition," Zhang said. "He chose me as the only one among the 30 kids in the class."

Zhang started going to the local ping-pong club to train almost every day after school. "After a year and a half, I started to become a decent player and become enthusiastic about table tennis," he said. He even went to practice with a fever one day.

In 2004, Kai was chosen for a better club and trained there for three years, from first to third grade.

"The system was semi-professional because we still went to school in the morning and trained in the afternoon and night," he said.

The hard work paid off. In 2007 Kai was selected for the more competitive Beijing City Team. It meant more time training, less time in school.

The following year he was elected to the Beijing pre-professional team, one of the best teams in China and incubator of many world champions.

"I was 11 and just finished fourth grade," he said. "I jumped directly to seventh grade to keep following the intense training schedule - almost every morning, afternoon and night."

Decision time

Somewhere along the line, the young champ saw a crossroads taking shape before him. If he wasn't one of the top three or four players in China, then he would not be competing and most likely he would be relegated to being a coach - a coach without a proper education.

Zhang had always had the dream to come to the US. In 2011, he embarked on a journey to the US with his parents, who were taking his older cousin on a tour to look at colleges. It was a trip that would change his life.

Meanwhile, back in the US, Shortz had been busy making one of his own dreams come true. Having laid off table tennis for 15 years, he had taken it up again in 2001, playing at clubs and community centers.

He made friends with Robert Roberts, a coach from Barbados - five-time champion of the Caribbean who had once been ranked 128 worldwide - and they decided to make it their goal to create the best table tennis facility in the US.

"We both love the game so we established a club the way we would want it," Shortz said.

They found 14,000 square feet of high-ceilinged warehouse space in Shortz's hometown of Pleasantville. He ordered 19 top-of-the-line Double Happiness/Double Fish tables from China.

"When I played in China, these are the tables that you see there," he said. (The center's website lists the 250 table tennis clubs Shortz has played at around the world).

Perfect timing

They installed plenty of overhead lighting and gymnasium flooring with good bounce covered with non-slip athletic flooring.

They opened in 2011 and hosted their first tournament just in time for a 13-year-old prodigy from China - who was traveling with his parents and cousin - to drop by and enter.

Shortz and Zhang played and became friends. Six months later, Shortz traveled to China for a sudoku championship (Shortz is the only living human being with a bachelor's degree in enigmatology - or the study of puzzles - which he earned at Indiana University-Bloomington's design-your-own degree program). Zhang and his father squired Shortz around to Beijing's best ping-pong spots.

Zhang was back to living fulltime at a table tennis academy, training daily into the night. Still, as good as he was, he wasn't good enough to play on the China team.

Making a change

Zhang wanted to make a change. He would keep playing ping-pong but he also wanted to get an education. Going to the US would maximize his opportunity to compete in international arenas like the Olympics.

In 2012, Shortz came up with at plan: Find a family in Pleasantville - within walking distance of the table tennis center - to take Zhang in. Shortz tried everything he could think of - ads, bulletin boards, articles placed in the local papers.

In the end, he re-did his third floor for a teenager and Zhang moved in four years ago, enrolling in Pleasantville High School. And Shortz became his official guardian. Zhang struggled with and conquered English and is set to graduate and go to SUNY-Binghamton in the fall. He has also been ranked the No. 1 table tennis player in the US.

At high school, Zhang was known as personable, quite social and an excellent math student. The school also held lunchtime ping-pong tournaments for students. Kai would play multiple students using only his cell phone - and always winning, of course.

'Courageous life'

Last year, the Westchester-Hudson Valley chapter of the Organization of Chinese in America (OCA), awarded Zhang Kai its Jeannette Wang Award, a $1,000 stipend given annually to a high school senior of Asian or Asian-American descent "who has a courageous life story to tell and who will be in the first generation of his family to attend a four-year college anywhere in the world".

"Kai's personal life story - his unusual climb to the top of professional sports in not one but two countries and his venturing on his own to the US to live, work and study to accomplish this at a young age - and his success at doing so - is truly unique," said OCA's Linda Sledge, who also reported that when Kai received his award at the chapter's annual gala, "he got a spontaneous ovation by the crowd and was treated like a rock star, especially by the other admiring youth awardees."

Not surprisingly, Zhang also won the tournament at Shortz's center last weekend, taking home the prize money of $1,500.

Judging from the video, which is viewable on the center's website westchestertabletennis.com, Zhang's strategy, in the simplest of terms, was to draw his opponent in on the serve then smash back the return, rocketing it past him before he could get back in position. It worked.

His dream now: to play for the US Olympics team in 2020.

(China Daily USA 06/02/2017 page20)