What’s Up With Ping Pong?
When I was a kid of about five years old, we lived in Costa Rica, which meant that many of the standard American games and conventions were missing from our daily lives. We had bikes and simple toys, but we would do crazy things that the local kids did for fun like dragging a dead snake behind a bicycle. I don’t really remember whether my mother remembered to bring things like a Chutes & Ladders or Candyland game with her to this tropical valley, but one thing I know for sure was that we did not have a ping pong table anywhere nearby. There was probably one in San Jose somewhere, but that was two hours away over treacherous mountain roads in 1959. But I do remember that when we went back to the States for a visit, we would go to Ithaca, where my mother’s family lived. When we were there, we would stay with Aunt Aggie and Uncle Art, my mother’s older sister and her husband. They were a childless couple who owned a Red & White grocery store and had a nice life in their hillside 2-bedroom bungalow that felt like the Taj Mahal to us. Three things I remember doing whenever we went there was lying on their plush living room carpet and watching their console TV, using my uncle’s binoculars to scan the town of Ithaca, the boats on Cayuga Lake and the mysterious buildings of Cornell University on the opposing hillside, and going into the 1950’s Americana basement with a fancy entertaining bar in one corner and a big old ping pong table in the middle. I loved playing ping pong with my uncle and he always seemed so unbeatable in a very easy-going way.
During grade school in Wisconsin, there was always a ping pong game to be had in someone’s basement or at school. Everyone played and it was a fun game for all with only modest levels of expertise exhibited by anyone. Playing ping pong was something like playing tiddly winks, it was not something anyone took seriously enough to get all competitive about. When we moved to Maine in my middle school days, ping pong was less prevalent because Maine was a place where the outdoor sports of skiing, golf, tennis and canoeing were so dominant that no one seemed to bother much with a sissy sport like ping pong. During my one year of prep school, ping pong sank into a realm of quasi disrespect and despite there being a table or two around the school, I can’t ever remember seeing anyone playing. In Rome, many things that were common in America were simply absent. That was the case with golf (for the most part) and certainly true of very American pastimes like ping pong. By the time I got to college, ping pong was a somewhat forgotten play thing to me even though there were a few tables in the student union. Every once in a while, when someone wanted to take a break from the pin ball machines or pool tables, they would offer up a challenge to play ping pong. Two games later and with no sentimentality whatsoever, we would put down our paddles and carry on with our normal activities. In my second home and after my oldest son was born, I got the urge to buy a ping pong table and put it in the basement in my updated version of my uncles’ old basement fun room. Ping pong was back in my life though I can’t say I played it that often.
The next time I remember it coming into my life was when my youngest son was in summer camp in the Berkshires. They had outdoor ping pong tables and Thomas was quite surprised to see that his father even knew what ping pong was, much less be able to keep up a credible game with him. Years later when I would rent vacation villas for the family in places like Italy, France an Mexico, there would invariably be a ping pong table amongst the household amenities. In Normandy, the game room was taken over by my oldest son, Roger, who organized a family single elimination tournament. Both he and Thomas were vying for the king of the ping pong hill accolade, but I somehow managed to lose to Thomas’ girlfriend (now wife), Jenna and had to live that down for many years.
I remember during my last Wall Street stint at Bear Stearns, my boss, the co-president of the bank and a very hip city dweller, was noted in whispers to be a serious ping pong player who took weekly lessons from a famous Chinese coach. Where he expected to show off his talents was beyond me, but that’s when I first heard of people taking this old basement game seriously. Of course, we all watched Forrest Gump where he picks up a skill level in ping pong that earns him enough endorsement money to launch his Bubba Gump Shrimp Company.
For some reason, I must have gone down a ping pong rabbit hole on Instagram because now my Instagram feed is a blend of family posts, mostly from my kids (I never post anything on Instagram) and extreme ping pong playing. When I see one of them it’s hard not to stop and watch and so I guess I have created a self-fulfilling prophecy that Instagram has exploited by showing me anything they have related to ping pong. There are some crazy good players out there and no, they are not all Chinese, though many are. I just saw one the other day where Bill Gates and Warren Buffet got suckered into a doubles match with some Asian hot shot players. I was actually pretty impressed with their play, especially Buffet’s when he put a huge looping spin on the ball only to have the Chinese player slam it down his throat. Just realizing that two of the world’s leading billionaires were credible ping pong players was pretty interesting. I wonder if they each have tables in their basements?
As I was recently pondering about ping pong, it was hard not to start analogizing about the game. Because of its fast back and forth pace, we often think of rapid-fire exchanges as a form of ping pong. And then I got thinking about the world events that we find ourselves in these days. We are now two weeks into the ping pong of Israeli and Hamas offensives. Between Hamas rockets and Israeli Iron Dome defenses and retaliatory rocket launches and fighter/bomber attacks in Gaza, it is hard not to think of the war at this stage like a ping pong match. The verbal ping pong among the world leaders who are trying to balance their support for Israel and yet their disdain for the collateral damage among Gazan civilians is also going back and forth as much as the rockets. And then there is the last 18 days of political ping pong in the House of Representatives. Strangely enough, this one is a game being played between the same side for all this time and hasn’t even crossed the net over the Democrat’s side once. Hakeem Jeffries is just standing there with his paddle in hand and 212 steady votes while the Republicans, first McCarthy, then Scalese, then Jordan, then McHenry and then Emmers just keep coming up shorter than that. And as much as these two news events are pushing the trump legal issues off the top page of the news shows, we now have a fast-paced game being played in Fulton County as the litigation roster of the nineteen, now sixteen defendants keeps dropping as plea bargains proliferate and ping the ball back into Trump’s backcourt one after the other. It almost seems like Trump is getting skunked without ever getting a point on the board.
I do not know what’s up with ping pong these days that it has created this sort of mindshare with me. Maybe its that Instagram feed that is rattling around in my head or maybe its just the old childhood game coming back to haunt the corners of my politically rattled mind. Whatever it is, there must be something inherently appealing about the back and forth of ping pong because over my 70 years it has ebbed and flowed without ever changing one bit. Your serve.