This was an interesting year to go to the Nationals, because it was the first time that an important new rule, instituted by the International Table Tennis Federation, the sport’s ultimate governing body, was in effect. Players were now forbidden to block their opponents’ view of their serve and thereby prevent them from judging the degree and direction of spin. The ITTF had made a couple of other big changes in recent years, in an effort to make the sport more spectator-friendly. The game was now played to eleven points, not twenty-one, and each player served just twice, instead of five times, in a row. The ball, which had been thirty-eight millimeters in diameter for decades, had been enlarged to forty. The idea was that the eleven-point game would keep matches moving apace; at the same time, the bigger ball would slow down individual points, and be easier to see on television; and the service rule would eliminate the deception that had caused tournament play to follow a monotonous pattern: confusing serve, confused return, slam. The new rules have had mixed results. Players try to appear to be adhering to the service rule while coming as close to flouting it as they possibly can. The ball is easier to see, although, from all reports, its meliorative effects have been negligible. (I find it floaty and elusive, like a balloon in the wind.) The eleven-point game, however, has unquestionably sapped the sport of something essential. Games have a beginning and an end, but no middle—there’s no wiggle room for players, and no dramatic traction for spectators.
The ITTF has never set any meaningful standards for racquet coverings; a player can have two completely different surfaces on his racquet, of different thicknesses and different rubber. While the hard rubber that Reisman uses can last for years, sponge rubber has to be replaced every few months, if not more frequently. There are hundreds of types of rubber, and hundreds of blades—the wooden racquet, without the rubber—to choose from. And then there is the added wrinkle of “speed glue,” which has become almost a fetish among players. Top players remove the rubber from their racquet and reglue it each time they play. The glue—don’t ask me how—makes the ball carom off the racquet with even more speed and spin. The manufacturers of all this stuff—and rubbers and blades are not cheap—pretty much rule the sport; they are virtually the only advertisers in the USATT’s magazine, and one of them sponsored the Nationals. (I don’t know how hard the USATT tries to get other corporate sponsorship of its activities. George Brathwaite, a USATT vice president—and a many-titled player, who has long been involved in trying to raise the sport’s profile—told me he’d heard that Bill Gates had regularly attended the table-tennis events at the Sydney Olympics. Yet the association hadn’t thought about approaching Gates to help develop the sport or to sponsor tournaments. The championship purse at the Nationals was pathetic: two thousand dollars for the men’s singles winner, and—did somebody say “sexism”?—fifteen hundred dollars for the women’s. By the way, I have read that there are tables—tables, plural—at Microsoft.)
Still, it was possible to put aside these concerns about the sport and get good and drunk on table tennis at the Nationals. Matches were being played as far as the eye could see, and even farther than that, and there were competitors of every shape and size and age and level. One of the first matches I happened to notice was between a plump Chinese boy and an old bald white guy. There was a competition for players in wheelchairs, and a competition for disabled ambulatory players. (To play in the Nationals, you have to be an American citizen. Most of the players and the spectators—who were largely the family members and coaches of the players—were either of Asian birth or of Asian parentage. Four of the top six seeds in the women’s singles competition were born in China, and the future of the sport appears to reside in young Asian Americans, who have table-tennis culture in their blood; the four teenage girls featured as “top youth players” in the tournament program were named Jackie Lee, Whitney Ping, Michelle Do, and Katherine Wu.) You could get close to the play, and sometimes, when the ball was mis-hit and came your way over the thigh-high barriers surrounding each playing area, you’d get to throw it back to the players, which was totally cool. One of the funny things about table tennis is that, no matter how big you get, you still have to chase after the ball. There are no ball boys or girls kneeling in wait. (Steve Berger, a teacher and a player I met in Las Vegas, told me that players don’t mind; the interval gives them a chance to think about their next shot.) There is one big difference between basement and elite players, though. They may both say “Come on!” out loud to themselves after a missed shot, but being a tournament player means never having to say “Sorry!” or “Whoops!”
When I first laid eyes on Marty Reisman in Vegas, he was zooming through the convention center (Marty walks faster than most people run), in his panama hat and a bright orange sports jacket, on his way to a match. Reisman, who marches to his own drummer and likes to talk about his march and his drummer at length, introduced me to various people, all of whom had fun commenting on Marty in front of him. “He’s a legend,” one USATT official said. “You’re talking to a very questionable character here,” another said. Lily Yip, a two-time Olympian and a dynamic force in organized table tennis (and the mother of two top-ranked teenagers), said to me, with a smile directed at Reisman, “Everything he says is not true.” At one point, I saw a ten-year-old staring at Reisman’s hardbat—he had obviously never seen such a thing before—and I suggested to Marty that he hit with him a little. Reisman, who, like all the top players of his generation, played mostly money matches, as a way both to practice and to make some dough, said to the boy, “Do you want to play for money?”
Some of the playing at the Nationals was spectacular, some of it was extremely good, and some of it was moving: Thelma (Tybie) Sommer was playing in the over-seventy women’s singles—her game wasn’t what it had been when she won the world championship mixed doubles with Dick Miles, in 1948, of course, but there she was, playing.
One of the reasons I had gone to the Nationals was to meet Dick Miles, who, at the age of seventy-seven, was being honored by the USATT for lifetime achievement. Miles, who is generally considered the greatest American player of the twentieth century, was, if not the anti-Reisman, then the non-Reisman of table tennis. He was Björn Borg to Reisman’s Jimmy Connors—a no-nonsense, self-contained player. The two men, who have known each other for sixty years, since the days at Lawrence’s, are physically and sartorially poles apart as well: Reisman is a lanky, balletic six-footer, given to wearing attention-getting—what my father would call “zooty”—clothes, and Miles is a compact five feet seven, who, the day I met him, was wearing light brown corduroys and an oatmeal-colored wool sweater over a plaid flannel shirt.
At the end of the hardbat finals, between Lily Yip and Steve Berger, I introduced myself to Miles and asked him whether he thought the hardbat game was superior to sponge. He likes both—he switched to sponge in the early sixties—but he said that a problem with the sponge game, from the point of view of spectatorship, is that the speed of the game is such that the unsophisticated viewer can’t see that the winner of a point has actually earned it, with the spin he put on the ball. “In tennis, you can see it,” he said. “In table tennis, it looks like an error.”
Miles told me that as a young man he had wanted to be a writer. (He once took a job at The New Yorker, as what was then called an office boy, but quit after five days.) Both he and Reisman are, in fact, writers; Miles covered table tennis and wrote features for Sports Illustrated and has written an unpublished novel, and Reisman recently finished a second autobiography. Miles was known for carrying around a copy of Ulysses; Reisman called me the other morning (“Did I wake you up?” he said. “Yes,” I said, and he kept talking for forty-five minutes) and recited a John Donne poem. But what Miles really wanted to talk about was a young man named Jake Carter, whom he had coached a little, and who was here at the Nationals.
One Saturday afternoon just over a year ago, Miles had gone to play at the Manhattan club but couldn’t get a table—a birthday party wa
s in session. “I said to the guy who runs it, ‘Look, do you mind if I give the kids some pointers?’ Jake’s mother and father were there, and they said to me, ‘Dick, do you ever give lessons?’ I said, ‘No, I don’t want to.’ They asked again, so I named a price that was so high I thought they’d say no—a hundred dollars an hour—and they said yes. I gave him three lessons and then went to Hawaii.” (Miles spends four months of the year in Hawaii.) “He has talent, so I gave him to Steve Berger.” (Berger, who also plays jazz guitar with Bob Dorough at Iridium every Sunday, played table tennis at Reisman’s when he was a teenager, in the seventies, and became a protégé of Miles’s when he was about twenty. He is one of the few people who have close ties to both players—in the table-tennis world, that’s a little like being the patient of both Freud and Jung.)
I talked to Jake, a slender twelve-year-old with brown hair and a dusting of freckles on his nose, who was polite and friendly, despite having just lost a tough match during which the spectators—the large, unsportsmanlike family of his opponent—had been loud and distracting, and he had hurt his ankle. Jake told me that he was in the sixth grade at the Dalton School, in Manhattan, and that his interest in table tennis had started the summer before last, when his family got a table for their country house. “Then I found this place on a Hundredth and Broadway, so I had my eleventh-birthday party there.” What did his friends think of his enthusiasm for the sport? “It’s mixed,” he said. “There are some people who think it’s cool, and some people who think it’s kind of dumb, like ‘Ping-Pong? Why would anybody want to play Ping-Pong?’”
While I was in Las Vegas, I did a terrible thing: I bought a sponge racquet. I had to—I didn’t have a usable hardbat of my own anymore, and the racquet that Reisman had promised to have made for me hadn’t materialized after almost a year. I had to have something to play with, and I also knew that, if I was going to play with the general run of humanity, I would need this kind of racquet. I was with Marty, though—I didn’t approve of sponge, so I bought a cheap, ready-made racquet, and deliberately avoided learning anything about particular rubbers, sponge thickness, blades, and speed glue (and also thereby avoided spending a hundred dollars more than the nineteen I did spend). I went back to New York, and asked Jake Carter to give me a lesson. Jake did his best, but perhaps he was a little shy about instructing someone thirty-four years his senior, and it didn’t help that I was using my new sponge racquet for the first time. He tried to show me how to make a forehand loop drive—the essential shot of the sponge game—but I couldn’t quite do it; my racquet wanted to go forward more than it wanted to go up. So we just played some games. He spotted me six points, and beat me. (We played to eleven points.) Then he spotted me eight points, and beat me again. I beat him once, but that’s because he couldn’t play his usual game against me. Steve Berger told me that Jake’s strongest suit was letting an opponent open an attack: “He’ll allow you to do that and then he’ll hit it right at you. We call it a kishke shot. You aim it at their elbow.” But I couldn’t get a rhythm going, and my hitting was unpredictable. (“Whoops!” “Sorry!”)
A week or so later, I got a lesson from Berger, and that went much better. Steve had been at the club the night I played with Jake, and, when Jake was playing with someone else, I’d heard Steve yelling at him to keep his head down, and I’d thought his approach was unnecessarily harsh. Once I realized, when Steve was showing me the starting position for the forehand loop drive, that he’d been talking about the racquet head and not Jake’s own head, I revised my opinion of his approach, and I revised it even further when he told me that I was a natural. Still, I found the sponge racquet hard to get used to. Berger had taken off the rubber that my racquet came with, which was of mediocre quality, and replaced it with top-notch rubber; it was disconcertingly lively, and I didn’t feel the connection with the racquet that I had when I played with a hardbat. Hitting the ball didn’t give me that “Aaaahhh” feeling; instead I got a “Whoa! Hey, what the—” feeling. But I did all right, for a beginner. At least, Steve said so.
A couple of weeks ago, I played with Marty for the first time since the spring. His new favorite place to play is the basement of Harry Evans’s apartment building; last summer, Harry got the building’s board to agree to let him put a table down there. There is, of course, a couch for balls to get lost under (there must be something about this in the USATT rule book: “a couch, preferably inconveniently placed, must be present at all times during play”), but the conditions—the lighting, the amount of space around the table, the pock-pock acoustics, the distance from the inhabited area of the building, so that no one can hear you shout “Nooooo!” when you miss a shot that you should have made—are excellent. Marty spots Harry between ten and thirteen points when they play. (The hardbat game is still played to twenty-one points.) Several times, Harry was up 20–15, and Marty said, “It’s another deuce game, Harry,” meaning that he was going to get the next five points. And then he did. And then he’d win the game. Harry didn’t talk during points, but Marty did—during a rally, he’d look ahead to what he thought Harry was going to do and he’d say, “Forget it, Harry.”
The racquet Marty had promised me still wasn’t ready, so he let me use one of his—an old, classic paddle made by Bernard Hock. Though it was clear that, once again, I was out of practice, it was a pleasure to hold a hardbat in my hand for the first time in months. I was home. My backhand chop started coming back, and I hit a couple of good forehands. When Harry suggested that Marty and I play a game—something we had never done—I told him to play his normal game, as if he were playing for real. He said OK, and spotted me eighteen points. He won the first game almost as soon as it started, and I realized that he had never unleashed even a tenth of his arsenal on me. The second game was close, but I won—Marty made two shots that went long and missed the table, and then he hit a fairly hard forehand of mine into the net. I turned to Harry, who was sitting on the couch, watching, and said, “Let the record show: I beat Marty Reisman.” I have a feeling, though, that Marty hit my shot into the net on purpose. In fact, I’m quite sure of it. I didn’t win the game—he let me win it. But, if he’ll keep spotting me eighteen points, I think that, with a little practice, I can beat him.
2003
PLAYING DOC’S GAMES
WILLIAM FINNEGAN
It was a shining February afternoon. The tide was low, and Ocean Beach, a four-mile-long north-south strip that accounts for nearly all of San Francisco’s seafront and is normally narrow and deserted, was wide and full of people. I stutter-stepped down the bank at the foot of Sloat Boulevard, surfboard in hand, and hurried across the sand. Off to my left, two young black men in 49ers warmup jackets were silently putting a pair of miniature remote-control dune buggies through their paces; they wove and whirled and fishtailed in the sand. Off to my right, a group of white people were beating the hell out of pillows with yellow plastic clubs. As I passed, I could hear screaming and cursing: “Bitch! Bitch!” “Get out of this house!” Some people were weeping. They were also kicking the pillows around on the sand. A chubby man in his forties was pounding a sheet of paper laid on a pillow. When it flew off, he chased it down, bellowing, “Get back on there, you bitch!” Near the water’s edge, I found another middle-aged man, gazing out to sea, his yellow club at his feet, a beatific expression on his face. He eyed my board as I knelt to strap on an ankle leash. I asked about the pillow beaters, and he said they were engaged in something called the Pacific Process. Thirteen weeks, three thousand dollars. This exercise, he said, was called Bitching at Mom. I noticed he was wearing work gloves. Hey, no use getting blisters while beating the bejeezus out of Mom.
It was the third day of a solid west swell. Winter is the prime season for surfing Ocean Beach—it’s when the biggest waves and the cleanest conditions (little or no wind, orderly sandbars) coincide—but this joyful conjunction usually falls apart in early February, so each good day now was gravy. Conditions this afternoon were superb: si
x-foot waves, not a breath of wind. Unfortunately, the prolonged season had brought out unprecedented crowds, and half the surfers in Northern California seemed to be on hand. Ocean Beach didn’t normally suffer from the overpopulation that spoils most California surf spots. There were only a few dozen local surfers, and visitors were rare. My theory was that surfers from nearby towns and cities didn’t want to know about Ocean Beach, because, while it sometimes got great waves, it was just as often ferociously intimidating. But crowds of sixty or more had become common in the last couple of weeks. It was as if a whole layer of the regional surf population had decided that, with the major winter swells probably over and conditions still improbably clean, Ocean Beach could be safely raided. I understood this selective bravado, because I felt it, too, along with an immense relief at having survived another winter—this was my third—of surfing Ocean Beach. Still, I resented the horde whose spidery silhouettes I could barely see, gliding and thrashing in the glare beyond the shore break, as I prepared to paddle out.
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