From VOICES: Chop Slam! The Inner Life of Ping Pong by Steve Zeitlin

Volume 26
Fall-Winter
2000

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As player Phil Perelman put it, "to see what Marty can do with that primitive racket is like watching Itzhak Perlman play a concert on a ukelele."

Steve Zeitlin
Photo: Martha Cooper

Steve Zeitlin is executive director of City Lore, 72 East First Street, New York, NY 10003; citylore@aol.com. He is also the "Ping Pong Correspondent" for WNYC’s new show, The Next Big Thing. In the next issue of Voices, Varick Chittenden will join Steve Zeitlin for an Upstate-Downstate perspective on the folklife of New York.

So defensively, a chop can be countered with a chop that negates the topspin. But I relish countering his chop with my loop. The loop starts at the knees and moves up to take the opponent’s spin and double it; when he chops it back, the spin quadruples.

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Chop Slam! The Inner Life of Ping Pong By STEVE ZEITLIN

Marty Reisman enjoys "perfect communication with the ball" when he uses the old-style rubber racket. A sponge foam racket gives more spin, but the best way to play Ping Pong is really with your ears, which open the player to the dynamics of the game’s flow. Photo courtesy of Marty Reisman

According to Marty Reisman, the game of Ping Pong died that day.

Bombay, India. 1952. Marty Reisman is favored to win the world table tennis championship. He brushes aside rumors that the Japanese have a secret weapon—a newfangled racket? A killer shot? Then out walks Hiroji Satoh with a little racket case under his arm. "I was the first American," Reisman says, "to see that racket—the sponge racket.

"The Japanese did not expect him to win the world championship," Marty continues. "They sent him as a substitute. He ran off with the world championship."

On that day, according to Marty, Ping Pong became a game of obfuscation, concealment, and deception. "In the world championship today," he says, "the ball goes no more than three times across the net. In the old days, rallies would be 30 or 40 strokes. There was a dialogue between two players that even a child could understand." The beautiful sound of"kerplock-plock, kerplock-plock" was reduced, according to table tennis writer Howard Jacobson, to "squelch-plock, squelch-plock."

"I cling to the racket of my childhood," says Reisman, who grew up playing in the Settlement Houses on New York’s Lower East Side and who today, at age 68, challenges world champions to play him for $5,000 using his style of hard-back racket (he's 0 and 2 so far). "It’s a pimpled rubber racket. It gives me perfect communication with the ball. It’s a certain kind of feel that’s transmitted from this racket, and it lends itself to whatever neurophysiological makeup I have."

As a folklorist, I should prefer the old racket. After all, how many folklorists does it take to change a light bulb? Two. One to change it and one to talk about how good the old one was. But I love the sponge foam racket. That racket transformed the game from a miniature version of tennis to a far more complex game of finesse, touch, and subtle spins. As player Phil Perelman put it, "to see what Marty can do with that primitive racket is like watching Itzhak Perlman play a concert on a ukelele."

You see, Marty, the great shots come from the foam. The foam gave us the flawless chop, or slice. Perfectly executed, it makes no sound. Then there’s the chop slam. A slam is hard to hit back, but trying to hit back a chop slam is like trying to return a balloon with the air rushing out of it. When I was a teenager playing with my friends in Brazil, the casquinha para dentro was the stuff of legend. Casquinha ("peel") is when the ball hits the edge of the table. Instead of bouncing up, it peels off. Impossible to return. But the casquinha para dentro is chopped so hard, the ball does a double take, skidding off and spinning till it reverses direction in midair—making it more impossible than impossible to return.

Tune your ears to the rhythmic kerplock. As Marty knows, you can take the same table and put it in a different room and it becomes a completely different game—the result of the different sounds produced by wooden walls, plaster walls, or drop ceilings.

The sound of the racket, table, and ball lays down the rhythm of the game. I’ve always loved Ping Pong because you can get into that rhythm, hit the ball back and forth across the net for hours with any racket and simply talk. I remember conversations from when I was 14: ping "How did you" pong "reach over" ping "and hold her hand?" pong.

But Ping Pong players also talk to each other with their shots. Tuesday nights Stefan Kanfer and I hit backspin to top spin. His backspin reads as topspin on my side of the table. So defensively, a chop can be countered with a chop that negates the topspin. But I relish countering his chop with my loop. The loop starts at the knees and moves up to take the opponent’s spin and double it; when he chops it back, the spin quadruples. It’s as if we’re trading jokes with classic one-upsmanship. Marty would never approve.

Mihaly Csiszentmihalyi once asked why Americans enjoy activities that offer little or no material reward. He concluded that play provides a feeling characterized by an unself-conscious sense of absorption. In the full experience of play, we act within a dynamic that he called flow. "Action follows upon action according to an internal logic that seems to need no conscious intervention by the actor. He experiences it as a unified flowing from one moment to the next."

Both Marty and I concede that you don’t have to play Ping Pong to experience the dynamics of flow. Other sports also harbor subtle distinctions like those between the hard-back and sponge racket for aficionados. A Brazilian soccer fan once commented that European players’ hard chests send the ball flying; Pele had a soft chest and could drop the ball right to his feet.

Mastering the neurophysiological skills of a sport is not just learning the game. It’s attuning yourself to the inner life of the sport, to the poetry in motion. A player masters the game the way a thief opens a safe: ear to the combination lock, breaking into the inner chambers through the subtleties. Players become part of a community that knows what it feels like when the shot is hit right.

When I’m playing Ping Pong, I often feel that a particular spot on the other end of the table is in my hands. It’s as if I could stretch my arm seven feet across the table to touch the place where I know the ball will hit. That may be a bit the way Babe Ruth felt, when (according to legend) he pointed to the center-field wall before he hit a home run.

Because they know that inner dialogue between player and ball, the best players make the best announcers. Listen to John MacEnroe call a tennis match. Or Clyde Frazier call basketball with the players "swishin’ and dishin’," "shakin’ and bakin’," "wheelin’ and dealin’" and admonishing them for breaking the flow for a split second to think about a shot. To describe Larrel Spreewell’s perfect pass to Marcus Camby, who flying midair above the basket caught the ball for a slam dunk—basketball’s equivalent of a chop slam—Frazier had to turn to the sacred.

"Amazing grace," he said.

The Downstate column was published in Voices Vol. 26, Fall-Winter, 2000. Voices is the membership magazine of the New York Folklore Society. To become a charter subscriber, join the New York Folklore Society now.