Photo by R. Jerome Ferraro
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King Pong
By Harold Evans, September & October 2005
How a bunch of New York literati found happiness—and a way to keep their wits about them—whacking a yellow ball in the basement
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Odd noises percolate up the elevator shaft of our apartment on
Manhattan's East Side, as if down in the basement there's a great
experimental ticktocking metronome tended by a mad scientist—its
arrhythmic beat punctuated by whoops and wild laughter.
Penetrate down there past the darkened cages of storerooms heaped with
bric-a-brac, the hot-air pipes, and the electric meters, and the corridor
suddenly opens up on a large, well-lit room, painted lime green, with a
Ping-Pong table as its centerpiece. The distinct kerplock-kerplock noises are
the dialogue of challenge and response as two players whack a yellow celluloid
ball at each other.
They play with traditional hardbats (paddles, to the uninitiated) made of
pimpled rubber—not that woefully common, sponge-coated variety. There are
a dozen or so onlookers, the source of the ricochet of bantering and laughs;
the early arrivals have bagged the only sofa to pontificate on the proceedings
in comfort over a glass of red wine and pizza.
All of us at what we've come
to call the Print and Paddle Club knew it would be fun taking out the day's
stresses on the little ball. But none of us guessed that it would also be
therapy of high order: a Japanese study shows that people who play table tennis
at even rudimentary levels enjoy "a remarkable increase of blood flow in
the cerebellum, brain stem, and the frontal lobe." (See For the Brain, a
Net Gain)
Happily, concentration is the coin of the realm for our group. At any
of our informal, irregular gatherings, you will variously find writers,
publishers, and critics from The New Yorker, Esquire, The New York Times, The
New York Observer, InStyle, HarperCollins, The Week, and U.S. News & World
Report, mixed with a couple of notable booksellers and a sprinkling of people
who make Hollywood movies and Broadway shows. There is also a real estate
mogul, who picks up a ball that has rocketed past him to tell his opponent,
"Your rent just went up 20 percent."
It is the kind of crowd that used to hang out at the Algonquin Round Table
in The New Yorker's fabled '20s—but then Robert Benchley, Dorothy
Parker, Alexander Woollcott, and company met only to eat, drink, blow smoke
rings, and retail spontaneous epigrams cooked up in their apartments. Here the
name of the game is conspicuous endeavor to defy the laws of physics. At the
Algonquin, Dorothy Parker turned up wearing a feather boa; at the Print and
Paddle Club, Nancy Franklin, The New Yorker's droll television critic, is
more likely to arrive in jeans and a University of Iowa T-shirt—
unveiling an unladylike backhand drive.
There is another Nancy, name of Bass, who presides over New York's
famous Strand Book Store, but she—important to remember which Nancy you
are playing—is a mistress of the forehand drive. "Now I'm with
Bush on cloning," murmurs a male player. "Nancy-Nancy would be a
torment."
The players are of varying styles, ages, and experience. Tonight we might
have The Observer's sardonic theater critic, John Heilpern, or Sony
Pictures Entertainment chairman and CEO Michael Lynton, who swats every ball as
he would a lousy script (he'd do even better if he had time to change out
of his smart shoes). A regular is A. J. Jacobs, editor at large for Esquire,
who these days seeks relief in the lime-green basement room from the
aftereffects of reading all 32 volumes of The Encyclopædia Britannica,
all 44 million words, for his recent book, The Know-It-All: One Man's
Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World.
The thing to do when playing the smartest person in the world is to ask him
what he learned under "B for brain," and while he is telling you that
after the age of 20 we lose 50,000 brain cells a day, you can sneak one or two
shots by him. It is wise to be more circumspect with B. H. Barry, a
gray-haired, nimble director of movie and stage sword fights. After one of his
characteristic lunges, the riposte "Who do you think you are? Errol
Flynn?" hovers on one's lips and dies. Every club night there's a
thin, bearded man of 75 in tinted glasses who wears a natty Panama hat and
doesn't take it off when he elects to play. It is natural to assume he will
be a pushover for the much younger hardbat warriors, but when Barry cracks him
a decapitating smash, Panama Hat glides six feet back from the table and
returns the ball nonchalantly with the taunt "Do you think every day is
Christmas?"
It is no fluke. Throughout the game, he floats like a butterfly, stings like
a bee. He talks a lot too. He tells the smartest person in the world, "You
should look up sucker in the encyclopedia." He swivels from the hips and
hits and hits on both wings, and when the defender retreats, he gently drops
the next ball one inch—one flaming, horrible inch—over the net. And
if the defender scrambles to get that one back, he finds another, dropped one
dying inch over the net on the opposite side of the table. "Can't you
go easier on a younger man?" becomes the losers' cry. Panama Hat can
be a very patient coach, turning even the most inept novices into reasonable
players, but the cockier newcomers—who spurn his offer of an 18-point
start in a game of 21—inevitably go down 21-18. Do they think every day
is Christmas?
Panama Hat has a name: Marty Reisman. And he just happens to be a
living legend in the world of Ping-Pong. I first came to know about him when I
had dreams of decorating my mother's sideboard with table tennis cups. I
used to sneak out of night school in Manchester, England, to play Ping-Pong,
and I got to thinking I was quite good. So when I was 19, I competed in the
1948 English Open table tennis championships, the Wimbledon of the sport. The
ball was a bit of a blur because I was nearsighted and too vain to wear
spectacles, a weakness cruelly exploited by the former French national
champion, M. Bordrez, who beat me in the first round and went to the
semifinals.
The following year, 1949, I was confined to barracks doing national service
in the Royal Air Force, so I was not at the English Open for the sensational
tournament when another 19-year-old myopic kid (but he wore specs) went from
the first round to the final to face the five-time world champion, the courtly
Hungarian Victor Barna, who liked drilling holes in opponents with a sizzling
backhand. The kid was Reisman, a.k.a The Needle, a tall and skeletal American
from the Lower East Side of New York City with a lip and a lacerating forehand.
He had polished his table tennis taking bets at Lawrence's Broadway Table
Tennis Club, a former Legs Diamond speakeasy that boasted bullet holes from
Prohibition raids. Before 10,000 excited spectators in London, he toppled the
champion in a thrilling five-set duel and became the first American ever to win
the coveted title. He went on to win the U.S. title too.
I was stunned not just by Reisman's ability at the table but by his
passion for reviving the classic form of the game, lost to a generation by a
series of unfortunate events—not the least of which was the evil advent
of the sponge-covered bat.
I didn't know it at the time, but Reisman's triumph in the 1949
English Open was just about the high-water mark of classic table tennis. In
classic table tennis, the players have the same equipment—a hardbat of
short-pimpled rubber on both sides. When I came home from the RAF and college,
I found that the sport had been subverted by the decision of its ruling
bureaucrats to sanction a little anarchy. An obscure Japanese player named
Hiroji Satoh turned up at the world championships in Bombay in 1952 with a
paddle coated in thick, resilient, spongelike foam rubber. It was utterly
different in effect from the classic hardbat. Nobody had seen anything like it
before. It made no sound on impact with the ball, and its spins were
unreadable. The world's best players had no answer to this disruptive new
technology. Satoh beat all comers and became the official world champion.
The sponge was legalized, but the effect was devastating: crowds stopped
coming to watch the tournaments, since, at best, sponge rallies came to be two
or three erratic, high-velocity exchanges, in contrast to spellbinding hardbat
contests with rallies of 20 or 30 exchanges.
Sponge disgusted the young Reisman. Months after Satoh took the world title,
Reisman beat him—using a hardbat—in a match in Osaka that convulsed
Japan. But after that he frequently—and loudly—protested the age of
the sponge bat. "It made table tennis a game based on fraud, deception,
and deceit," says Reisman. Alone among the greats, throughout his career
in table tennis exhibition matches, he stayed with his hardbat. What began as a
gesture of repudiation turned into a lifelong campaign to restore the classic
game.
Reisman kept it alive, drawing crowds to money matches everywhere from
Broadway to Bombay during years on the road. He demonstrated the superior
accessibility and enjoyment of hardbat at a club he opened in New York,
Reisman's, attracting the likes of Dustin Hoffman, Matthew Broderick, and
Kurt Vonnegut. He took part in a BBC documentary on his life and wittily
recorded some of his adventures in a book, The Money Player, now a
collector's item. (His full memoir, Ping-Pong Hustler, will be published
next year.)
It was only two years ago that I came across Reisman at a New York table
tennis party, just after his 73rd birthday—six years after he
miraculously won the U.S. national hardbat title (beating players 30 and 40
years his junior). I'd long since given up playing Ping-Pong, but he
suggested I should take up the game again. I turned up at a city gym with a
sponge paddle. Within a few hours, I was converted back to the classic game I
had known. I threw out the disgusting sponge, adopted the hardest bat I could
find, albeit with pimpled rubber now being manufactured for Reisman by a
British aerospace company, and installed a table in my basement. As word leaked
out that we were having a good time, others joined us: Mort Zuckerman, chairman
and editor in chief of U.S. News & World Report; Justin Smith, president of
The Week; David Hirshey, vice president of editorial at HarperCollins
Publishers; Naomi Hample of the celebrated Argosy Book Store; David Carr, media
columnist for The New York Times; record producer Michael Case Kissel; software
consultant David Mintzer; and a whole slew of eager young men who work with
David Granger, editor in chief of Esquire magazine.
There is but one iron rule for entry at the Print and Paddle Club. At Legs
Diamond's place, you checked your gun at the door. Here we confiscate
sponge. "Marty Reisman saved me from the dark side of sponge," says
the smartest person in the world. "I look back and shudder at my life of
spongy sin."
Winning is not what matters most at the Print and Paddle Club. When at the
end of a session the moles emerge into the bright lights of New York City, they
confess to having forgotten whatever worryingly important thing was on their
minds before they entered the lime-green room. "I feel as though I have
been in training with a Jedi master," says David Lefer. "I come out
of the basement with a sense of total calm, total focus, and sheer amazement
that my paddle returned a speeding ball before I'd even thought about
it."
As Nancy Bass says, "After a day in dusty book stacks, Ping-Pong is my
new champagne."
Harold Evans, former president of Random House, is author of The American
Century and They Made America: From the Steam Engine to the Search Engine: Two
Centuries of Innovators.
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