Ping-pong, now a big-time sport

JOHN R. TUNIS

The National Ping-Pong Championships of the United States will be held, this year, at the Carter Hotel in Cleveland, early in April.

Wait a minute. Did I hear a snicker from the rear of the house?

If so, please contain yourself. Because ping-pong today is big-time sport, played by he-men. Perhaps you are so old-fashioned and out-of-step that you still think of it as a sissy pastime, a pleasant after-dinner diversion at which the girls—as they used to do—invariably "beat the men all to pieces." That day, friends, is no more. Ping-pong, believe it or not, has grown up and become a man's-sized game.

A list of its devotees would make an athletic Who's Who including several leading football coaches, Fritz Crisler, Harry Kipke, and A. A. Stagg, Avery Brundage the president of the A. A. U., Frank Hunter and Vinnie Richards, the tennis stars, as well as others equally celebrated. Not only is it big time sport; it is also big business. The inventor of ping-pong, Mr. James Gibb of Southwold, St. Lawrence, Isle of Wight, England, made the tidy sum of £156,115 from the game. Any sporting goods manufacturer will tell you that that is big business, especially under the New Deal.

Formerly ping-pong was just another game. Eight years ago the rules advised skirts for women that cleared the ground, and spoke of it as "the poor man's billiards." All that is out. Today the sport is well organized, there is an Association and rules quite as complicated as those of football or ice hockey. Its adherents are numbered in the millions and there are probably more persons playing ping-pong than any other game in the United States except golf. It is crowding out pool and billiards in public parlors where tables have been converted for ping-pong; there are state, sectional and national tournaments with cups, flashlight pictures of the winners, and all the rest of it.

How did ping-pong get that way? The English who never tire of inventing games for their rainy season, (June to June) originated it, and made it popular. It caught on all over the Continent; the world's champ is a Hungarian with an unpronounceable name, while the French call it "pansh-ponsh" and eat it up. Last summer, passing a small cafe in a back street behind the Jnvalides I heard shouts, shrieks and the unmistakable click-click of that little white ball. Inside were a couple of chauffeurs off duty; in shirt sleeves and suspenders they lunged away while the patron and patronne looked on with the customers in enjoyment.

You could duplicate that scene in the pool parlors along Broadway in the fifties where New York taxi drivers play, and play well, too. But interest is not confined to any one part of this country. Everyone plays. The American Ping-Pong Association, now in its sixth year, figures that there are 2,889,000 families with tables, which is pretty accurate checking. There are numerous tournaments out in the Inflation Belt, and in California it has the movie colony by the ears, among the cracks being Ginger Rogers, Joan Crawford, Florence Vidor, Jack Barrymore and Alice White. In New York, Neysa McMein is a first class player, while Howard Dietz won a tournament at the Algonquin, beating among others the great Bill Tilden. Alexander Alekhine, the chess wizard, is a first class player, so is Jascha Heifetz, the musician.

Its rise from a fad to big-time sport can be explained by the fact that once the table is purchased your expenditures are next to nothing, for sets with balls and net can be bought at the ten-cent store. Ping-pong is great exercise, especially for those of us who spend most of our time on our knees digging that exasperating ball out from under tables, chairs and bookcases. Moreover it's infernally fascinating; looks easy and isn't. Anyone can become fairly useful in a short while; but to become an expert you must almost devote your life to it. At least that's what the champs do.

By administering cut and spin these cracks can positively make a ball sit up and beg for help. It's most disconcerting playing one of these champs. You reach for a ball and find it bouncing under your chin or past your left ear. This is funnier for the crowd than for you. I once saw Fred Perry the English tennis star, who is also a champion at the indoor game, make monkeys out of our Davis Cup team before a roomful on an ocean liner. Our heroes didn't enjoy themselves. I did. Fred had just done the same thing to me a few minutes previously.

The champion of the North Atlantic is Monsieur Henri Villar, the purser of the Île de France, who is closely pressed by Monsieur de Fonrocque of the Paris. The last time I crossed with the latter he obligingly stayed out of the tournament to let me reach the finals where my adversary was Yehudi Menuhin, the violinist. Master Yehudi was evidently a little better with a fiddle than with a paddle.

It takes years to make a really good violinist, and, if you'll believe it, just as long to reach the top in ping-pong. The Yehudi of the sport is a boy prodigy named Aaron Boksenbom, a red-haired lad of thirteen who is champion of Cleveland. The national championships at Cleveland, will be played this winter under the rules of the A. P. P. A. That makes it pretty official.

As intimated, the champs spend hours perfecting them-) selves to attain and hold their fiendish skill. There are leagues in all the big cities, and metropolitan tournaments in Chicago, Philadelphia and New York, with various inter-city and interclub matches, all culminating in the national championships. The present men's title-holder is James C. Jacobsen of New Rochelle, New York, a student in New York University, while the women's champion is Miss Jay Purves, a high school teacher of Des Plaines, Illinois. Miss Purves is an all-round athlete, having in her college days been a member of fourteen championship swimming, track, basketball, golf and hockey teams, so she naturally takes ping-pong in her stride.

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Yes, the cracks take it quite as hard as the golf nuts or the tennis hugs. They play with specially made rubber covered bats which they carry carefully around in cases, and won't compete except with the regulation ball on the regulation 9x5 foot, 5 ply wood table. Their skill is such that they can keep the hall in play forever, and a rally of five minutes or longer in which the ball passes across the net two or three hundred times is just nothing at all. More amusing to watch than to play against, these champs.

Naturally ping-pong like every bigtime sport, has its controversy. As there is a dispute in football over the defense outweighing the offense, over the new hall in baseball, and whether in ice hockey players shall be assassinated or simply chopped into bits, so ping-pong has its controversy over the knuckle-ball service. The knucklehall service must be seen to be believed. It is a diabolical stroke in which the hall is spun off the knuckles onto the racquet with such twist that when it hits on your side of the table it bounces off at right angles into space, leaving you fanning the air. Inasmuch as it never bounds twice the same way, the game degenerates into a succession of unreturnable services.

Hence the controversy. It's all pretty important. Is this fair or not? What's the game coming to, anyway? Families are divided and the whole ping-pong world, or at least the champs who after all are the most important part of it, are badly upset. At that, I envy them. In this day and age with things going to pieces about one's ears, it must be comforting to feel that the knuckle-hall service is the most important thing on earth.

What do you think about it; is it legal or not?