The Only Game in Town
Page 37
Now that I look back on it, I can see what a dumb question it was. I guess that even back then I knew how dumb it was, but I wanted to hear the answer directly from someone of Seko’s caliber. I wanted to know whether, although we were worlds apart in terms of strength and motivation, we felt the same way when we laced up our running shoes in the morning. Seko’s reply came as a great relief. In the final analysis, we’re all the same, I thought.
Now, whenever I feel like I don’t want to run, I always ask myself the same thing: You’re able to make a living as a novelist, working at home, setting your own hours. You don’t have to commute on a packed train or sit through boring meetings. Don’t you realize how fortunate you are? Compared with that, running an hour around the neighborhood is nothing, right? Then I lace up my running shoes and set off without hesitating. (I say this knowing full well that there are people who’d pick riding a crowded train and attending meetings over running every day.)
At any rate, this is how I started running. Thirty-three—that’s how old I was then. Still young enough, though no longer a young man. The age that Jesus Christ died. The age that F. Scott Fitzgerald started to go downhill. It’s an age that may be a kind of crossroads in life. It was the age when I began my life as a runner, and it was my belated, but real, starting point as a novelist.
2008
BACK TO THE BASEMENT
NANCY FRANKLIN
I loved the house I grew up in, a big mock-Tudor, built in the twenties, with stained-glass windows and an old-time solidity, but I was afraid of the basement. It had two rooms where, for all eighteen years that my parents owned the house, I thought I might die. One was a storage room, with a raw rock outcropping that extended back farther than the light in the room allowed you to see. I thought that the black space above the rock went on more or less forever, and I was always expecting a man to emerge from it and kill me. The other was the small, hot room where the furnace was; there was a blood-red switchplate with a printed warning on it telling you not to turn the switch off, and, hanging next to the furnace, a large glass container full of red liquid, whose function I never knew. I was sure that if I touched it or the light switch the house would explode. And then, if I didn’t actually die, I would be in a lot of trouble. Beyond those two rooms, down a hallway and two steps, there was what we called the playroom. There wasn’t much in there—nothing good that might get ruined, and not much to play with, either—but there was a Ping-Pong table, which for me was, if not quite a reason for being, at least a reason for risking a trip to the basement. In this room, I was the killer.
My father had made the Ping-Pong table himself: It consisted of two pieces of plywood hinged in the middle and stained dark green, with a white painted center line, laid over a brown wool blanket on an old dining room table from the Philippines, where my parents had lived when they were first married. It was the only piece of furniture in the room, except for an ugly blue couch in a corner, which sometimes had to be pulled scrapingly across the linoleum floor in order for you to get at an inevitably errant Ping-Pong ball. At some point, we got a pool table, adding another obstacle under or around which you had to go to fetch the ball.
I had one friend who liked to play almost as much as I did, but mainly I played with my father, starting when I was about six. He was a very good tennis player, and a very good Ping-Pong player, and he didn’t tone down his game for me. I really wanted to beat him, and I knew that one day I would. Because I was good, too. I was really good. I had excellent hand-eye coordination and timing—I knew when and how to put spin on the ball, dump a short ball just over the net, or put it away with a slam. I loved everything about the game: the rhythmic pock-pock, pock-pock of the ball hitting the table and racquet again and again, the hummy all-over pleasure I got when I hit a ball well, the back-and-forth conversational aspect of it. I was always in the mood to play. Dick Miles, a ten-time United States champion in the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s, wrote in one of his instructional books, “Table tennis is, for me, one of those world-blotting-out activities, the ultimate escape.” It was a little like that for me, too. I was completely at home with a racquet in my hand; I played without any tentativeness or self-consciousness, which made the game different from everything else in my life. My father, who had a military bent and was not a big proponent of self-assertion in his children, nevertheless allowed me my insistence on my own existence when it came to Ping-Pong—my killer instinct, my agonized howls after missing a big shot—and he would laugh appreciatively when I went all-out and hit a winning slam. He had his little jokes, which became my little jokes. If either of us had the other person at zero and the other person got a point, we’d say, “There goes my love game,” as if we’d been sure we had a shutout going. Each time we finished playing, my father would pretend to be a boxing announcer and declare himself “the winner and still champeen!” And for quite a few years, until I was twelve or thirteen, and good enough to beat him at the game he’d taught me, he was.
After I left home and went to college, I stopped playing, except once or twice a year at my parents’. They’d sold our house, in a suburb of New York City, and bought a place in Massachusetts. The green plywood, the wool blanket, and the dining room table are set up there now, in an uninviting storage room that has an off-putting number of places for a ball to hide after a missed shot. I always beat my father when we play these days, but perhaps I should add that he is now eighty-two. Once, after I moved to New York, in 1979, I played in the Ping-Pong parlor on Broadway and Ninety-sixth Street, which was owned by the legendary player Marty Reisman. It was just a few blocks from my apartment, but the place closed a year later, to make way for a never-to-be-legendary high-rise. Not playing much Ping-Pong for all those years cemented my belief that I was a good player—not to mention the fact that I’d gone out on a high note, having won my high school championship in my senior year. I only had to beat two people to do it, but still.
Here’s the thing, though: I really wasn’t very good. I was…OK…sort of. Other amateur athletes dream of being better than they are, but a peculiar trait of basement Ping-Pong players is that they think they’re better than they are. They’re not. The expert and the amateur “play different games,” Dick Miles writes in The Game of Table Tennis. “The expert plays table tennis as a sport; the basement player is, for the most part, piddling at ping pong.” In his book The Money Player, Reisman, a three-time U.S. singles champion and the winner of some twenty national and international titles, tells of a middle-aged man who challenged him one day when he was a young, topflight player. Reisman beat him 21–0 three games in a row, but the man didn’t get the message. “‘With a little practice,’ he said, ‘I think I could beat you.’” People who play baseball, soccer, golf, tennis, basketball, or football have plenty of opportunities to get an idea of the size and nature of the gap that separates them from the pros. But Ping-Pong isn’t televised much in this country, and most of the spectators at tournaments are other tournament players. Also, the modest scale of the game—a nine-by-five table, a six-inch-high net, a little plastic ball, and a wooden racquet that is barely bigger than a hand span—makes it look so easy. And then there is the name, which is hard to take seriously. Ping-Pong was coined a little more than a century ago by an English sporting goods firm, which sold the American rights to the name to Parker Brothers in 1901, during a craze for the game that lasted about four years. When the game became popular again, in the 1920s, other manufacturers had to use the generic term table tennis, and that is the term the professionals use; the governing body for the sport in this country is called U.S.A. Table Tennis. But the name Ping-Pong persists.
Kids—even kids who eventually become champions—discover and take to Ping-Pong by accident. Dick Miles, who had asked for a pool table for his eleventh birthday, was given a “tea-table table-tennis” set instead. Marty Reisman began playing at eleven, because his older brother did. Ruth Aarons, who in 1936, at the age of seventeen, became the only American player ever t
o win a world singles championship, discovered the game at fourteen in a hotel basement. (For some of this table-tennis lore, I have relied on the invaluable writings of Tim Boggan, the sport’s premier historian.) Even these players didn’t realize what they were up against until they happened upon a club where top players gathered. Miles and Reisman became world-class players by going to a club known as Lawrence’s, on Broadway between Fifty-fourth and Fifty-fifth streets, where the great players of the day congregated. City players have an advantage in this respect: they didn’t grow up with Ping-Pong tables in their basement and take the game for granted; they had to make a journey of discovery for themselves. At one time, there were a handful of active world-class players who were born and brought up in New York City. (Four of them are still living here: Reisman and Miles, and Sol Schiff and Lou Pagliaro, who were two of the greats of the thirties and forties.) Even though table tennis is the No. 2 sport in the world, after soccer, it is all but invisible in this country. (There are no “Ping-Pong moms” whose vote anyone is trying to get.) A brief flurry of interest in the game in 1971, at the time of “Ping-Pong diplomacy,” when an American delegation of players was invited to China, was just that. None of the sport’s players have ever been household names, and the only journey that most Americans make when it comes to Ping-Pong is to their basement, to a table that is generally coated with dust and marked with sticky rings where the kids put their sodas while they’re playing air hockey.
During the years when I didn’t play much, I still thought of Ping-Pong as something I played, not as something I used to play, and I kept waiting for a table to fall into my life. I was flabbergasted when my company moved, four years ago, into a brand-new building that had amenities like a multimillion-dollar cafeteria and lights that go out while you’re working unless you flail your arms around (internal, psychic flailing won’t do it) but didn’t have even one Ping-Pong table. Similarly, what helped me endure a year and a half of noise and dust while a new Jewish community center was being built down the street from my apartment was the thought that at least they’d have a Ping-Pong table there. But they didn’t! (So much for the would-be Reismans, Schiffs, Mileses, and Aaronses of the future.) Ping-Pong didn’t come knocking at my door again until a little more than a year ago. That’s when I first got a true idea of my place in the Ping-Pong pantheon—or, to be more accurate, my distance from the Ping-Pong pantheon, which is something like the distance from Earth to Alpha Centauri.
In December 2001, the editor and writer Harold Evans invited me along to a publication party for a new book about Ping-Pong, by Jerome Charyn, called Sizzling Chops & Devilish Spins. Harry was known to be a good player and a fan—he competed in the 1948 English Open, and he had edited a 1959 book by the English player Ken Stanley called Table Tennis: A New Approach. The party was held at a table-tennis club I hadn’t known about, on Broadway between Ninety-ninth and a Hundredth streets, called the Manhattan Table Tennis Club. Founded in 1999 by a Polish-born businessman named Jerry Wartski, who plays there regularly, it is the only Ping-Pong club in Manhattan, which years ago used to have half a dozen such places on the stretch of Broadway between midtown and Ninety-sixth Street alone. It’s a third-floor hole in the wall, dingy and welcoming in a pre-gentrification sort of way, and its windows have been painted over to keep the light, and the world, out. (It is managed by Atanda Musa, a former Nigerian champion, who is the best African player in the history of the game.) At the party, Harry was to play some games with Marty Reisman, whom I’d never met or seen play, though his photograph was a fixture in the Chinese restaurants in the neighborhood. The two men, both in their seventies (Reisman turned seventy-three this month), went at it with a skill and an intensity that were delightful to see. Reisman was dazzling. He wore a panama hat, as he always does, and he didn’t break a sweat. Sure, he missed some shots—everybody does—but the core of his game was still there: the devastating fast forehand, which had been his signature shot, and which had helped make him, at one point, one of the top five players in the world, and his chess-master-like ability to control the game. (Reisman’s accuracy is such that with his deadly forehand he can—famously—snap in two a cigarette standing on end on the far side of the table.)
Harry arranged to play with Marty on a regular basis, and I got in on the act, too. Reisman had been given playing privileges at a sports club in midtown for a few months, and, during that time, I was lucky enough to be coached by him once or twice a week. I was several decades out of practice, but after I’d hit the ball back and forth just a few times Reisman could see that rustiness wasn’t really the problem. I had been doing everything wrong my whole life: I had basically been playing tennis on a smaller scale. I held the racquet too low on the handle, and I tended to hit with too much of a sideways spin. (Proper strokes in table tennis combine an up-and-down motion with forward motion; these motions, and the angle of the racquet face as it comes into contact with the ball, determine its speed and spin.) I also didn’t move unless I had to—when you’re young, you think that a shot you can reach for and get without moving is, by definition, a good shot. So I had to learn—and constantly try to remember—to stay on the balls of my feet and be ready to move, and then actually move, and then get ready for the next shot.
Because I still had a vestigial feel for the sport, and because Reisman is a terrific teacher, I made rapid progress on a couple of aspects of my game. I had lost some things—I used to have a decent backhand slam, and I remember being good at hitting down the line on both sides of the table when my opponent (Dad) was expecting a crosscourt shot—but I quickly gained a couple of shots I had never had, such as a backhand chop, which is a defensive shot with backspin, and a forehand drive. With these tools, I could surely have won my high school championship a year sooner, instead of losing to Elaine Lang.
By playing with Reisman, I had, in addition to getting a far greater teacher than I deserved, walked into a fifty-year-old argument. Reisman plays with the kind of racquet called a hardbat, whose covering is a thin layer of pimpled rubber. This used to be the standard racquet for pros and basement players alike, though pros had access to higher-quality equipment than you’d find in a sporting-goods store or at Sears—better-balanced racquets, better rubber. It’s what I had always used, too, and I stuck with it because that’s the way I am; I still have my forty-year-old paddles, even though the rubber on them is now so hard that they’re unusable. I had noticed over the years that I’d stopped seeing this kind of paddle at people’s houses and in stores, and that it had been replaced by racquets with a smooth rubber covering and no pimples. I didn’t like the new racquets, mainly because I couldn’t feel the ball as well when I hit it, and I missed the sound of the ball’s resonant smack against the racquet. The new racquets, instead of saying pock when they hit the ball, gave off a muted, indefinite pah—the difference was comparable to the difference between the sound of a manual typewriter and the sound of a computer keyboard.
This new kind of rubber—it will always seem new to me, though it has been in use since the early fifties—completely changed the game of table tennis, and it has been Reisman’s bête noir since it was first introduced. Reisman, the winner of the English Open in 1949—then the most prestigious title next to that of world champion—was poised to win the world championship a few years later, in 1952. It was, he thought, his year. But, in an early round, he faced an unknown Japanese player named Hiroji Satoh, whose racquet was covered with this strange new rubber—three-quarters of an inch of foam—which no one had ever seen. Reisman writes in The Money Player, “Outfielders in baseball often can judge the flight of a ball from the crack it makes as it comes off the bat. So too can table tennis players judge the velocity of a ball by the noise it makes when it is struck by the opponent’s racket…. But against Satoh there was no sound.” Because of the catapult-like quality of his equipment, Satoh, who wasn’t even one of the best players on the Japanese team, was able to use Reisman’s own attacking-style game against h
im. Reisman’s shots “sank into the foam rubber of Satoh’s racket and were flung back at me with amazing force…. I was throwing lethal punches and hitting myself in the face.” Reisman had shown up with a bow and arrow, and his opponent came armed with an automatic rifle—and it won him the world title.
Americans were slow to switch to the new paddle, called a sponge racquet, and their world stature, which was already on the way down by the early fifties, suffered further because of it. The new surface took over everywhere, and eventually it became standard here, too. Reisman’s beef with the sponge game is not merely that it robbed him of a world championship, though that would be reason enough to hate it—he believes that it is a lesser game, and that it rewards lesser players. Where the game once had drama, it now had mere excitement—a generalized, impersonal excitement that extinguished the game’s formerly inherent gladiatorial sense of struggle, its me-against-you-ness. Now it was my racquet against your racquet. (Reisman won the U.S. Open in 1960 with a sponge racquet, but playing with it gave him no satisfaction; he put it down and never played with it again.) There are still people who play with the hardbat, but it is a niche game, which had all but disappeared from serious competition until a sidebar tournament was instated in the National Championships, six years ago.
The National Championships are held at the Las Vegas Convention Center, and it is an indicator of the sport’s marginality and semi-geekiness that the four-day tournament takes place just a few days before Christmas, when so-called normal people are busy at home with real life—holiday preparations, families, parties, shopping, seasonal affective disorder. I didn’t see any publicity for the tournament around town, even at the hotel where the players—some seven hundred of them—were staying, and at the tournament itself it was hard to figure out who was playing when and where in the huge hall, which held ninety tables. The USATT has something of a basement-player mentality: When I asked the tournament director for a printout of the day’s matches, he told me that the file was in his computer at home. And the association’s slogan—“Putting a New Spin on an Old Favorite!”—sounds like something your all-too-helpful aunt cooked up.