Ping-Pong Diplomacy

by Nicholas Griffin

  It really didn’t matter, explained a player, because the final word came directly from Mao. He agreed with Zhou that the team should leave for Nagoya, wrote them a note conveying his good-luck wishes, and told them “to prepare for death.” Japan was a rightist country; there was a healthy chance of a bombing or assassination. Mao added to Zhou, “We should be prepared to lose a few people; of course it will be better if we don’t.”

  CHAPTER 35 | Long Hair, Light Heart

  The same year that the Chinese world champions had stepped off a plane straight into the Cultural Revolution, Glenn Cowan was still a kid, the oldest son of a middle-class Jewish family from New Rochelle. Just a short ride from Manhattan, in 1966 the New York suburb did a good impersonation of the American heartland. It had a Woolworth’s where you could still buy a Coke for a nickel, no stores higher than an elm tree, and a Main Street dominated by redbrick banks. “We were crew-cut kids,” explained his brother, Keith Cowan, fitting seamlessly into the All-American landscape.

  Cowan was one of those boys who seemed to be able to pick up any sport, but he was smitten by table tennis for the simple reason that he’d won the first tournament he’d ever entered within a week of taking up the game. Then he won the next seventeen in a row. His father put a table above the garage, a lopsided affair on an uneven floor. By the age of twelve, Cowan was writing poetry about the game of Ping-Pong:

  This small white ball I hit is quick to lead,

  It travels on the table everywhere,

  Sometimes it happens I’m not always there,

  It surely travels fast with mighty speed.

  On the newly built interstate, Cowan’s father could commute to his job in public relations at the Manhattan headquarters of Metromedia in twenty minutes on a good day. On the weekends, father would occasionally take son into the city to match up against older players. One of the centers of the New York table tennis scene was a club in the basement of the Riverside Plaza Hotel on West 73rd Street, where a suburban kid could find a glimpse of the city’s underbelly. It belonged to Cowan’s future mentor and agent, Bob Gusikoff, himself once one of the country’s best players. It had a “smelly, filthy, undersized playing area, poor lighting, and a bathroom that looked like it hadn’t been cleaned, ever.” Parents who dropped their children off for the afternoon were horrified to return to find their teenagers “playing poker with men in their thirties and forties.” The magazine Table Tennis Topics explained:

  Most table tennis locations were in skid row type locations. This naturally produces good table tennis. In order for the players to get to their clubs, they inevitably develop great reflexes. They can’t help it—avoiding muggers, rioters, falling buildings etc., can’t help but improve your footwork, coordination, and general speed of reaction.

  At fourteen years old, Cowan was considered a good-enough table tennis player to be asked for an interview by the Los Angeles Times during a West Coast tournament. With his big smile and Leave It to Beaver crew cut, the teenager explained that table tennis just wasn’t that hard for him. “The most amazing thing,” said the newspaper, “is that he seldom practices.” The Chinese coaches would have been horrified, but why should Cowan be serious about the sport? His father had been trying to nudge him in the right direction. “Glenn, if you’ve got to do swimming or tennis, then do it, because you’re never going to get anywhere playing Ping-Pong.” There was no money in the American game. At least the fourteen-year-old seemed to realize this. “After high school,” the Los Angeles Times continued, “Cowan wants to study law or finance.”

  Father and son had enjoyed their trip to Los Angeles so much that they persuaded Glenn’s mother and younger brother Keith to move there in 1966. The following year, in 1967, everything changed for the Cowan family. His doting father, his main practice partner and nurturer of his fledgling career, died abruptly of lung cancer.

  His mother, determined to keep the family together, started a small florist business. Without a father figure, Cowan became absorbed by the prevailing trends of everything around him: his hair grew down past his shoulders, and his attitude changed. If anything, his smile seemed to broaden. On top of the suburban New Yorker a new image was grafted: that of the laid-back Californian.

  In May 1967, the Beatles admitted they’d dropped acid, Jimi Hendrix’s new stage act involved setting his guitar on fire, and Cowan’s greatest idol, Mick Jagger, was charged with drug possession in England. It was a time when culture and counterculture overlapped. For Cowan, that meant an odd mixture of hypercompetitiveness and relaxation, namely, table tennis and pot smoking. Unlike his Chinese counterparts, he was content to believe in the myth of natural ability. Ping-Pong was a small-enough sport that Cowan could often just show up at his local spot in Hollywood, hustle a few dollars in winnings, and travel to win a regional tournament on the weekend. By the turn of the decade, his mother estimated that her teenager had won “over a hundred trophies.”

  In early 1971, the best players in the country gathered at the Convention Center in Atlanta, Georgia, for the US Nationals, which underscored all that was wrong with American table tennis. First came the humiliation of having dozens of competitors show up, only to find that they had been displaced from the main auditorium by El Mongol, a not-so-famous wrestler. Second, the floors were waxed so well that players were sliding into cardboard hoardings. Third, the play was divided between two different floors separated by a maze of passageways. Some players were scratched from the roster for not finding their tables in time. Fourth, attendance was pitiful. Forty-five years before, Montagu had managed to get ten thousand British spectators to pay to watch an unknown sport. Now, about four hundred spectators watched the US Nationals, and most of them were friends or relatives of the players. There wasn’t a breath of media coverage. In the hype of American sport, table tennis had been forgotten.

  The US team that emerged from Atlanta would bump, trip, and beg its way to Nagoya. The United States Table Tennis Association (USTTA) was still too poor to send a team, and players were paying their own way, just as Ogimura had done before them. Three of the four men’s semifinalists lacked the money.

  One player raised her funds at a high school. Judy Bochenski, who at fifteen was the youngest player on the squad, was able to make the trip as a second alternate because her father had taken out a $900 loan from his local bank. Cowan’s fare was paid by a semiretired engineering executive from Detroit. Some team members were solidly middle class—a researcher at Chemical Bank, an IBM computer analyst, another at the United Nations, albeit in the documents section rather than as an ambassador. No one was going to Japan expecting to win a World Championship; it was more of a chance to measure themselves against the world’s best to see how far they had to climb, perhaps to learn what the world’s finest were capable of and bring back something new to the basements of America.

  The USTTA paid for a total of three men to fly. One was Tim Boggan, the USTTA’s vice president and an associate professor of English literature at Long Island University. At forty, he wasn’t a playing member of the team but was undoubtedly America’s ultimate table tennis obsessive, a graybearded Pepys of Ping-Pong who believed that if the unpaid bureaucrats in the American game would just step out of the way, it would shine by itself.

  Before leaving for Japan, Boggan had had the effrontery to call the sports editor of the New York Times, offering to cover the World Table Tennis Championships on their behalf. There was a pause. “The US Ping-Pong team!” Boggan recognized the derisive tone. In two weeks’ time, the New York Times would be begging Boggan to write for them.

  Cowan, who would be Boggan’s roommate for part of the trip, was the most colorful but hardly the only character. In fact, Boggan worried that the team wasn’t a team at all, just a group of individuals who shared a liking of but no great commitment to the sport. He’d watch in Japan, amazed that women on the team were writing postcards instead of studying the best players in the world.

  The generation of Mar
ty Reisman and Dick Miles that had won international tournaments for America was gone. The balding Miles was in Nagoya working for Sports Illustrated, the ever grumpy, grumbling reminder of what had been. The squad was now ranked twenty-third in the world. For Japan, according to Boggan, “there were no expectations.” Some members of the USTTA had even wondered if it was worth sending such a poor team. Boggan violently opposed them. “How the fuck were we going to get good if we stayed playing in the basement?”

  Almost all teams were housed in the Nagoya Miyako Hotel, a bleak box that looked like an inhospitable cheese grater. Glenn Miller’s tunes were piped through the hotel corridors. In the lobby a Japanese torch singer warbled American love songs from World War II. Pajamas and slippers were provided for the players. Buses from the hotel to the Aichi Gymnasium, home of the 31st World Championships, ran every thirty minutes.

  On the first night of play, Sunday, March 28, the fifty-eight teams paraded through the arena for the opening ceremony. The Chinese entered in much the same manner as their army stomped through Tiananmen Square every October to celebrate the foundation of the PRC, arms swinging vigorously back and forth, perfectly synchronized in their red tracksuits. Every country had outfitted their players in uniforms for the event except for the beleaguered American team, which made its lap of honor in an assortment of colors and styles.

  The matches proceeded just as the Americans feared, starting with the sad sight of the empty-handed team captain, Jack Howard, stepping forward to greet his counterpart although the USTTA hadn’t provided him with a pennant to swap. They lost five to one to Hong Kong and five to zero to South Korea. Cowan was swinging away, losing again to a better player. He desperately beseeched Howard for advice. “You got to tell me what to do out there. You got to tell me what to do!” But Howard was a captain, not a coach, and had no cure for the desperate state of American table tennis.

  Thanks to Ivor Montagu, Ping-Pong was now a game in which state-sponsored professionals dominated amateurs. There were really only a handful of countries that competed at the top. All the other fifty-three competing nations lagged far behind. The American team dropped into the third tier with nothing to play for.

  The team went sightseeing, but Boggan barely moved from the Aichi arena. He walked past Japanese students curled up in sleeping bags, reading copies of Ogimura’s books while waiting for tickets to the championships. Boggan himself was scheduled to play at Nagoya in the Jubilee Cup, a sop to the over-forties. Just before the tournament began, he had been practicing in the auditorium with a teammate. As he bent over to pick up a ball, Boggan noticed the entire Chinese team filing into the stands one by one. The team was “thirty or forty strong”; they descended “like they were out of a spaceship” and walked straight past him to sit en masse behind a skinny Swedish teenager, Stellan Bengttson, the fifteenth seed. At nineteen, Bengttson looked more likely to win the role of Peter Pan than a World Championship. The Chinese squad sat transfixed behind him.

  What Boggan didn’t know was that Bengttson was enough of an athlete and Ping-Pong addict to have traveled to Japan, slept on Ogimura’s floor, and withstood Ogi’s merciless training regimen. Within ten days, Bengttson would seize Zhuang Zedong’s former crown as the men’s singles champion. But Bengttson’s achievement would be eclipsed by the Chinese in other ways. While he was playing table tennis, the Chinese were there to play a different game.

  CHAPTER 36 | Could the Great Wall Crumble?

  The Chinese team had arrived in Nagoya on not one but two planes for maximum safety. Zhou Enlai had chosen a decorated air force veteran to organize the flight details, telling him “to treat the journey as a special campaign.” He’d gathered the team one last time. “Go,” he’d told his ambassadors, “and rejoin the international family.”

  The team had spent much of their last five years in either Beijing or the farms of Shanxi. When the first plane landed, security was tight. Among the advance party was one of the men’s team coaches, Liang Youneng. To his relief, he saw among a large crowd on the tarmac a handful of people holding aloft the Little Red Book. “Long Live Mao!” they shouted. Across the runway, he saw a larger group swarming toward them, furiously bellowing “Down with Mao!” The police tried to hurry the Ping-Pong players toward safety. “I couldn’t even feel my feet on the ground,” remembered the Chinese coach. “I was pushed by the crowd to the car.” Perhaps Mao’s warning wasn’t an exaggeration. Ping-Pong players might really be killed on the streets of Nagoya.

  Everywhere the Chinese went, they were accompanied by a convoy of police officers on motorbikes. While most of the teams would be sharing a hotel and transport, the Chinese had their own buses and had made their own hotel arrangements. The assigned Japanese security wore tiny pins so that the Chinese players could identify them in an emergency. At night, as the team tried to sleep, they could hear the chants of Japanese demonstrators drift up to their windows. “Drive! Drive! Drive! Drive away the Chinese!” The team watched the Chinese national flag burning on the street beneath their hotel. They watched portraits of Chairman Mao spark, light, and burst into flames. To ensure their safety, a handful of Japanese Communists would sleep in the corridor outside their rooms “with only some newspapers underneath and overcoats for covering.”

  Though most of the foreign press believed that Nagoya was the first international tournament for the Chinese team, they had actually played their first comeback match almost eight months earlier. Straight from cutting wheat stalks in Shanxi Province, the Chinese players were suddenly sent to play at the king of Nepal’s sixtieth birthday party in Beijing before Zhou Enlai. It was the exhibition match against Ogimura and their oldest rivals, the Japanese national team.

  Before the match, on an airless July night, Coach Xu Yinsheng, Mao’s favorite speechmaker, gathered the squad to watch two patriotic films about atrocities that China suffered during the War against Japanese Aggression in the 1930s, which had cost the lives of 20 million civilians. All the tenets of the Cultural Revolution—to care only about the domestic and ignore the foreign, to serve the people and disregard competition—were immediately forgotten.

  “The aim was to emphasize the hatred toward Japanese militarism,” explained Xi Enting, who was present that night. By the end of the movie, the team was thoroughly worked up. The domestic oppression that had plagued the squad over the last few years was cast aside. “We all stood and started swearing, our hair was standing straight up, we were sweating away and chanting ‘Down with the revival of the Japanese army!’ ” Had Montagu been there, he would have been thrilled by the moment—his three great loves, table tennis, film, and politics, rolled up into powerful propaganda.

  After the final reel ended, the team “marched to the arena like an army entering into battle.” It was the first time the Japanese players had seen their great rivals in five years. Zhuang Zedong remained an idol to them and was surrounded by Japanese admirers. He refused their autograph requests and looked “so angry that his face was pale. He jumped up onto the table and shouted loudly. It scared the Japanese. He was like a madman.” The Chinese won the match with ease, “terrifying the Japanese into submission.” What the king of Nepal made of his celebrations wasn’t noted. Ogimura seemed bemused.

  The game was covered by Peking Radio. Though the Chinese could not have been hungrier for victory, the new rules accepted by Zhou Enlai to allow the reintroduction of sport insisted upon “Friendship First and Competition Second.” The radio commentator wasn’t even allowed to announce the score. All you could hear was the ping, pang of the ball going back and forth and polite, entirely political commentary. Even the manufacturing of the balls had become political. In factories, only balls that rolled out of the machine straight were chosen. Those that rolled left or right were labeled deviationist and destroyed.

  China’s only preparatory tournament in late 1970 had been deeply depressing. Humiliated three to one by the Hungarians at the Scandinavian Open, the team had slunk back to the Chinese
embassy, where “some started to cry.” The cook sent up bowls of hot noodles, but they couldn’t eat or sleep. The following morning, the squad opened a Swedish newspaper and understood nothing except for a cartoon that showed a picture of the Great Wall of China crumbling.

  When they were coaxed by Zhou Enlai into traveling to Nagoya, it had been understood that they weren’t necessarily there to win the tournament. There had never been a more political trip. They were supposed to report to Beijing three times a day. Still, as ever, the officials were in the know, and the table tennis players were the pawns to be moved where they were needed.

  In Nagoya the Chinese were doing better than they had hoped—slowly pushing aside their Swaythling Cup competitors and heading toward the inevitable clash with Japan. Their faltering visit to Sweden seemed a long time ago. They practiced feverishly on the days when they didn’t have matches and occasionally mixed with the North Koreans and players from other friendly countries.

  In Nagoya, the Chinese could spot an American at a distance; they were like small clouds of radioactivity that were best avoided. As the players had already learned, the Cultural Revolution moved in uneven rhythms. Both players and officials knew that direct contact with Americans could still be interpreted as counterrevolutionary behavior.

  Liang Geliang, Zhuang Zedong’s young acolyte, was about to step away from a table when an odd apparition appeared before him. Glenn Cowan was gesturing to Liang to practice with him. Liang was horrified. Not only was the long-haired, head-banded teenager an American, “he was a really bad player . . . third ranked.” Liang thought of his invitation as “almost an insult,” an American attempt to hoodwink him because he was so young. Liang retreated to ask an official what he should do. What if Cowan had been told to approach the Chinese by an American official? Go back, was the advice from the Chinese delegation, play for a short time, and then excuse yourself.