As they left Cunningham’s office, Steenhoven and Harrison had a good sense of the sort of quasi-diplomatic mission they were undertaking. It was like being in a Western where they’d just been deputized by the sheriff, only to be refused the tin star and pistol. In the corridor outside Cunningham’s office Harrison and Steenhoven bumped into John Rich, perhaps the most experienced of all Asia-based journalists. Cunningham didn’t even know how Rich had made it inside the embassy, but forty years later, still remembered his doorway smile, polished for Steenhoven and Harrison. The US team wouldn’t be escaping from the press for weeks.
By the time Harrison and Steenhoven made it to a lunch near the international airport, boxes filled with hundreds of American-made ballpoints were being driven out to meet them. Cunningham had considered seeing the team off but decided it was best no representative of the government be seen anywhere near this group. American table tennis wasn’t political, was it?
CHAPTER 41 | The Worries
The madness began as the American team reached Hong Kong. It became increasingly obvious that this might be the biggest story of the year. There was no avoiding the media. “You go to eat, and they’re there at the same table as you. You go to take a leak, and they go and take a leak with you,” remembered Harrison. The story had so many perfect ingredients: the importance of Sino-American relations combined with the faintly ridiculous scent of Ping-Pong. Throw in the unexpectedly diverse group of Americans heading into unknown Beijing, and something would simply have to happen, and when it did, every single TV network and newspaper wanted the news at once.
Because it seemed at first that no Western journalists would be allowed into China, it looked as though the players themselves would be the only witnesses to history. They were asked by media outlets to act as reporters. Boggan alone was tracked down by Time, Life, Newsweek, CBS, an Australian newspaper, and the New York Times, until recently uninterested in Ping-Pong but now anxious for his services. The younger girls would be approached by Seventeen magazine. George Brathwaite, a Guyanese immigrant who worked at the UN, would hear from Ebony magazine. He carried four cameras from different newspapers around his neck. Sitting in their hotel rooms in Hong Kong, the Ping-Pong players were provided with equipment and given crash courses in how to use the cameras. They were told what to ask, what to look for, and how to write.
Before he’d even left Nagoya, Steenhoven had called Cunningham to inquire about returning China’s invitation. A visit from the Chinese team to the United States would generate much-needed domestic publicity for the sport. But it wasn’t as simple as it sounded. Steenhoven would need clearance from a different government department to have Communists admitted to the States. The McCarran Act of 1950 restricted visas for citizens of Communist countries. In the normal order of things, applicants for visas were supposed to be interviewed in a US consulate, and of course there wasn’t one in all of China. There was also the question of funding a Chinese tour, an impossibility for the impoverished USTTA. As Steenhoven put it, he’d be relieved if “a fairy godmother could be found.”
To Steenhoven’s relief, a cable awaited him at the Golden Gate Hotel in Kowloon, announcing that the National Committee on United States–China Relations had agreed to fund-raise for the trip. The committee began six years earlier as a forum for Americans to promote a public discussion that might delve beyond knee-jerk negativity against Red China. Steenhoven kept the good news to himself. He didn’t trust anyone else on the trip with the information, worrying that something might happen and that he was the one who was “going to look like an asshole.”
Cowan, the maverick, was thinking ahead. He placed a call to his old mentor Bob Gusikoff, back in Los Angeles, and decided that Gusikoff would act as his agent on his return. Cowan planned to hit the ground running, starting with a press conference the moment they landed back in the United States. Gusikoff returned his call within hours to tell him that he’d already negotiated the front cover of Life magazine. He felt Ping-Pong had a good chance to become as big as golf on the team’s return and advised Cowan to concentrate on getting rights to Chinese table tennis equipment.
To anyone who’d listen, Cowan shared his optimism for the future, “Don’t worry, baby, we’re gonna play 50,000 tournaments when we get back.” For the moment, Cowan was completely relaxed. He’d promised Jack Howard, the team captain, that he’d flushed the last of his stash down his hotel toilet in Tokyo.
Steenhoven’s other worry, asides from Cowan, was eighteen-year-old John Tannehill. He had had a shoulder-length hairstyle similar to Cowan’s but had mowed it down to stubble before heading to Japan. His only long hair now grew from the point of his chin in a wispy, youthful beard. A psychology student from the University of Cincinnati, Tannehill was a loner by nature who carried with him a novel by Norman Mailer, a book on Che Guevara, and a copy of the Teachings of the Buddha. One of his teammates considered him so smart that “he could play chess against eight people at the same time without looking at the board.”
On the eve of their departure, Tannehill disappeared from the Hong Kong hotel for a mere twenty minutes and returned, claiming to Boggan that he’d just visited a hooker. “I won’t do that again,” he said. Boggan doubted that he’d had time to do it at all.
His rival from hundreds of youth tournaments, Glenn Cowan, one-upped him and went missing before midnight. Cowan’s roommate, team captain Jack Howard, was seen scouting the hotel lobby at 2:30 in the morning. “Has anyone seen Glenn?” Cowan had remained so relaxed the night before their entry into China that he’d headed to a bar in Lang Kwai Fong, where he picked up a local prostitute for $12, smoked some dope, and ended up at her apartment, relying on her to wake him up for his trip into China. The alarm went off at 5:00 AM, and Cowan’s day began with his new friend “giving him a blow job.” By 5:30 AM he was back in the Golden Gate Hotel being dressed down by his captain, who had begun the night with Cowan searching for hookers before getting cold feet.
If Cunningham had been comforted by Steenhoven’s blue suit and American flag pin, Cowan’s bag of dirty clothes, condoms, and marijuana would have horrified him. Tannehill’s Che Guevara tome would have raised a little red flag in the State Department, too. Ambassadors were nominated by presidents and approved by the Senate; Ping-Pong players weren’t vetted quite so closely.
More worrying still was Cowan’s mental state. Boggan paused by his open hotel door the next morning as Cowan was preparing for an interview with a TV reporter. He obsessively brushed his hair before suddenly leaping on his bed, rolling in circles clutching his pillow. He hoped the girls in China liked him, he said. The Japanese girls had been keen on him, so why not the Chinese? “Christ,” thought Boggan, “I reckon this guy’s still on something.”
CHAPTER 42 | Crossing the Borders
Glenn Cowan wore his white “Let It Be” shirt, a yellow floppy hat, and purple tie-dye pants. It seemed to have been his outfit of choice, no matter where he went or whose hand he was told to shake. Cowan sensed that he could become a one-man brand—his own spokesman, model, and salesman. It was already obvious to all that Cowan craved the spotlight. On the railroad bridge between the freedom of the New Territories in Hong Kong and the stricture of Communist China he was “given explicit directions . . . to lag behind the others” and then turn to give “a smile and a great big wave.”
As the teammates stepped across the border, “there was music playing from the sky.” Chinese loudspeakers accompanied their arrival, giving many members of the team the sensation that they “were in a movie.” Even as he traipsed across the red-and-white bridge, Cowan was cognizant of his unique position—a hippie in China to play Ping-Pong with real live Communists. Another American paused on the bridge and silently wondered, “Am I going to come out again?” In the watching crowd of newspapermen lurked an official from the US Consulate, an unnamed exception to the firm orders for all American diplomats to avoid the team. A report shot to Washington. The team “crossed the border a
t 10.18 local time . . . we welcome this development.”
The photograph of Cowan waving good-bye to the Western world hit the front page of the New York Times and the front pages of newspapers across the world. Zhou Enlai couldn’t have designed a more favorable layout. Mao’s invitation to the table tennis team shared the front page with news of the ongoing Paris Peace Talks, Kissinger’s and Nixon’s incessant push and pull to extract America from the Vietnam War with a vestige of honor. The coincidence would not be lost on Washington this time. For a reminder of why Nixon needed Mao’s influence with the North Vietnamese, just below was an anguished article about a rise in American casualty rates. And should Zhou have wished one more nudge to remind Kissinger and Nixon that China was going to reestablish contacts with or without their help, in the bottom corner of the front page was an article on China’s quiet surge into Africa.
As they boarded the train from the border to Guangzhou, Cowan was in his own world. He stared out the window at the workers laboring in the paddy fields that lined the tracks. “I really believe life is simple. It’s all the other people that make it complicated,” he said to nobody in particular. Earlier, he’d approached Tim Boggan with a strange request: “You gotta watch me, please watch me.” He would raise more eyebrows at their first lunch in Guangzhou when he suddenly stood up and left the room in the middle of a speech by their host.
If Cowan was playing the role of Californian counterculturalist, then on that train to Guangzhou, Tannehill was undergoing a quieter, more earnest conversion. He was dressed in his Farmer Brown bib overalls, more suitable to a Nebraskan homestead than a train to a Communist hub, sitting alone eating a box of cereal and almonds, playing chess against himself. At the Customs House at the border, he’d picked up a copy of Mao’s On the Correct Handling of Contradictions among the People. On the train he declared it “one of the best books I’ve ever read.”
After flying from Guangzhou to Beijing, they were put up at the Xing Qiao Hotel, just as the last generation of Ping-Pong playing Westerners had been a decade before. Everything that happened to this US team was seen as new, yet everything that they were going through was entirely familiar to their Chinese hosts. Ping-Pong was ambassadorial politics, and the US team was one of the few that had never received this treatment. During the next week, the world’s press ignored table tennis history. The 1961 Beijing Championships, and the fact that dozens of foreign Ping-Pong players had already been sent on exactly the same kind of tour that the Americans were about to undergo were brushed over to emphasize the strangeness of the situation.
The team’s biggest immediate danger wasn’t Steenhoven’s fear that they would be torn apart by Red Guards but gluttony. Every way they turned at all times of day, they were met with banquets with double-digit courses. Even after their first banquet in Beijing, a tableful of food awaited them on their return to the hotel. Opinions on the dishes varied from the diplomatic (“I haven’t acquired a taste for it yet”) to the repelled (“a vat of vomit”).
On the first morning in Beijing, as the others discussed their breakfast, eaten in the hotel restaurant under a banner of “US aggressors and all their running dogs,” Cowan and Tannehill ran breathless back into the hotel. They had been up before 4:00 AM and managed to slip out alone onto the gray streets. They had walked around followed by children, then more children, until Cowan was convinced that they had a crowd of thousands in tow. Cowan and Tannehill had decided that if this was a truly communistic society, then everything must be shared. As they tried to get on bikes propped against a wall, they realized that the kids “glared at us. It wasn’t such a socialist country after all.”
To Tannehill, it seemed like the crowd was closing in on them. “The only way we could stop them from getting on top of us was that we had a camera and we took pictures of them as we were going away and I don’t think they’d seen a camera or a white person before and they were kind of startled.”
A newsman went to check on Cowan’s crowd, which Cowan numbered at five or ten thousand. Cowan was losing his credibility among the reporters. “In fact, there was only the usual collection of onlookers, about fifty of them, mostly children, who always collect outside the hotel to wait for foreign guests staying there.”
Cowan’s enthusiasm was unabated. He walked around “whistling at the girls, following them down the street,” remembered Tannehill. He got Jack Howard to play a game of imaginary Ping-Pong with him in a street, which did attract a huge crowd, stopping traffic all around them until “the meanest-looking guy in China came along.” Intimidated, Howard stopped their game and dragged Cowan back toward the hotel through the crowd.
“This is getting a little dangerous,” said Howard.
Cowan disagreed. “Don’t be silly,” he said.
Then a rock came flying out of the crowd and landed between them. Howard was suddenly worried that he, the captain of the American Ping-Pong team, would end up “stoned to death on the streets of Peking.” Cowan just casually shook his finger at the crowd and kept walking.
During the preparations for the visit to China, the table tennis team hadn’t even made the sports pages of an American newspaper. Now, after less than twenty-four hours in China, they dominated the broadsheets; five articles inspired by their trip appeared in the New York Times alone. On their second day in China, there were eight articles in the Times. All were in the international news section, placing Ping-Pong in columns usually reserved for foreign policy. The Chinese press coverage was quite different. The other teams, from England, Nigeria, Colombia, and Canada, were given equal ink. The stories were short, bland, and placed on the back pages.
At first, the Chinese players had no idea of the impact the US team’s arrival was having. “It was,” after all, “a crime to listen to the Voice of America.” Xu Shaofa, one of the country’s top players, crept into officials’ offices once a week to steal the newspapers, including those published specially for the Communist Party hierarchy. It was from him that the team learned of the influence Ping-Pong diplomacy was having on relations with their “American enemy.”
Zhou Enlai had played another subtle card, suddenly granting visas to three veteran American newsmen and one Englishman who had covered Asia for decades. Why, at the last minute, would the Chinese do such a thing? It was a considerable rise in the stakes. These weren’t the British sportswriters of 1961 nor members of the thin line of sympathizers, such as Edgar Snow, who had dripped into China over the years. John Rich, Jack Reynolds, John Saar, and John Roderick, representing NBC, the Associated Press (AP), and Life, were considered some of the shrewdest Asia reporters on the continent. Roderick was among those who had made it to Yan’an to visit the Dixie Mission back in the 1940s.
Norman Webster, the correspondent for Toronto’s Globe and Mail who was accompanying the Canadian tour, believed that the Chinese were shocked to find the American press, denied access for their experienced reporters, had recruited athletes who knew nothing about China. Early on, he heard one player turn to another and ask, “What’s this Cultural Revolution they keep talking about?” Perhaps, he thought, the Chinese had decided that the risk of poor coverage would lessen if veteran reporters were allowed in—the compromise was that they would be tied to covering the Ping-Pong team’s progress. It was a savvy move; the reports of AP man John Roderick were front-page news across the world.
Though some of the would-be reporters on the squad felt aggrieved by the presence of professional journalists, Cowan was thrilled. “He thought they were going to do all the work and he was going to get all the . . . glory.” They gave Cowan $50 as spending money and told him, “From now on, we’ll tell you when we need you.” But Cowan wasn’t so easy to dismiss. By the end of the week, Cowan explained to the reporter and photographer from Life, “I thought instead of doing ‘Inside China’ you could have done a piece on ‘Americans in China’ with a big picture of me on the cover.”
The rest of the team could be timid around the experienced pressmen, bu
t not Cowan. He muscled aside Roderick, interrupting the interview of a professor at Tsinghua University. “These are really strange questions, man.” “You think you can ask better questions?” snapped Roderick. Cowan nodded and took over the interview. At the same university, a spontaneous game of basketball erupted in front of hundreds of students. It was another event in which Cowan could shine. “They liked me as much as the Harlem Globetrotters,” he beamed afterward.
The team had the wonders of the Cultural Revolution explained to them. Steenhoven played the parental role, making small speeches of thanks that were painfully in line with the Chinese, urging his squad to applaud “the peasants, the workers, the students who are in the room.” The older players knew when to keep their mouths shut, but John Tannehill and Glenn Cowan were still teenagers. They were in college at a political time, found themselves in a political place, and, unsurprisingly, were thinking about politics. Everywhere they went, the newsmen followed, and passing conversations were slapped down on paper.
On the bus ride to the Great Wall, weaving “through a stream of oncoming Mongolian ponies, trucks and bicycles,” the two turned to the question of how America might be transformed by resistance to the Vietnam War. Cowan thought that the country was on the cusp of an intellectual revolution, though he worried it was coming across more like “a lot of hippies doing their own thing—and protesting the government.”
“How are you an intellectual?” interrupted Tannehill.
“I don’t know,” said Cowan. “How are you an intellectual?”
“I don’t know,” said Tannehill. “I read.”
“Oh,” Cowan said slowly, “is that how you’re an intellectual?”
“It helps,” said Tannehill.
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