Ping-Pong Diplomacy

by Nicholas Griffin

  “I think,” said Cowan. “That’s how I’m an intellectual.”

  Tannehill had an awakening on the Great Wall that would horrify the American heartland. First, he riffed on Steenhoven’s constant harping on the word “responsibility”: “I’ve decided to be political and suffer the consequences. Not being political, it’s like not having any mind. China knows it can beat us at table tennis. They brought us over here for the political consequences.” Instead of listening to Graham Steenhoven, the Chrysler company man, president of the USTTA, and holder of American passports, Tannehill decided that the truth lay with Mao, “the greatest moral and intellectual leader in the world today. He reaches the most people and influences the most people. His philosophy is beautiful.”

  It was said in earshot of Webster and made the front page of the next day’s Toronto Globe and Mail. It wasn’t what Steenhoven wanted to hear, it wasn’t what Nixon wanted to hear, and most of all, it wasn’t what Chairman Mao or Zhou Enlai wanted to hear. They were looking for bridge-builders, not converts who might inspire opposition to China back in America. “The Chinese,” said Tannehill, on a roll, “had this Great Wall to keep out the Mongols. The US has its paranoia in its ghetto suburbs, its missile defense systems.” Back in his hotel room that night, Tannehill taped a silk-screen portrait of Mao above his bed. And then, to his surprise, he felt very, very sick.

  At four in the morning, an unconscious Tannehill was found by his roommate, George Brathwaite, wedged behind the toilet bowl, slumped in his own shit. It’s tempting to presume the Chinese had targeted him with a well-placed dumpling, but many on the team suffered during their trip. Team captain Howard was missing from the team’s Time cover photo on the Great Wall because he was bent double over a hole in the ground at the foot of the steps. Another player, Errol Resek, had to stop a bus ride and leap into the neighboring field.

  Tannehill was rushed to the hospital by Howard. As the team captain headed back to the hotel, he heard Tannehill screaming “Jesus, don’t leave me here! Don’t leave me here!” Tannehill watched as a man was rolled past him in a wheelchair, holding up Mao’s Little Red Book. It was helping his recovery, explained the translator. By the time Tannehill made it back to the hotel, John Roderick, the AP man, was there to capture his first doubts. His initial enthusiasm had been tempered by a day of Chinese health care: “From his sick bed, Mr. Tannehill said, ‘I wouldn’t want to spend the rest of my life here, but I’d like to see more of it.’ ”

  Steenhoven was by now seething with anger at the Globe and Mail’s reporter. It was the worst possible scenario, a stain on the tour fully documented by a veteran reporter. Was Tannehill a Maoist among them? Or simply a young man strung along by an old hand? Steenhoven called Webster to his room, accused him of yellow journalism, and told him he might be ruining a young man’s entire career. He threatened to get back at Webster. He wasn’t sure how, but Steenhoven planned to make the effort. Webster shrugged it off. He was a reporter and he was reporting. What else was he supposed to do?

  CHAPTER 43 | All Eyes on America

  A stadium devoted to Ping-Pong, “grander than Madison Square Garden,” was now packed with eighteen thousand fans. It was an intoxicating moment for the Americans. If the crowds of five thousand in Nagoya had surprised them, what to make of this? The Chinese played it safe; the reporters noted that almost the entire stadium was made up of conscripts from the PLA. The only person missing was the ailing Tannehill.

  Cunningham had been right about Steenhoven. His geniality and refusal to take offense made him a perfect ambassador. At that first match, he noticed that behind a huge banner saying “Welcome American team” was another message painted in large red letters, four feet high: “Down with the Yankee Oppressors and Their Running Dogs.” He asked the interpreter why they hadn’t taken it down. It was said in a joking manner. The interpreter just smiled and didn’t say anything.

  The team had been introduced to the crowd by the song “As a helmsman is necessary to navigate in high seas, so the thought of Mao Zedong is necessary to make a revolution.” “Probably carried away by the music,” Cowan had started to perform “a twist-like shuffle.” Then he pulled out his red headband and strutted out to the table for his match. The crowd applauded. No member of the American team knew that Zhou Enlai had personally overseen the schedule and dictated how the event would be covered by television cameras. He had personally drafted the text for the announcer. Even the timing of the applause Cowan heard as he stepped forward had been ordered by the premier.

  For all of Cowan’s posturing, he was one of the few natural entertainers on the team. The crowd, regimented and breathless, began to react to him. Here was a man doing exactly what he wanted—clenching his fist to celebrate a point rather than dedicating it to Mao; putting his foot up on the table to tie a shoelace instead of discreetly bowing to the floor; jumping over barriers to get a ball back instead of stepping around them. Even Steenhoven appreciated Cowan’s antics. Though Cowan was playing well, after he lost a point he walked back to the table and picked it up, shifted it an inch, and put it back down, implying that his last shot would have been a winner if the table had been in the right place. Steenhoven listened as laughter rolled around the stadium.

  The Chinese were masters of the fixed match; a thousand games of friendship had preceded this one. Cowan won his first game twenty-eight to twenty-six. He thought it was a legitimate match up to the point when he was leading sixteen to twelve in the second game, when his opponent let Cowan win the remaining points. “Fuck you,” said Cowan as they finished up. “I’d have won anyway.” The words weren’t translated. By the time he took his seat, he had comforted himself. “Eight hundred million people are watching us!” he told Boggan.

  What was left unsaid was that to the Chinese crowd, hosting and throwing a match wasn’t just a sign of friendship but a symbol of superiority. “A team of their most powerful players could have humiliated their American guests,” noted the AP’s John Roderick, but the Chinese men won by only five to three and the women by five to four. Roderick roamed the arena trying to balance the table tennis with a touch of politics. He kept pestering his interpreter to ask questions about Liu Shaoqi, Mao’s old number two, once chairman of the People’s Republic. Roderick was assured that Liu was “alive and probably being reeducated,” which, Roderick noted, “is a Chinese Communist way of saying he was being punished and brainwashed.”

  Roderick wasn’t even close. It had been two years since the Red Guards had found his body. Excommunicated from the Communist Party, constantly persecuted, he had been cremated under an alias. The pathetic state of his corpse had been hidden from his family. A year after the Americans left Beijing, Liu’s family would finally learn of his death. The man who had helped to draw up China’s constitution could not be protected from Mao.

  If Ping-Pong was the friendly face of China, it was also tied to the ugly fate of so many who had founded the country. Peng Dehuai, who had asked a journalist for a shipment of Ping-Pong balls four decades before, had challenged Mao on the success of the Great Leap Forward and had died in jail. He Long was another casualty of Mao’s cruelty, and Chen Yi was still marginalized.

  After Cowan’s performance, the rest of the team was beginning to lose any good feelings they had for him. The more he began to shine as a celebrity, the less his teammates liked him. They didn’t even know what to call him as the newspapers began to claim him as representing the youth of America. He couldn’t really be a hippie, because “Hippies aren’t rude.” Another agreed. “He doesn’t represent anybody. Just himself.”

  The Americans toured the Summer Palace, just as the teams had done at the 1961 World Championships. Dick Miles had been allowed to accompany the US squad from Nagoya because of his history as a table tennis player, not because of his current status as Sports Illustrated reporter. Out by the lake, he asked an official what he thought of Americans. The official tried to brush the question off but Dick persisted. “I mean,
in what ways do you find them peculiar? Have you ever seen an American before?”

  The Chinese looked Miles right in the eye. “On the battlefield,” he said, “in the Korean War.”

  History and politics were never far away. Brathwaite, the Guyanese immigrant who worked at the United Nations, was approached by a delegate who wanted to know whether Brathwaite thought China belonged in the United Nations. Brathwaite held his ground and tried to explain he had no official capacity and simply worked in the documents section. The delegate pushed him, just as Miles had pushed in conversation with the Chinese official. “I would vote for all the countries of the world to be admitted,” said Brathwaite, Ping-Pong player and diplomat.

  The news filtered through that morning that let the last doubters see that this really was about politics and not Ping-Pong: they were to be granted a meeting with Zhou Enlai that afternoon. There were politicians who had been in Beijing for years without gaining such an audience.

  They walked up the stairs of the Great Hall of the People and were ushered past huge portraits commemorating Communist victories. Howard casually asked the interpreter if Mao was dead or alive; the interpreter “turned white.” They were led to sit alongside the other Ping-Pong delegations in a room like so many others they’d waited in on the tour—big bulky chairs and davenports, all with crocheted dollies on their backs, and small tea tables with all the makings for a pot of tea, an open pack of cigarettes, an ashtray, and a writing desk with envelopes and an ink bottle.

  Zhou Enlai arrived promptly. Jack Howard clocked the time Zhou spent with the Nigerians, Colombians, Canadians, and Americans at ten to twelve minutes each; then he moved on. This wasn’t how it seemed to the other delegations. A chagrined Canadian player claimed the United States received most of the publicity and hogged almost all of the premier’s time. “It was quite the tea party,” carped a Canadian news channel.

  Zhou asked if any of the American team had been to China before. Steenhoven burnished his diplomatic credentials and answered for the team. “Well, no, none of us are familiar with China, but we have become familiar with Chinese hospitality.”

  “What joy it is to bring friends from afar,” said Zhou, quoting an old Chinese proverb.

  “Good friends can be found anywhere,” said Steenhoven and then, because he couldn’t resist pushing the thought of a Chinese team pouring Ping-Pong fever across America, “and we would welcome the Chinese in the United States.”

  The premier talked of his own fondness for the sport and how he still played despite his age. Then came the line that would be carried on the front pages in America. Zhou congratulated the table tennis team for having “opened a new page in the relations of the Chinese and American people. I am confident that this beginning again of our friendship will certainly meet with the approval and support of the great majority of our two peoples.”

  Just as it seemed that there would be no more questions for the premier, Cowan waved a hand. He was, thought Boggan, “the only one undaunted” before the meeting and “probably the first person in purple, bell-bottom trousers received by Mr. Zhou,” the New York Times observed. What did the premier think of the hippie movement in the United States? It “seemed to catch not only Mr. Zhou off guard but also the rest of the Americans.” Zhou said that he didn’t know too much about it, but “youth wants to seek the truth and out of this search, various forms of change are bound to come forth . . . when we were young,” he continued, “it was the same, too.”

  The premier of China had spent more time with Cowan than anyone else in the room. The world’s press loved the comparison of the two men talking together. Cowan went from hippie to “our hippie” overnight. The team was won over by Zhou Enlai, especially Graham Steenhoven, who now believed the premier could have been a top executive at Chrysler.

  CHAPTER 44 | Tension

  The next morning, as the team gathered in the hotel lobby readying themselves for the short flight to Shanghai, a pair of Chinese bellboys galloped down the stairs. They were holding Cowan’s and Tannehill’s dirty underwear. The Americans boys, having received an abundance of gifts from the Chinese at every stop, had had to make some strategic packing choices. But they were not allowed to leave a thing behind. They stuffed their underwear into their pockets and trudged out to the bus. Later, another player was chased down by a man waving his forgotten toothbrush. To Americans they seemed like acts of honesty, but the Chinese were only trying to sidestep political trouble. Who, for instance, would want to be caught wearing a pair of imperialist underpants?

  On the plane to Shanghai, Tannehill and Cowan went at it again. Tannehill thought hippies were fine but useless, like parsley on America’s steak dinner. Their true weakness, thought Tannehill, was their fondness for drugs.

  “Drugs help me think,” said Cowan. “Every time John gets stuck, he attacks me for drugs. You have a million crutches, John. Everybody has crutches.”

  “Glenn needs dreams,” said Tannehill. “Because he’s a product of a society where the dreams are taken away.”

  “I do escape in drugs,” said Cowan. “I choose to because they give me a world that fits my needs.”

  Tannehill’s disdain was mounting. Later, he’d say that “Glenn was going to lay his long-haired hippie thing on the Chinese, was going to bring hippiedom to China—like he was a missionary, like he was Jesus Christ himself come back.”

  In Shanghai, Cowan roamed the streets with the Life writer and photographer. He wasn’t the Pied Piper, because the Pied Piper was independent. He was more like a pot of honey, made by others, attractive to many. The Chinese gathered around, the photographers took pictures. To Cowan’s delight, the crowd slowly broke into applause as they realized he was an American Ping-Pong player. This was Shanghai, rumored to be the birthplace of Ping-Pong in China. They had walked past toddlers using table tennis racquets as teething tools.

  For Boggan, who strolled beside Cowan that morning, it was the turning point, when Cowan began to suspect how “innocent and vulnerable” he was before the media—perhaps he was the one being controlled. As Cowan disappeared after breakfast, the Life reporter leaned toward Boggan and asked, “Who’s the real Glenn Cowan?” Boggan didn’t answer. “As if I knew,” he wrote in his notes.

  In Shanghai the team played another exhibition game in front of a large, enthusiastic crowd, including every foreign diplomat in the city. The only one who boycotted the evening was the head of the North Vietnam Mission, who remained “extremely upset” at the American presence. China watchers in Hong Kong picked up what they considered an “intriguing statement” made over the public address system: “The great leader Chairman Mao teaches us that it is necessary to distinguish between the American people and their govt and between the policy makers in the US govt and the ordinary work personnel at lower level,” as it was reported by telegram. Did that mean the Chinese were thinking that the American Ping-Pong team was in some way official, albeit at a low level? Did the Chinese presume that Ping-Pong was political in America as well?

  All players would play this time, including Tannehill, now recovered. What he remembered afterward was not so much the constant applause but how that applause would increase for certain players. Brathwaite, Tannehill believed, received “very special treatment” because the Chinese were trying to demonstrate that they knew “blacks were oppressed more.” “They especially liked Cowan, he flopped around with his long hair,” recalled Tannehill. “He lost his match, but the Red Guards loved him.” There was something to be understood, but for the moment, Tannehill couldn’t put his finger on it. Cowan “was the exact antithesis of what the Chinese should stand for and for some unknown reason, they loved it.”

  Feeling better again, Tannehill hadn’t totally dismissed the idea of remaining in Beijing or Shanghai. “I could very easily have switched over to China without a problem. Get some yellow paint and I’d be done.” To the young Tannehill, what he was seeing looked like “a perfect society. There was nothing out of
order.” The people “behaved very properly, like seventeenth century puritans . . . Plymouth Rock people.”

  Even the Sports Illustrated reporter, Dick Miles, was asked to play—a rematch against a man he’d beaten on his way to the semifinals in Dortmund twelve years before. To the stubborn Miles, throwing a game meant you were the better player. But what to do when both players were trying to lose? The game, which had started off as a fast-paced match bringing huge cheers from the crowd, turned into a farce near the end. Both were shanking shots out or into the net. Miles said to the interpreter, “Look, this is silly. Let’s call it a draw.” The man’s face collapsed. Even the combative Miles finally got the message and accepted his hollow victory with a bow.

  The next day, as they toured Shanghai, Miles made a play for freedom. He had to get back to the States to do his voice-over for ABC’s Wide World of Sports. All he needed was his passport from Steenhoven.

  “Do you think I’m a fucking idiot?” said Steenhoven, seething. “You’re going to go back and tell the story before all the rest of them do.”

  “Then I’m going to have you arrested,” said Miles.

  Steenhoven finally silenced him by threatening to have his Chinese friends keep Miles behind a day or two extra.

  At their last stop, a commune outside Shanghai, Boggan’s worries for Cowan increased. According to Cowan, he’d drunk one too many cups of ginseng tea. Boggan presumed that he’d lied and was now traipsing through the Chinese commune high on pot. He was being guided around in the arms of the Chinese, who also seemed to have noticed his strange behavior.

  “I was getting into the chickens,” said Cowan as they walked through the commune. “They were yellow and really fascinating. You don’t see them at zoos. And they were right up close to me.” Boggan started to laugh at him, but Cowan was “quite serious.” He finally confessed to Tannehill that he’d smuggled drugs into the People’s Republic of China. Right now he wanted to talk about the chickens. They weren’t in cages. They just walked around. How many eggs were there?