Not all the Chinese left at once. Consultant for Press Affairs Marcia Burick chaperoned a handful of Xinhua journalists who lingered on to file reports. She escorted them to a Cincinnati Reds baseball game, where they were disappointed to find out that Cincinnati wasn’t the birthplace of American Communism. She did her best to explain baseball terminology. “Do you know what a ‘sacrifice’ is?” “Yes,” said one newsman, “when you throw yourself under a tank.” Burick leaned in to explain, “This is a little less dramatic.”
CHAPTER 50 | The Hippie Opportunist
The year before, as the team was about to touch down in Los Angeles, Cowan casually broke the news to Steenhoven that he planned to be first off the plane to meet his mother, hoping to get a jump on the group and reach the press ahead of the team. Steenhoven explained he could arrange for Cowan to be the last off the plane. If he wanted to meet his mother, Steenhoven would arrange a small room where he could do so quietly.
Steenhoven had guessed correctly that Cowan had tried to arrange his own press conference. It made sense: Los Angeles boy, Los Angeles press. Minutes later, Steenhoven was unable to prevent Cowan from dominating the USTTA press conference, but at least Cowan was still representing the team. Who else would have dipped his yellow hat and said, “I think I could mediate between Zhou En-lai and Nixon quite easily.”
At the airport, Cowan had shaken the hand of an undersecretary of state sent out west by Kissinger because the White House didn’t want Beijing to think that the US team was “being cold-shouldered by their own Government.” In China the Chinese players knew that they represented the state, but what was the role of an American player once they had returned? Now that the game had achieved its goal and American politicians were stepping in to take over, what was going to happen to a frontline diplomat like Glenn Cowan?
The young Californian emerged from the terminal into the sort of whirlwind of media attention reserved for the celluloid denizens of his hometown of Hollywood. Cowan was whisked into and out of talk shows, radio interviews, even a guest spot with Johnny Carson. His agent, Bob Gusikoff, fielded a stream of calls from businesses. Maybe, said Cowan, “with this China thing” table tennis “will even turn into a money-maker.”
Cowan finally held his own press conference two days later, announcing his plans for “appearances on the lecture circuit, and the opening in several cities of Glenn Cowan Table Tennis Centers, which he hopes will become hangouts for the young.” Two publishers were offering advances for one or more books. Best of all, he’d been asked to shoot a pilot for a syndicated talk show called Reach Out.
Perhaps companies were hoping that the kid who had said he was willing to negotiate between governments would be able to reconcile generations. Maybe Glenn Cowan could bridge the fearful chasm between campuses teeming with antiwar protesters and the aging establishment. He seemed a perfect fit. He was confident, handsome, youthful, “a hippie opportunist.” Within weeks, he was standing under the lights being introduced by Dinah Shore on her popular NBC daytime TV show. Cowan’s bashful smile comes across as half “Aw shucks” and half “I could get used to this.”
Dinah Shore’s questions were earnest but still couldn’t step away from how Americans thought of Cowan’s game. Did eighteen thousand Chinese really come to watch a Ping-Pong match? Did they have to use binoculars to see the ball?
Cowan dealt with the questioning well. He showed Dinah Shore his exercise routine, standing back to back with her, linking their arms, and lifting her off the floor. “Boy,” said Cowan, laughing. “You really are heavy.” “You didn’t have to tell them,” she said glancing at the studio audience. “How’d you become a diplomat with a line like that?” She looked Cowan up and down, stared at his long hair and relaxed demeanor, and said, “We’re so proud of you. You kept your own identity.” She couldn’t help sounding like a concerned aunt wanting to drag Cowan to a barbershop.
As the show ended, Cowan held up his now famous “Let It Be” T-shirt to the audience. The applause was warm. The last shot was of Shore; she called Cowan’s efforts in Ping-Pong diplomacy “remarkable” and “beautiful,” then opened her mouth and concluded, “The whole world . . .” and the microphone went dead as the commercials took over. The whole world what? Should thank Glenn Cowan? The whole world had been saved by Glenn Cowan?
It was the pinnacle of his fame. The ride down would be rapid. In early May, BusinessWeek remained positive, noting that “US history is full of individuals who got rich quick by being in the right place at the right time. The latest could be Glenn Cowan, the luxuriantly maned 19 year old in the flamboyant threads who rode a Ping-Pong ball to Peking.”
The other players were enjoying the moment. They went on To Tell the Truth and The Phil Donahue Show, and a handful were flown to Paris to be on French television, including Tim Boggan, who was followed by a reporter who believed he might fly on to Hanoi for peace talks. The youngest player, Judy Bochenski, traveled to New York to be interviewed by Barbara Walters on The Today Show. Back in Oregon, she was the grand marshal of the 1971 Portland Rose Festival Parade. Resek and Brathwaite made a record called Ni Hao (Hello) featuring the two repeating the phrase again and again. Neither quit their day jobs.
Not everyone’s experiences were positive. Tannehill received “all kinds of hate mail” for his brief embrace of Chairman Mao. His fellow students at the University of Cincinnati took a knife to his bed and carved a big X. He’d be invited onto talk shows, only to be told to go ahead and move to China.
Cowan wrote his book, a lazy work full of photographs of Glenn Cowan, which sold poorly. The next disappointment was the TV show Reach Out. No network picked it up. He held on to his fame longer than the other players, but it kept slipping through his fingers as easily as a buttered ball. In July, the best that Gusikoff could drum up for Cowan was a side table at the Orange County Teen-Age Fair at Anaheim Stadium, where they played table tennis between the sets of fifty local bands. By September, Cowan was judging a fashion show of models on bicycles held in a parking lot on Wilshire Boulevard.
The rest of the team either were so young, like Bochenski, that they had the stable surroundings of high school to protect them, or else they returned to their old jobs at the United Nations or IBM. But Cowan was untethered to begin with. He thought what had happened in China was a firm foundation for a new life, one in which he had a starring role in front of thousands.
What came first: the disappointments or the loosening grip on reality? After the TV deal fell through, it became obvious that the market for table tennis equipment wasn’t strong enough for Cowan to earn any kind of salary as a spokesman. Nor would there be any Glenn Cowan Table Tennis Centers. His mother described his behavior as “a little erratic” during 1971, when he was caught on film swearing at a news commentator and throwing papers at the TV camera. By the end of the year, he had been “diagnosed, variously, as being bipolar and schizophrenic.” “When he was in one of his crazy states,” said his brother, “there were a lot of paranoid delusions that had to do with Russian spies planting stuff in his head.”
Ironically, the Chinese had most likely been spying on him in Nagoya, probably intensely, albeit for less than a week. His mother didn’t notice his paranoia until his return, but Cowan had told Boggan back in Nagoya that he had seen the Chinese watching him while he practiced. “He went into the hospital,” explained his mother, “and they gave him medication to keep him on an even keel.” The problem for Cowan was obeying the doctor’s orders. “Pot was his thing,” said his mother. “He took the drugs and didn’t take his medication.”
The real reason he abandoned the tour in 1972 was that “he had freaked out.” There was little doubt that what was happening to Cowan was tied to the China trip. His grip on reality began to slip. He could do a very good impression of normal and attended therapy paid for by his mother, but every spring the same thing would happen: Cowan would stop taking his medication and end up in a psychiatric institution in the San Fernando
Valley or Pasadena. “It was a very tough time,” explained his brother Keith. It took Cowan a long time to graduate, and because his mental health collapsed with the anniversary of the China trip every April, it was almost impossible for him to hold down a job. He lost his apartment and declared bankruptcy.
In the mid-1970s, Cowan made a new friend, Sandy Lechtick. They shared a passion for playing paddle tennis on Venice Beach, and Lechtick was impressed by Cowan’s level of concentration. He called him “the toughest guy I ever saw on court.” Lechtick ran a headhunting personnel agency and took a gamble on hiring Cowan. “He had the gift of the gab,” said Lechtick, and “with his powder blue eyes” and “total confidence,” he did well for a while.
But April always came, and Cowan would appear with “ketchup stains on his tie and mustard stains on his shirt,” and then wouldn’t appear at all. Lechtick knew that he’d stopped taking his medication once again.
Cowan was unable to keep a job. Eventually he lost his rented apartment and began living out of his car, driving up to Venice Beach to hustle on paddle tennis. He had borrowed money from friends and his mother, but no one could support Cowan year by year. “It was exhausting for the family,” explained his mother, “and there was nothing in the world you could do about it.” “Eventually,” agreed his brother, “you’ve got to give up because it just wears you down.”
Cowan became a substitute teacher. On occasion, he sold shoes at a discount store in Venice Beach. His one true attempt at a comeback in table tennis in his midthirties ended when his entry check for a local tournament bounced. That April, he wrote to a Beijing author, asking about an ivory carving of himself playing table tennis that he’d heard was for sale in Beijing’s markets.
Finally, Cowan’s car stopped working and he began to sleep on the streets. Every now and then, Lechtick would get a call. “I miss the fine dining,” Cowan would say. “Why don’t you come over to Venice Beach and bring me a pack of cigarettes?” They’d partner up on the doubles courts and win a few dollars. It wasn’t enough. Soon, Cowan didn’t even own a pair of sneakers. All he had left was a small backpack. Inside it was his last copy of his book on table tennis.
“People sanitize what happened to Glenn,” says Lechtick. “It was tragic.” One day he watched his friend sitting by the side of the court, picking crabs from his crotch; he asked Lechtick if he had any extra underwear he could borrow. His motto had become “MGM,” which stood for Mao, Glenn, and Mick. He convinced himself that he had written some of the Rolling Stones’ biggest hits and would soon be playing guitar for them onstage. It hadn’t been that long ago, back in 1972, when he’d tossed that famous yellow hat of his up at Elton John onstage at Carnegie Hall. John had finished his set with the hat on his head, but backstage, Cowan had had to explain who he was. “I’m the guy who went to China. Here, I’ll autograph it for you.” Maybe even then his fame had been stretched too far. Boggan remembered that Rolling Stone magazine had mocked Cowan as its groupie of the year.
Lechtick suspected the end was near when a friend called him to say that he’d found Cowan’s battered book by the side of the paddle courts one afternoon. It was almost inevitable that he would die in April. His heart stopped on April 6, 2004, on the eve of the thirty-third anniversary of the invitation to China. There were no obituaries in the Los Angeles Times or the New York Times. For his old rival Tannehill, it was obvious what had happened to Cowan. “After China, everything seemed to be useless.”
Cowan had stood before Zhou Enlai. He had played a vital role as liaison between two worlds that hadn’t yet been bridged. Lauded by Johnny Carson and Dinah Shore, he had appeared on the front cover of every newspaper in America. The Los Angeles Times wrote that Cowan and his teammates had done “what the Paris peace talks, striped pants and Homburg hats, and the State Department couldn’t do in decades—unthaw one-quarter of the world.” Or as John Tannehill explained, “How can you do better than world peace?”
When Zhuang Zedong, his mirror image on the Chinese team, heard about Cowan’s death, he found it impossible to believe that the nation had paid no attention to him. “When I die,” said Zhuang, “everyone in China will know.”
Cowan’s trajectory had been very American. He had been shot into the stratosphere, tested against the market without a safety net, and then cracked in two by a hard fall.
CHAPTER 51 | The Heights
Zhuang Zedong’s path was more incremental and yet in many ways much more terrifying than Glenn Cowan’s. In October 1976, Zhuang was incarcerated for the second time in his life. He was driven from his home in Beijing to “an anonymous building in rural China” and found himself behind bars with every reason to fear for his life. For a three-time world champion, the apparent instigator of Ping-Pong diplomacy, the head of the first Chinese Communist delegation ever to visit America, it was a stunning fall.
Two years after singing “Home on the Range” at a restaurant in Virginia, he was raised to the post of minister of sport and physical culture, a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party. An American journalist had watched him on tour in 1972, “murmuring niceties at teacup and cream-puff receptions and sight-seeing,” and quickly concluded that Zhuang had chosen the right side in the Cultural Revolution.
In 1974, Zhuang Zedong was guest of honor at a dinner given by George H. W. Bush, Gerald Ford’s China envoy at the US Liaison Office in Beijing. Zhuang treated Bush to a long harangue over dinner on how sports existed in China to give strength to “the million troops on the Northern border,” interrupted only when Zhuang paused to stub out one cigarette and light another. But Zhuang soon relaxed, and the future president and the Ping-Pong politician had a long discussion on international relations. “I like the man,” confessed Bush to his diary, and a few weeks later accompanied Zhuang to a Sino-American athletic meet, where “red flags fluttered from the top of the stadium and nationalistic slogans were discreetly covered with red swaths of cloth.” Zhuang was still pushing the Cultural Revolution slogan “Friendship First and Competition Second,” but the American college students flown over for the friendly meet had no such qualms. They took sixteen of the seventeen medals on offer. An American athlete saw a Chinese 10,000-meter runner “meditating by the side of the track. ‘You are thinking of your lap times?’ asked the American. ‘No. I am thinking of friendship.’ ”
Back in 1971, when the Ping-Pong team returned from the Nagoya World Championships, Zhuang and three other champions were summoned to the Great Hall of the People to greet touring players from Canada and Australia. After his ceremonial duties were over, Premier Zhou Enlai approached the small group of Chinese players. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s go and play some Ping-Pong.” The game stretched into the afternoon, despite the fact that it was May 1, International Workers’ Day. All four knew the premier would soon have to join Chairman Mao at the Gate of Heavenly Peace in Tiananmen Square to watch the workers of China parade before them. To their surprise, the Ping-Pong players were also called up into the reviewing stand along with Zhou Enlai. It was the place for generals, or the country’s greatest heroes. As Zhuang headed up the stairs in front of women’s champion Zheng Minzhi, she wondered why they’d been invited. Did their achievements in Nagoya really rank that highly?
Chairman Mao approached the Ping-Pong players. His outings were less and less frequent, and still, years after the first gatherings of Red Guards, his presence caused ripples of hysteria to shimmer across Tiananmen Square. Zheng Minzhi found herself applauding as he approached. Zhou Enlai leaned in toward the Chairman, and Zheng listened as the premier introduced her. Mao reached forward, smiled, and shook her hand, leaving her in shock. Zhuang Zedong stepped forward to greet the Chairman, no stranger to the leaders. As Zhuang talked to Mao, Zhou Enlai’s wife, Deng Yingchao, came up to Zheng and whispered, “You’ve contributed so much to Chinese Ping-Pong. The Ping-Pong ball is very important, you know. It can shake up the whole earth.”
It was less than two weeks after
the American team had left Beijing, and the Chinese players didn’t fully understand the effect of their outreach. After all, the Chinese newspapers had played down the event, even as coverage around the rest of the world intensified. Not until later in the year, after China was welcomed into the United Nations and Nixon’s visit to Beijing was confirmed, would Zheng finally understand what Deng Yingchao had meant.
The Nagoya triumph had sent a firm signal to China’s National Sports Commission that slowly echoed out through the root system of provincial teams: sports could be practiced again. The achievement was attributed to the strength of the Cultural Revolution rather than recognized for what it was—a deliberate rebuttal of all the limits on thought and action the Cultural Revolution had imposed on the Chinese people.
Yet there was something in the air in 1971 that had not been there in the early 1960s: distrust. Looking along the line of China’s greatest athletes, one young sportsman saw in their faces “omnipresent shadows. No one laughed cheerfully and openly. It was as if they were constantly watching out for something, something so vicious and fearful that it could devour them any time it wanted.” It was the experience of fear. The older athletes knew their lives were lived on a public tightrope. One misdeed, and an athlete could be dismissed to his or her hometown with no position and no career training to fall back on.
CHAPTER 52 | The Costs
In the wake of the thaw with America, the Chinese players couldn’t afford to relax. Rumors kept sliding back to Beijing. The table tennis team heard that one of the highest-ranked officials in the National Sports Commission was still in Shanxi, beginning each morning waist-deep in pig shit, filling and dragging carts of manure to the fields. If he could fall, then anyone could. Every sport had not only a political director but an army representative, and it took little to receive a dressing down. One athlete peeled the skin off his potatoes in the vast dining hall and was humiliated by the political director, who lectured him in front of hundreds for such “decadent bourgeois habits.”
Ping-Pong Diplomacy Page 27