Follow the bouncing ball

Ping-pong has played a key role in establishing US-China relations. It continues to provide a hopeful back-and-forth between the two peoples, as CHRIS DAVIS reports from New York.

Ping-pong — aka table tennis — is arguably the world's most widespread sport. The International Table Tennis Federation recently announced that it has more countries affiliated with it than any other Olympic sport.

And China is the table tennis capital of the world. Of the top 10-ranked players in the world at any given moment, six to seven are Chinese — and there would be more if more were allowed to compete in international tournaments.

"China's B Team and C Team and D Team would beat anyone else's A Team," according to Will Shortz, owner of the Westchester Table Tennis Center in Pleasantville, New York, about a 50-minute train ride north of Manhattan.

How did a novelty pastime that started as a parlor game in Victorian England evolve into such a global and competitive sport? And how did China rise to dominate the whole field?

Maybe Shortz could offer some clues. "In some ways," he said during a tournament at his center last weekend, "it's similar to crossword puzzles — my other field."

Shortz referring to crossword puzzles as "my other field" is kind of like having a conversation with Einstein about his violin playing and having him say, "It's kind of like physics — my other field."

Ping-pong fanatic

Editor of The New York Times crossword puzzle — the undisputed gold standard of the game — Shortz has also been a table tennis fanatic since he was a kid growing up on a rural Indiana horse farm with a table in the basement. He also constructed his first crossword puzzle when he was still a kid. So what's the similarity?

"People think they're the best because they win their game with their family or friends and they think they're champions," he said. "And then they come to a tournament, and they find they're nowhere near champions. They have no idea what champions look like."

New York Times crossword puzzles — Shortz turns in a week's worth in a single batch — start out easy on Monday and grow incrementally more difficult each day. A top crossword solver, he said, can do a Monday puzzle in a minute and a half and the much larger Sunday puzzle in six to eight minutes.

"It's unfathomable to most people, but that's what they can do," he said.

Table tennis is also fast-paced and strenuous. "When I'm playing (and he plays every day), I will be drenched in sweat in 15 to 20 minutes. It's an all-over body workout," he said. "It's also a brain game. Part of what I like about the game is that you are using your brain the whole time —and table tennis attracts intelligent people."

Practice your moves until they're instinct. Analyze and exploit your opponent's weaknesses, cover up your own and play to your strengths — at a lightning pace. Little wonder it's been called "chess on speed."

And watching some top level players go at it can also inspire unfathomable wonder. One such champ is Zhang Kai, 19, who was at the tournament last weekend (favored to win) and may also offer a clue as to how the sport has evolved into what it is today.

Zhang was born in Beijing in 1998. The son of a policeman and a pharmaceutical worker, Zhang was in kindergarten at the age of 6 when a ping-pong scout came to the school "to choose potential table tennis stars," he said in between preliminary matches at the tournament.

One out of 30

"It was pretty crazy. He touched our shoulders and our body to see who had the better potential, better physical condition," Zhang said. "He chose me as the only one among the 30 kids in the class."

Zhang started going to the local ping-pong club to train almost every day after school. "After a year and a half, I started to become a decent player and become enthusiastic about table tennis," he said. He even went to practice with a fever one day.

In 2004, Kai was chosen for a better club and trained there for three years, from first to third grade.

"The system was semi-professional because we still went to school in the morning and trained in the afternoon and night," he said.

The hard work paid off. In 2007 Kai was selected for the more competitive Beijing City Team. It meant more time training, less time in school.

The following year he was elected to the Beijing pre-professional team, one of the best teams in China and incubator of many world champions.

"I was 11 and just finished fourth grade," he said. "I jumped directly to seventh grade to keep following the intense training schedule — almost every morning, afternoon and night."