Follow the bouncing ball

From left: Westchester Table Tennis Center (WTTC) owner and New York Times crossword puzzle editor Will Shortz, WTTC May Open winner ZhangKai, runner-up Sharon Alguetti and WTTC manager Robert Roberts, after the championship match on Sunday. PROVIDED TO CHINA DAILY

Decision time

Somewhere along the line, the young champ saw a crossroads taking shape before him. If he wasn't one of the top three or four players in China, then he would not be competing and most likely he would be relegated to being a coach — a coach without a proper education.

Zhang had always had the dream to come to the US. In 2011, he embarked on a journey to the US with his parents, who were taking his older cousin on a tour to look at colleges. It was a trip that would change his life.

Meanwhile, back in the US, Shortz had been busy making one of his own dreams come true. Having laid off table tennis for 15 years, he had taken it up again in 2001, playing at clubs and community centers.

He made friends with Robert Roberts, a coach from Barbados — five-time champion of the Caribbean who had once been ranked 128 worldwide — and they decided to make it their goal to create the best table tennis facility in the US.

"We both love the game so we established a club the way we would want it," Shortz said.

They found 14,000 square feet of high-ceilinged warehouse space in Shortz's hometown of Pleasantville. He ordered 19 top-of-the-line Double Happiness/Double Fish tables from China.

"When I played in China, these are the tables that you see there," he said. (The center's website lists the 250 table tennis clubs Shortz has played at around the world).

Perfect timing

They installed plenty of overhead lighting and gymnasium flooring with good bounce covered with non-slip athletic flooring.

They opened in 2011 and hosted their first tournament just in time for a 13-year-old prodigy from China — who was traveling with his parents and cousin — to drop by and enter.

Shortz and Zhang played and became friends. Six months later, Shortz traveled to China for a sudoku championship (Shortz is the only living human being with a bachelor's degree in enigmatology — or the study of puzzles — which he earned at Indiana University-Bloomington's design-your-own degree program). Zhang and his father squired Shortz around to Beijing's best ping-pong spots.

Zhang was back to living fulltime at a table tennis academy, training daily into the night. Still, as good as he was, he wasn't good enough to play on the China team.

Making a change

Zhang wanted to make a change. He would keep playing ping-pong but he also wanted to get an education. Going to the US would maximize his opportunity to compete in international arenas like the Olympics.

In 2012, Shortz came up with at plan: Find a family in Pleasantville — within walking distance of the table tennis center — to take Zhang in. Shortz tried everything he could think of — ads, bulletin boards, articles placed in the local papers.

In the end, he re-did his third floor for a teenager and Zhang moved in four years ago, enrolling in Pleasantville High School. And Shortz became his official guardian. Zhang struggled with and conquered English and is set to graduate and go to SUNY-Binghamton in the fall. He has also been ranked the No. 1 table tennis player in the US.

At high school, Zhang was known as personable, quite social and an excellent math student. The school also held lunchtime ping-pong tournaments for students. Kai would play multiple students using only his cell phone — and always winning, of course.

‘Courageous life'

Last year, the Westchester-Hudson Valley chapter of the Organization of Chinese in America (OCA), awarded Zhang Kai its Jeannette Wang Award, a $1,000 stipend given annually to a high school senior of Asian or Asian-American descent "who has a courageous life story to tell and who will be in the first generation of his family to attend a four-year college anywhere in the world".

"Kai's personal life story — his unusual climb to the top of professional sports in not one but two countries and his venturing on his own to the US to live, work and study to accomplish this at a young age — and his success at doing so — is truly unique," said OCA's Linda Sledge, who also reported that when Kai received his award at the chapter's annual gala, "he got a spontaneous ovation by the crowd and was treated like a rock star, especially by the other admiring youth awardees."

Not surprisingly, Zhang also won the tournament at Shortz's center last weekend, taking home the prize money of $1,500.

Judging from the video, which is viewable on the center's website westchestertabletennis.com, Zhang's strategy, in the simplest of terms, was to draw his opponent in on the serve then smash back the return, rocketing it past him before he could get back in position. It worked.

His dream now: to play for the US Olympics team in 2020.