History of U.S. Table Tennis Vol V - Part I
PING-PONG ODDITY
By Tim Boggan (Copyright 1999)

Chapters Menu ------------------------------- Chapter I Chapter II Chapter III Chapter IV Chapter V Chapter VI Chapter VII Chapter VIII Chapter IX Chapter X Chapter XI Chapter XII Chapter XIII Chapter XIV Chapter XV   Also: Additional Reading ------------------------------- History of U.S. Table Tennis Vol I History of U.S. Table Tennis Vol II History of U.S. Table Tennis Vol III History of U.S. Table Tennis Vol IV History of U.S. Table Tennis Vol V - Part I History of U.S. Table Tennis Vol V - Part II History of U.S. Table Tennis Vol VI History of U.S. Table Tennis Vol VII World Championships: 1971--2001

THIS BOOK IS FOR MY WIFE, SALLY

"Our practice proves that what is perceived cannot at once be comprehended and that only what is comprehended can be more deeply perceived....Whoever wants to know a thing has no way of doing so except by coming into contact with it, that is, by living (practising) in its environment....Knowledge is a matter of science, and no dishonesty or conceit whatsoever is permissable."

--Mao Tse-tung ("On Practice")

"‘The great art of riding, as I was saying, is--to keep your balance properly. Like this, you know--’

He let go the bridle, and stretched out both his arms to show Alice what he meant, and this time he fell flat on his back, right under the horse’s feet.

‘Plenty of practice!’ he went on repeating, all the time that Alice was getting him on his feet again. ‘Plenty of practice!’"

--Lewis Carroll (Through the Looking-Glass)

FOREWORD

I never thought that I would be happy to see the words "Ping Pong," and in a newspaper of all places--in fact, in many newspapers. These words are hated by all who struggled hard in the early days to persuade a general public, derisive because of the ping pong table in the basement, that table tennis is a first class sport, involving art and great physical stamina.

Yet in May, 1972 newspapers all over the World carried banner headlines--"Ping Pong Diplomacy"--and I was glad. It was scarcely to be expected that journalists anywhere would not leap to use an onomatopoeia which not only gave them a neat lead, but, by the very fact of their Chinese appearance, were a "must" in introducing a story which rocked the world!

The fact that British and Canadian teams were invited to tour China after the Nagoya World Championships was news enough, for all physical contact with the Chinese had terminated in 1965, and little if anything was known of their activities throughout the Cultural Revolution.

But when the Americans were invited, that really got the wires buzzing, and the implications were tremendous. Perhaps "tremendous" isn’t an exciting enough word to use to describe the impact in the United States. Probably there, for longer than anywhere, our game had suffered the indignity imposed by the name by which it was known. And the fact that such a game had been the means of establishing a detente between World Powers politically so far apart was almost unbelievable!

Little wonder then that, as President of the International Table Tennis Federation, I was so proud that our game had been used as a vehicle of approach that I instantly forgave all those who used those hated words.

Because I was part of this extraordinary happening, it might be interesting to record the sequence of events.

We in the I.T.T.F. had maintained a formal correspondence with the Table Tennis Section of the People’s Republic of China throughout the period of the Cultural Revolution, but information as to actual playing activities only came to us by way of rumour via Taiwan and Hong Kong.

Towards the end of 1970 and in the early months of 1971, it became apparent that events were moving towards the re-appearance of the Chinese in the World Championships in Nagoya, Japan, in April.

Shortly before my planned departure for Nagoya, I was asked by the Chinese Charge d’Affairs in London if I would be prepared to go to Peking en route for Japan.

I readily agreed, as there were many items of importance in which I knew they would be deeply interested, and in any case I wished to renew acquaintance with the Association which had departed the scene in 1965 as the strongest in the world.

So I went via Hong Kong on a visit I had made before in 1959 and 1961, but under very different circumstances.

I spent two or three days with the Chinese in deep discussions on the implications of various political attitudes, a subject which looms large in any International Organization, but which I do not propose to discuss here.

My stay culminated in a conference with Prime Minister Chou En-lai, who reinforced arguments advanced by the Table Tennis officials. During the discussion Chou En-lai expressed great pleasure at China’s re-entry into World Table Tennis, and talked of further steps they could take to re-establish themselves quickly.

I reminded him of the Peking Invitation Tournament they used to hold each August, and suggested its revival. I pointed out that all the strongest countries would be present in Nagoya, and that it would be a good opportunity to invite them to China after the World Championships.

May I record here and now that no promise was given, and indeed no recommendation on my part, as to which countries should be invited.

The subsequent invitations extended to England and Canada were therefore no surprise to me, but that the United States, the unlikeliest guest of all, was invited was of course a great shock.

I have been, all through the visit and its aftermath, critical of any person claiming to have been the architect of any "breakthrough." I am convinced that the Chinese did exactly what the Chinese had planned to do. That the breakthrough occurred in our game is accounted for by the fact that the International Table Tennis Federation is the only truly international sports organization to which the Chinese belong. Table Tennis is second only to basketball as a Chinese National sport, and the Chinese are amongst the best players in the world. What more natural than their use of our game as a vehicle upon which to ride out of the obscurity of the Cultural Revolution?

All who go to China will have a fascinating experience. Hospitality is overwhelming, friendship the religion of every moment of every day. Let us accept the fact that our organization was used as a medium for the expression of Chinese determination to demonstrate its friendly intentions in a world upon which it had turned its back for six years.

The euphoria which attended every Chinese visit to fifty countries brought fantastic publicity to our game. We must be deeply grateful for that, but it would be as well to recognize, and record, that the initiative really came from the Chinese.

H. Roy Evans

President, International Table Tennis Federation

CHAPTER I

The first time I saw the red Chinese I wasn’t thinking of them as The People’s Republic of China. In fact, for one brief moment or two, I wasn’t thinking of them as people.

It was an afternoon in late March of 1971, and I was playing table tennis in the Aichi Prefectural Gymnasium in Nagoya, Japan--practicing hard with one of the U.S. Team members the day before the start of the week-and-a-half-long World Championship matches.

Because every one of the 54 entered teams (the Swedes, I remember, had just come in and were warming up) had been allotted two hours of private practice time away from the training areas a short bus ride off, all competitors would be able to get at least some familiarity with the actual playing conditions in the gym before the start of the tournament.

The uninitiate likely has no way of knowing what this means to a professional, but the lighting, the floor, the table, the bounce of the ball and the sense of space in which to smash or retrieve are all vitally interconnected--instinctively, even irrationally, magnified for him, often a lesser man facing a champion, like, maybe, in the eye of a fly, the space-time continuum of the hand of the swatter opposite.

In the beginning, there were only a few scattered teams scheduled to share the 16 enclosed-off courts in the Aichi Stadium. And, at first, it was strange playing there--for, all around, echoing the sound of ping-pong balls, was the emptiness of the circle of stands above.

Or so I thought until, once, on retrieving a ball, I chanced to look up and see that, unknown to me, or, I suppose, practically anyone, they had entered silently, some 30 or 40 strong, in uniform maroon jump suits or official grey button-down tunics, had formed a block of seats in the empty air, and, all together now, were intently watching, as from a hovering space ship, a particular player in a court adjacent to me below.

Of course I was startled--the Chinese had so caught me by surprise. And yet I wasn’t in any way embarrassed, for they didn’t seem to be observing me. Rather just the opposite, it was I who had the advantage and could stare unashamedly at them.

Where had they come from?

Six years ago, before the Cultural Revolution, they were the greatest players in the world. Since then (Chuang Tse-tung, Li Fu-jung--was it true they’d been cut down like irreplaceable statues in the purge of the Red Guards?) they had dropped out of sight--only now, miraculously, to suddenly reappear.

And who were they watching with such laser beam concentration?

A Swede. But not whom you’d expect, not Alser or Johansson--the Doubles Champions of the world. No, their attention focused on an unspectacular-looking 18-year-old named Stellan Bengtsson, seeded 15th in the Men’s Singles.

I didn’t know it then, but 10 days later, even if the Chinese were not in the least going to be astonished, I was. Stellan Bengtsson would be the new Men’s Singles Champion of the world, and I and the rest of the U.S. Team and its official party would be going to a different planet--Mainland China--spirited off in the name of some new-found "friendship" by these very same Chinese, the mysterious, all-knowing strangers of the moment.

How could I, could any American of my time and place, be on that night plane to Peking?....

"A giant firefly:

that way, this way, that way, this--

and it passes by."

Now, looking back on this translation of Issa’s firefly haiku, it’s anything but a digression, I hope, to comment that more of my life has passed me by. True, over the years, much of it seems to have been lost in the blackness. But it’s enough, is it, that even though I didn’t know what was going to happen next, was indecisive, lacked direction, I more than occasionally lit up, had energy, was seen for moments here and there--an identifiable moving object, an insect caught breathing in, breathing out, the air of this spaceship Earth?

In showing a little spark of life here, in speaking of that unforeseen flight two years ago through the darkness to Peking...and, later, down to Shanghai and over to Canton...I’m immediately reminded of the back and forth, zig-zag line of thought that I took in originally trying to find my own dark way to Nagoya.

It was really this three-line Japanese poem about the brevity of life--with its accompanying idea that one ought to at least try, if only in the perspective of the moment, to move in some direction--that, more than anything else, even the prompting of two close friends, made all the difference to me.

For the U.S. Team (unlike other, comparable teams abroad, it had never been government subsidized) just wasn’t prepared to have me (or, for that matter, anyone) free of charge--which was the only way I, an Assistant Professor of English at Long Island University in Brooklyn, could afford to go.

Being a second-tier player (U.S. #15), I was not one of the five men picked on the basis of his tournament record for the Team by the USTTA’s Selection Committee. However, I had some claim to join the group. I was a Vice-President of the Association, an appointed Delegate to the International Table Tennis Federation’s (ITTF’s) U.N.-like Congress that would be meeting at Nagoya, and, most importantly, the Editor of the national table tennis magazine, Topics, which for nine months I’d been transforming into a successful, even world-wide publication (not in the sense that it was being bought of course--nobody would buy it--but that it was being read).

I felt that by economizing two issues of the magazine into one, I could save enough money out of my budget to cover my transportation expenses to Japan, after which I would come back and give the membership--long isolated from international competition, and hence ignorant of what the sport was really all about--by far the most detailed report they’d ever had on any tournament abroad.

Two things, though, were stopping me. The first was the fact that none of the Team players (not to say officials) were being funded by the USTTA. And so it really wasn’t fair to fund me, was it? For certainly any one player was more important than any one official, wasn’t he?

Well, if I had to answer my own nagging question, no doubt he was, but, in the end, when I’d hesitated so long it was almost too late, I convinced myself that, though no Topics Editor had ever had his way paid to the World’s in the 40-year history of the magazine, no Topics Editor had ever done the work I’d done or could do in the future, and that just because others weren’t getting USTTA help and weren’t going to ask for it was no reason I shouldn’t.

Once I’d decided that, the second obstacle, the one I feared, had to be overcome. I would have to call and convince, practically beg for the help of, the sure-to-be-surprised eight other members of the Executive Committee--some of whom I personally disliked, and most of whom, I was afraid, would naturally be jealous of me.

There was also the not so minor problem of getting my University Department Head’s approval and as many substitute teachers for my classes as I could.

"...that way, this way, that way, this...." Through all the hassles my unconscious continued to see the comet tail of that jagged line of long dead poet’s life--it kept passing me by, signaling the way in darkness.

Eventually things got straightened out at school--I was able to get at least half my classes covered. And for the rest, well, I knew the students would be sympathetic--they understood an opportunity. Meanwhile at home, amid the day by day indecision, Sally, my wife, continued to give me the lipstick kiss of encouragement.

After a series of phone calls--in which in responding to International Chairman J. Rufford Harrison’s view that the USTTA ought not to give me the money, I strongly intimated I would resign as Editor of the magazine if not given the go-ahead--I finally saw the Executive Committee bring the matter to a vote. The results were: 3 for (including my own vote), 3 against, and 2 abstentions. The tie had to be broken by President Graham B. Steenhoven, the man who was to lead our Team through the U.S.-China exchange visits. He voted for me--as he’d assured me he would all along--and, inside, I rocketed away, lit up the sky.

I, who’d never veered ouside North America, had for a moment suddenly taken hold of some strange controls and clumsily changed, at least a little, the course of my life. And because it happened to be the first time I’d ever tried to hustle money, I felt very much the capitalist and, at 40, more alive, and not quite the innocent adrift I almost certainly knew I was.

For the other Team officials, it was relatively easy--at least six months earlier they’d made up their minds to go.

White-haired, bespectacled President Steenhoven of Detroit--who’d been active in U.S. table tennis for most of the 40 or more years he’d been with Chrysler (though I could never picture him in playing clothes, always in Management, with a business suit and lapel pin)--was the North American Vice-President of the ITTF.

Rufford Harrison, from Wilmington, Delaware, was a 40-year-old DuPont chemist (he’d come to them in 1953 to work on adhesive resins). A Ph.D. from London University with something of a pedant’s insistence on the rules of communication, the niceties of language, he was also, like Steenhoven, on the free hospitality list of the ITTF Council. Now Chairman of the Equipment Committee, he’d been corresponding abroad and going to the biennial World Championships for many years.

George Buben was a metal pattern worker in his 40’s, who, along with Steenhoven, had been very active in Detroit table tennis, especially in organizing and running the biggest of our (regretfully, always unpublicized) U.S. tournaments. He was taking his wife Madeline to Nagoya, and since they’d saved up for the trip it was understood that he had few if any USTTA duties and that it would simply be an enjoyable vacation for the two of them. True, he was given the token position of Second Delegate, but this, aside from allowing him to get down on the playing floor close to the matches, meant little, for the World Championship Organizing Committee was offering room and board to only one delegate, me.

It was, I thought, much to (George and) Madeline’s credit (Madeline had been appointed to the E.C. post of Corresponding Secretary by her Detroit neighbor Steenhoven) that she registered her ("that way, this way...") abstention on whether I should be given the money to go to Nagoya or not. In my absence, George would have been made First Delegate and been given hospitality for the duration of the tournament.

Or, come to think of it, was George’s hospitality as Delegate (and even E.C. member Madeline’s) being paid for by the USTTA anyway? It’s little things like that, so important to the players, like what was being done with their membership money, that would often not register with me.

As I think back on this little group of officials, I can’t help but speculate on how alike or how different we were. Buben. Unassertive, agreeable, like me a long-time Mid-westerner (I’m from Ohio), now a Delegate going to his first World’s to sit passively, unknown, while wily walruses in Congress met. Harrison. Identified by his Royal Canadian physical fitness exercises, his Air Force brush-cropped hair, his carefully trimmed beard, and his glasses, through which he looked, like me, so precisely (not to say coldly) at the written word. And Steenhoven. On the one hand, he served to remind me that (despite the duties my Topics magazine demanded of me and the essential "vote right" function I had as one of several unimaginative USTTA Vice-Presidents) I was still much more a player than an official. And on the other; he allowed me to understand that, in the table tennis hierarchy to which I apparently aspired, the less the officials were to play, the more something other than a table would separate them from the competitors they were supposedly spokesmen for.

So, o.k., enough about the officials, now a little about the players.

Two of the four women selected for the Team, Irene Ogus and Alice Green, could not, or would not, go to Nagoya.

Irene, an English girl, living in California, who was a finalist in the 1970 U.S. Open, and who’d previously played in international competition for England, expressed her disappointment in an article in Topics. "All that effort," she wrote, "aborted by the parsimony of the USTTA. Despite warnings, I constantly remained optimistic that they would open their purse strings in the end. It’s too bad, just too bad. I’m not sure what the next step is from here...."

As the story goes, the USTTA had gone a long way towards depleting its International Team Fund at the ‘69 World’s in Munich. And now, though there might be enough in their thin little purse for Irene, there would not be anything like that amount for all the others on the Team. So how could the officials show any favoritism? Each of the players would get $96 expense money in Japan. As for Irene, she would just have to get a sponsor.

That is, if she’d try. Did she? Or, overcome with disgust at the inability of the Association to raise funds for its long-time orphaned children, did she feel it was just not her job to (what?) prostitute herself so? Was there no one, now that she’d left England for America, who still valued the integrity of an amateur, a sportswoman? Must she become a hustler walking the streets?

Irene’s next step was to quit the game.

The other girl, Alice Green, a veteran of those ‘69 World Championships and currently a student at Barnard College in Manhattan, was later to convey the impression--in at least one reporter’s words--"that there have to be more important things than getting a celluloid ball over a net, even if that net is in Japan....Alice could go to Nagoya if she wanted, but the price she would have had to pay would have been the loss of class time and possible postponement of some mid-term examinations."

Coming in to take these two girls’ places were alternates 17-year-old Olga Soltesz, from Orlando, Florida, and 15-year-old Judy Bochenski, from Eugene, Oregon. They, of course, were virgins to the kind of world competition that they little understood awaited them.

According to an article in the close-knit, community-minded magazine Orlando Land, funds for Olga’s trip to Japan were raised by her classmates at William R. Boone High School.

"Each home room had a special delegate," John Pitts, the principal, told reporter Elaine Schooping. "I met with them and they eagerly accepted the assignment. They were willing to underwrite Olga’s expenses before another organization volunteered. They said, ‘We can do it.’

They collected the money in jars which they placed in the cafeteria and other spots around the school. They took up a collection each morning during home room period.

We used a gimmick....We’d make an announcement in the morning, saying, ‘We’ve got enough money now to put Olga over Nevada....Now she’s over L.A....Now we’ve got her half-way back from Japan.’ It took them only four days to raise nearly $800."

Judy Bochenski’s family, in jarring contrast, though they were helped with $250 by local table tennis clubs, had to pay $850 to send her on her mini-skirted way to Japan. "When she gets back," her father Lou said, as if in compensation, "she’ll have changed."

The other two spots on the Women’s Team went to the finalists of the 1971 U.S. Open--runner-up Wendy Hicks, of Santa Barbara, California, who, because she kept smiling often, even in defeat, I’d always thought of as Wendy Darling (though the next year, ‘72, she was to get tough enough to come back and win the Open), and the mighty-mite who beat her in a five-game, 25-23-in-the 5th thriller, Connie Sweeris, of Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Each of these girls was helped by an outside sponsor--so that Connie’s biggest worry was leaving two-year-old daughter Michelle at home, along with husband Dell, the unused First Alternate on the Men’s Team ("Mr. Connie Sweeris," he laughingly called himself); while all Wendy had to occasionally think about was keeping her scheduled meeting with a friend in Hawaii on her return from Japan.

Naturally each improvident member of the Men’s Team, too, had in the best interests of the game, to think in dollars--that is, if the U.S., once 25-35 years ago, a great power in world table tennis, was going to show up for battle with at least the residue of some kind of melting-pot Team in hand.

Dal-joon Lee was a 30-year-old Seoul Korean who in a few months would become a U.S. citizen. The National Champion ever since he’d arrived in this country, he was kept busy by hustling back and forth between exhibitions and weekend money-making tournaments (more money, of course, in selling equipment than in prizes). He managed a table tennis and billiards emporium somewhere in the neon-lit smog of Cleveland, Ohio.

A former Champion of the Dominican Republic, Errol Resek, 29, had been a U.S. citizen as of Dec., 1970. He was an affable if not a particular passionate researcher in "Adjustment and Control" at a branch of the Chemical Bank in Manhattan. He would be accompanied, as he was always accompanied, by his great, outgoing, open-armed, come-to-me-and-I’ll-gather-you-in, you-and-whatever-gossipy-news-you’ve-got-to-give-me wife, Jairie.

Independent-minded George Brathwaite held a dual citizenship--could claim both his native Guyana and, only two weeks before he was to leave for Nagoya, his second country, the United States. He worked in the Documents Section at the U.N., which couldn’t have been more appropriate, considering the image, the portfolio, of International Sportsman he so assiduously, civilly carried with him. He was a modish, smiling, but very tough, very-determined-to-have-his-own-way Minister of State.

A disappointed runner-up to Dal-Joon Lee in the 1970 U.S. Open, John Tannehill, was a 19-year-old sometime sociology student at the University of Cincinnati. Generally a rather quiet, self-proccupied person, he preferred puzzling moral abstractions and only a few well-defined particulars--like wearing Farmer Brown overalls in defiance of almost everything complex he thought Steenhoven and Harrison in their corporate cleanliness stood for.

Glenn Cowan, also 19, a former two-time U.S. Junior Champion, was another sometime (hadn’t really got a major) college student, often more out of Santa Monica than in. He might best be characterized, perhaps caricatured, as a long-haired hippie opportunist, willing to be a respectable representative of the with-it drug scene so long as it involved the flair of big business. Otherwise, he was Byronic.

Captaining this individual Team of nine players, trying to be proud of them, when most of them, without any sense of real kinship or obligation to the Association, were not much proud of themselves as a Team, was Jack Howard, a flexible, brooding, Seattle-based and hating it IBM systems engineer, who, as a top U.S. player in his own right, was destined to be a finalist in the 1972 U.S. Open.

There was also an outsider, who though not a member of the official party, was quite well known to our group. This was Dick Miles, a very good friend of mine, who for months had been urging me to come to Nagoya. He was the table tennis colorman for ABC’s Wide World of Sports, a writer for Sports Illustrated (he would be covering the World Championships for them)--and, as 10-time U.S. Champion and a semifinalist in the 1959 World’s at Dortmund, Germany, was generally regarded, even by those on the trip who disliked him, as the greatest player the United States had ever produced.

And, oh, I almost forgot, still another outsider--way out--was Leah "Miss Ping" Neuberger, nine-time U.S. Women’s Champion and a former World’s Mixed Doubles holder. By traveling to Nagoya with the Canadian Team via the Commonwealth Games at Singapore, and with them afterwards to Peking, she so successfully disguised herself, perhaps even to the Chinese, that her later claim to being the first American to enter China could never be taken seriously.

Naturally, amid this galaxy of stars, bound as we were for the real world of international, not to say intergalactic, table tennis (lost to us somewhere in the light-space of the years), I had, as the invisible rocket launched, to flash the news to the New York Times, to the Sports Editor no less, a Mr. Jim Roach. (Could that be right? I was scared to pronounce his name.)

"The U.S. PING-PONG team!" he said, catching the onomatapoeia precisely, mockingly."

Thank you, but, no, my services would not be necessary. All that anyone of the Times needed to know he would be able to get over the wires.

But, as you can imagine, I had already come too far to be discouraged by what was merely the expected. As we took off, I couldn’t help myself--my seat was pulled forward, I looked up and out in anticipation. The cry of the USTTA Executive Committeeman, "What’s the sense in sending a Team when we can’t finish in the top 20?" was left far behind, lost forever in our wake....