Chapter 1: Nagoya, Japan, 1971: Introduction To World’s/U.S. Team Play
I’m compiling a series of articles (only slightly edited) I’ve written for our USATT magazine on the World Championships I’ve attended in the last 30 years. My first World Championship was in 1971--and interested readers should take a look at my Ping-Pong Oddity, also available on this site. The opening pages of that "Ping-Pong Diplomacy" book give a background of the U.S. players I speak of in this Chapter, and also explain how, at age 40, I came to Nagoya--and, in effect, somewhat changed my life.
Introduction To My First World’s: It Was All So New To Me
As our chartered JAL jet from Tokyo--U.S. Team and its dozen well-wishers--dropped down, down, down over the strange blue roofs of houses, we heard piped into us, as if from another world, that old familiar song. Incredibly, into the twilight of the Nagoya afternoon, wafted the strains of "Home Sweet Home." Where seldom is heard a discouraging word....
Then off and away, it would seem, from the Westernized conveniences of the plane and into the Orient-crowded terminal, the confusion of the baggage area encircling us, tying us up. Met there by a delegation of maroon-jacketed would-be interpreters devoted to our mysterious ways (Glenn Cowan’s game--perhaps that’s explainable. But, oh, the unknown of his hair--those D’Artagnan-like locks). Given the same polite recognition afforded any team--Nigeria, for instance (who, as it turned out, could beat the Hong Kong team that we couldn’t)--coming so far and at what expense to play in this, the one Championship of the United Nations of the world.
And now bussed importantly, past the unseen windows of how many little green-covered Japanese inns, to one of Nagoya’s finest hotels, the Nagoya Miyaka, and into the Rotary-like safety of WELCOME. 31ST WORLD TABLE TENNIS CHAMPIONSHIPS.
As for the room, small but accomodating. Pajamas, bedroom slippers, and a no-need-to-leave-a-call alarm clock provided. The New Testament. And the old--The Teaching of Buddha ("Endurance is the most difficult of all disciplines, but it is to the one that endures that the final victory is given"). Piped-in Glenn Miller music in the halls. The Japan Times under doors. Shoes left out, waiting to be picked up and rubbed into shine. A masseuse available for one’s own nightly rub-down, all business, 60 if (to use the only proposition possible) she’s a day.
And in and out, hungry now, down to the cushioned comforts of the Atlantis Grill (Grill?...The Japanese feeling for English leaves in even the Manichi Daily News something to be desired). This Grill offers a continental supper-club atmosphere. A pretty, long-gowned, golden-baubled anything-but-Geisha-like singer, spotlighted, smiles, smiles, always smiles, to render again and again those World War II love songs so many of us will never forget.
The bobbing, bowing head waiter ("Very sahrry, sir"), not to say jokingly those comprising the body under him, spoke little or no English (Sahrry, sir. Sahrry. Uh, very Sahrry, sir. Just one minna, please"). But the menu was bilingual. And if the Ugly American was careless and ordered with a causal, that is to say imperious, gesture some wine ("A bottle of dry white wine--not too expensive") and was charged at the end the price of a good steak, 3,600 yen ($10), well, he wouldn’t make that mistake again, now would he?
Settled in then at the Nagoya Miyaka we were, for better or worse, for the duration of the tournament. I as U.S. Delegate to the International Table Tennis Federation’s (ITTF’s) Biennial General Meeting (BGM), to be given free my room and the nightclothes I was to wear only within it and the booklet of meal tickets to be used tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow ("In this hotel only, please. Thank you very much.") with the same kind of regularity I would responsibly make a mortgage payment back home.
Daily busses ran on half hour schedules from the hotel to the Aichi Prefectural Gymnasium where the matches were to be played. If you were impatient, it was the cheapest of ten-minute taxi fares. (It seemed, as one fellow said to me, that you could ride from city to city in Japan in a cab.) The white-gloved drivers, however, were whimsical. Sometimes they’ll stop and then as you try to open a door (they control them all with a little lever up front), they’ll decide they don’t like the look of you and drive off. Other times they’ll let you in and off you’ll go pell-mell up the left-hand side of the street into what seems the most certain of crack-ups. But, then no, the worst that can happen to you with a driver, who of course neither speaks nor understands the slightest syllable of English, is that, like a character in a Kobo Abe novel, you will drive off with him and he will drive off with you, and, really, he will not know any more than you do about how to get wherever it is you’re going.
The gym that beginning morning of the Championships was an exciting place to be--especially, anyone would think, for George Brathwaite and Errol Resek, Olga Soltesz and Judy Bochenski, all attending their first World’s. What they and the others in our group saw, what they felt, maybe you could begin to guess. Here, though, with near certainty is what the arena itself looked like as our players, each in his or her own way, were going about the business of preparing themselves.
There were 16 squared-off courts, each barriered all around in company-advertising green, the four quarters of the courts separated by a gigantic plus sign of aisleways. Some of the tables had two electric scorers, ten feet or so high, black, box-like in shape, big as TV sets, studded on all sides with marble-like bright yellow lights that flashed out the pattern of a number. Similar little marble-like lights at the top flashed red, and by their lit-up position indicated who had won the first game, who the second, and so on. At the very top of one of these electric scorers was written, say, FR (for France) and PH (for the Philippines)--so even though you might be high-up in the tiered-around stands you wouldn’t have any difficulty seeing at a glance how a match was going.
At every one of the 16 tables, for every single match, there were, in addition to the players themselves, five other people in the court, all dressed in the uniform of immaculately white shoes, grey trousers, and matching maroon tie and insigniaed jacket.
The umpire, who called the score (and you’d have to look long and hard to find an umpire who, thinking for just a moment of something else, miscalled), sat in a high chair and was flanked by helpers who would call nets and edges. Opposite the umpire, on the other side of the players, were two scorers seated at a green-clothed table who were responsible both for turning the leafs of two green, calendar-like cardboard scoring cards (00-99) and for calling nets and edges.
Each table was an eight-legged Butterfly International DX of underneath interlocking design guaranteed to give the impression of sturdiness. (Though as the tournament progressed, one very good player told me that this table would be worn down around the edges and so wasn’t, in reality, any more durable than, say, a Detroiter.) The lighting, the unwaxed, scuffed-up floor--these gave no cause for complaint.
Right behind every court, on either side, was a row of half a dozen chairs. Each team was allowed to have a combination of seven players or officials this close to the actual playing area.
On the two long sides of the arena there were special seating arrangements. A row of scoring tables ran the length of one side and behind them there was just barely enough room for cameramen. On the other side, there were a few rows of INVITED GUESTS ONLY seats. The Japanese are very proud of their champions and here sitting under the oft-engraved World Championship cups displayed above could be seen such players of the past as Eguchi, Watanabe, Namba, Goto, Kurimoto (formerly Matsushita), Tanaka, Tomita, Kawaii, Kodami, even 1967 U.S. Champion Fukushima.
On one short side of the rectangular arena the tables extended to a curtained wall; on the other they ended in a special section for the press where boards were nailed together to form desks on which telephones and typewriters sat and waited to be heard.
High above ("Hey," says an American, "there’s Pepsi!"), billboard-like advertisements hung over the sometimes 5,000 tiered spectators watching the vari-colored play.
The tournament was just beginning, but as it progressed toward the end of its first stage, the Men’s and Women’s Team events, it became increasingly difficult for just anyone to get down into the playing area. Players and officials were given something resembling war-decoration medals, members of the press white arm bands.
Jairie Resek, Errol’s wife, quickly became my Table Tennis Topics assistant (I’d only started my long editorship the summer before). Or maybe she was mistaken for a nurse, as if our team might get sick at any time? Anyway, they let her in. Milla Boczar--alias Frau Bukiet, divorced from Bernie at the end of the last (1969) World’s in Munich--also quickly became a press woman, interested in looking at all these players from her private woman’s angle. And the beringed Miss Ping, Leah Neuberger (whose flower-colored outfits blooming from day to day struck you with flashbulb suddenness), certainly she could only be from the press--a glossy magazine maybe? At any event, she obviously knew lots of people, must have been covering this racket game for a long time.
And Doug Stewart from New Zealand--was it possible that the Japanese TTA would not pay his expenses here from the States? After all, he was covering the tournament for how many newspapers--14 in California alone. And Gus Kennedy who was with his wife Jean and little boy. Was six-year-old Roger there in the Press Section also writing for the Minneapolis paper? And others from the Magoo Club, Charlie Disney and Alan Goldstein, who showed up wearing track suits, and who were naturally assumed to be on the U.S. Team--they were kept busy signing autographs for any number of proud fathers and happy little boys.
And the unknown Mr. Richardson (Lorenzo--was that his first name?), mysteriously arrived from Phoenix--as if suddenly arisen from the ashes of old burnt sponge to speak again and again of plywood and Judas wood and Poros and so many millimeters of Mark IV. He merely showed his half-palmed passport, lettered side down, and, like magic, it became the requisite green ticket into any country’s competition.
And shooting from the stands above, Norma Green and her husband Mike who, with Daedalian ingenuity in the subterranean maze of tunnel shops under the streets of Nagoya found a place to develop his tracksuit-bagful of photos at "Hey, man, you can’t beat this!" $.50 a roll. And Manuel (from L.A.?), also mysterious, who appeared and disappeared after being detained for some reason unknown to me by the authorities in Tokyo.
Down there on the floor of the arena was our Men’s and Women’s Teams. And our other Delegate, George Buben, and that first day or two his wife Madeline. And Rufford Harrison was there, on the run from some meeting or other (he’s Chair of the ITTF Equipment Committee). And Irv Wasserman who, it’s rumored, runs or doesn’t run the N.Y. Table Tennis Courts--he was there, ready to chop down any member of the Team who could give him practice. And of course there too was our USTTA President, Graham Steenhoven, who, as our Teams were getting ready to play their first matches, was back in his hotel room sick.
I myself took some time to get oriented. Follow now where I went and what I saw, and I promise you that in time you’ll get to watch, as best you can, the Americans play the ties that will decide where they’ll be ranked in the table tennis world--Men: #28. Women: #21.
Since it was my first World’s, I wandered about, just trying to get a sense of what it was like. The German Federal Republic (West Germany) was playing El Salvador. Eberhard Schoeler, the near Singles winner at the last World’s, was warming up--6-0, 7-0, 8-0. An easy forehand here, an easy backhand there. Just keeping the ball gently in play. Trying out different strokes, varying his steady chop, passing up a kill shot to suddenly surprise his serious, wrist-banded opponent with a difficult forehand counter.
And Klaus Schmittinger I happened to see (who would later beat Cowan in the Consolation Singles on his way to losing in the final against the Yugoslav first-round loser Korpa--that same Korpa formerly ranked #7 in the world, now married and with a kid). Schmittinger, winning the first game, 21-1, was exchanging smiles with his German teammates--as if to say, "Look, he’s come halfway round the world. What do you want? Blood?"
And there, playing little Singapore, was North Korea, delighting the huge, highly partisan crowd. No wonder, as the days went by, Japanese high school students, reading Ogimura’s book in curled-up sleeping bags, kept up their all-night vigil, sometimes in the rain--only a few tickets would be available come the inevitable rising sun. Not unexpectedly to those in the know, the North Koreans had bought out seats by the hundreds, perhaps by the thousands, for every single hour of the tournament. Every single hour, that is, one of their players played--otherwise they’d go home. Didn’t they have jobs? Were they on a long lunch hour? It was as if a gigantic machine had stamped out, along with all those blocks of colorless tickets, the ties, the suits I saw them wearing.
They were all intently watching, applauding after very point, one of their own. Pak Sin-Il, it might be, who, after ricocheting enough balls back and forth, stops, shakes hands with his vanquished opponent, bows, bows a winner to the crowd, bows, bows, bows again--as if to every applauding corner of the earth.
And here’s England playing Vietnam. Trevor Taylor, England’s #1 lion in the absence of Barnes and Neale, is soon to beat Schoeler in a Swaythling Cup match. He greets me with, "Is there any truth to the rumor that the Vietnamese wanted the Americans to play for them?"
As for the unpredictable Barnes and Neale, the official story was that they didn’t want to come to Japan because, well, first, there was the week of Commonwealth Games in Singapore, and, second, after the ten-day Nagoya tournament was over, they’d be required to spend still three more days touring about--which was just too bloody long.
All this of course was decided back in England, much before today’s sudden announcement that China had invited England to play some "Friendship Matches" in Peking immediately after the tournament. George Yates, the editor of the English Table Tennis News, told me that Barnes and Neale just might get "the big stick" for refusing to come. But maybe missing the China trip is punishment enough?
And there’s the team from Japan--with the Japanese insignia centered (strategically?) under the V-neck of the player’s shirt, a white square, white as a table tennis ball, with a dark sun in it. One of their players at the moment is playing the Australian #1--the Thai, now a naturalized Australian, Chaymond (later in the U.S. known as "Charlie") Wuvanich.
Talk about a kangaroo’s hop. "I never saw any topspin like that!" says Australia’s Alan Frankenburg limping over from his lopsided encounter with the 1967 Japanese World Champion, Nobuhiko Hasegawa. Alan had given himself a nasty gash in the first few minutes of play by half going over/half going into a barrier trying to make a retrieve, and had to finish with his right knee tightly bandaged. Later he found out he’d strained a tendon and tore two ligaments in his foot, so after just one match he was hobbling about--a casualty of international competition.
When Hasegawa plays, you try to stay and watch. Shaggy-haired, mustchioed Peter Powell--he wears a koala bear insignia; in fact, roly-poly looks like one--he’s the next Australian to go down under. At 15-1, he turns to his teammates and smiles. I leave him to go to the Americans (though if I saw any point to it, I could later bring him in to play a 28-26 game with our John Tannehill.)
U.S. Men’s Swaythling Cup Play
Our U.S. men are to play both South Korea and Hong Kong to determine which bracket they go into. Unfortunately they must play the weaker team first. Naturally since our players did not arrive like some intense-minded teams a week or two earlier to practice and get their heads together (no one, I’m sure, even thought, dreamed of doing this, of taking such a professional approach), they were hoping first to draw, for the practice, South Korea.
I mean, it would be embarrassing to lose to Hong Kong, wouldn’t it? What would that do to our ranking? Surely we thought well of ourselves. We might end up back in the thirties or forties.
Resek plays penholder Ma Lung Sang (who was later in the singles to take a game from the great Chinese 3-time World Champion Chuang Tse-tung) and immediately begins having trouble with the serve. Errol has just not been prepared in the isolated table tennis world of the States for what has become as necessary as a passport in every traveling player’s portfolio--without the ability to return serve Errol has no entry into big-time table tennis. It’s a 7-point game.
Our experienced but aging, ex-Korean world-class star, D-J Lee, does better. He loses in three--though he might have won two straight. In the 1st, he’s up 17-13...then, up 18-16, he serves off....And, worse, up 20-17, he loses one, two points, then fails to return serve, then whiffs one, then watches helplessly as Sang gets in a fast forehand loop. In the 2nd, at 17-all, Lee produces some very good clutch hitting--especially good when you consider how his confidence might have been shaken at the end of that first game. In the 3rd, D-J starts off badly, climbs back up to lead at 12-11, then misses a hanger, a serve, watches as Sang gets an edge--in short, loses 10 in a row and the match. "It’s not ridiculous for our U.S. Champion to lose," says a long time spectator. "There are dozens of Lees here."
Cowan, too, drops a match he might easily have won--to M. Cheung Kwai, who beat Errol two straight. In the 1st, Glenn maneuvers well, keeps the offense, brings his man in, then fast loops him. In the 2nd, he rallies from 14-9 down to take an 18-16 lead. Then, really bad luck for Cowan, who’s playing very, very well: Kwai returns Glenn’s best smashes (with chops, lobs), gets in two quick hits of his own, and pulls out the game at 19. The 3rd goes back and forth crazily. Glenn’s up 11-5...down 14-11...up 17-14...down 19-17. At deuce he just picks the wrong ball. "You’ve got to talk to me," he keeps saying to anyone who’ll listen. "I’ve got to know what to do out there."
And, it’s true, he does. Every player on team after team is constantly coached by someone whose job it is to do just that. Coached both during the actual play and back at the sidelines after each individual game. (The French even have thermos jugs and little cups ready for their players as they return from each game.)
"There’s a professional class and an amateur class at this tournament," Alex Ehrlich, Poland’s World Singles finalist in 1936, ‘37, and ‘39, had been telling me. "There’s China, Japan, Rumania, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia. All the rest is amateur."
"What’s it take to be a good coach?" I ask, a little in awe of such a longtime aficionado.
"Thirty years practice in different countries," he says. And then adds, "To be a player you need to practice 12 hours a day and forget about going to school and making money."
Cowan’s last match--our last match--against Hong Kong is with Lau Sek Fong who, Dick Miles recalls, beat him twice in Hong Kong nearly 20 years ago. Fong, who blocks like Bukiet ("Only," says one of our players, "he’s smarter than Bukiet"), has lost to Lee but now beats Cowan two straight. Perhaps if the score had been, as it could have been, 3-2 our favor, Glenn’s adrenalin would still have been strong?
However, though we lost 5-1, and were of course going to lose to the much stronger South Korean team (who also beat Hong Kong 5-0), had you been there to see the Hong Kong tie, you might have agreed that if we just had more experience or even more time just to think of ourselves as a team we might well have finished with a ranking in the teens--depending of course on how we would have done with the teams in the second bracket, Austria, Thailand, Nigeria, Netherlands, and Denmark.
"I am very disappointed," says the veteran Ehrlich. "I have never seen a U.S. team so weak." Another former world-class stalwart, France’s Guy Amouretti, said that, "If the U.S. had played Miles, Reisman, and Bukiet they would have been in the top bracket"--meaning they would have beaten South Korea, including the two players, our for how long invincible at-home Champion D-J Lee lost to. Surely a highly suspect statement.
U.S. Women’s Corbillon Cup Play
Our women are about to play France, whose symbol is a cock, a very male rooster. U.S. Team Captain Jack Howard is told by the Japanese officials which side of the court his players’ bench is on. It’s the side where the French are now seated (the male players are there too, waiting, watching). The side where the French are supposed to sit is up against a wall, is not as roomy, and the floor is a bit sticky with spilled soda. Jack asks the French to move to the appointed side. Play is delayed while the rooster’s feathers are ruffled--but Jack has his official way.
First up is Connie Sweeris vs. Martine Rioual--and with Sweeris down 1-0 and 14-9 in the 2nd, it’s not looking too good for the U.S. But then Connie stages a great rally--moves to 20-17 up. And now, shaken, Rioual almost serves the game away. Almost. But Connie makes some blocking errors--can’t handle the French girl’s loop--and it’s deuce. And deuce...and deuce...and...Sweeris loses this pivotal game, 26-24.
Against Claude Bergeret, who’s not listed in the Program (we’re not the only country who has financial problems?), Wendy Hicks, trying to kill the first ball, is down 12-6 in the 1st. But then she pulls within two to 18-16, then wins a furious counter-driving exchange and runs the game out. The 2nd is close after Bergeret overcomes a bad start. Down 20-19, the French girl misses a hanger--and the tie is tied.
One of our players thought that for the doubles Jack should have played Wendy and Olga. Why I don’t know. Anyway, Connie still can’t handle Rioual’s loop, and Wendy can’t hit her forehand. In the 2nd game, Wendy ends up chopping--and that of course is not good.
Now Wendy must win the singles against Rioual. It would seem, since the French
girl is mostly content to be a pusher, that Wendy has only to be attackingly steady. The first two games are traded off. In the 3rd, Wendy goes from 6-4 up to 10-8 down. She rounds the table--and serves off. After which..."Look," says one of our players, "Wendy’s locking herself up--she’s looping too much. Her loop is ruining her hit." So...France 3--U.S. 1
"Well," says Jack philosophically, "maybe it’s not the worst thing to happen to Wendy, to lose. Maybe now she’ll play better, watch the ball more closely."
But I didn’t believe it, and I don’t think Jack did either.
Concluding Comments On U.S. Team Play
Ehrlich, I thought, was a bit hard on our men. "Comparatively speaking," he said, "the standard of the young girls is better. But they have no technique, they don’t think."
And, if I may say so, I agree that the girls don’t use their minds as they could. "What have you been doing with yourselves?" I remember asking them.
"Sitting, sitting, sitting, "answers one. "There’s nothing to do but eat and sleep...and watch."
I also think--and here you can’t defend them by saying they’re young--that they don’t have the necessary interest to be really good players. The South Korean girls, who just two years ago were only a little better than ours, are playing the Japanese (the World Champion Kowada and her teammate Konno--who are later to beat the Chinese women for the Corbillon Cup) and are our girls watching? No, they’re writing postcards.
They just don’t seem to want to dream about being good. Wouldn’t under any circumstances want to haunt the matches.
And then you have one of them cry on being beat so badly. To sentimentalize so, to express that amount of emotion without having realized the expectant hard work, without apparently having a real passionate love for the game is...well, understandable. But through these tears (I won’t say idle tears) our weakness, our lack of toughness shows.
Of course I’m being hard on them--as if I were a coach. It’s true that in some ways they were on a pleasure trip, which they themselves literally, at least in part, financed. And doubtless they felt over and over again how hopeless it was having to compete in the isolation of the American continent. Certainly they were responsible, if not ideal, team members. But anyone knows that without the dream there is no reality.
"No, I wouldn’t want to come to America as a coach," said Ehrlich. "Even if they started now, it would be three or four years before there would be any kind of success."
Does this sound gloomy? Well, how about a parade?
Sunday night, this first day of the tournament, every one of the 58 teams takes its turn marching (though nobody swings like the Chinese) to the accompaniment of a martial drum-beating band. Every country is dressed immaculately in jump suits or matching insigniaed jackets and slacks--the Germans, for example, in matching brown, even down to the belt buckles of their street shoes. Every country but one is uniform. Us.
There, bringing up our rear, is a man, an American, in a raincoat. He’s not even on the Team. Who is he? What’s he doing there?
I’ll tell you. He’s Nemesis. Our nemesis. That which has made the U.S., a traditional superpower, something of a bad joke in the table tennis world. But a real force nonetheless. In the tradition of individual America. It may be split individual America, but maybe not--because nobody in our contingent actually tried to stop him from marching. He represents the looseness of America, the lack of psychic force that’s so needed on the Team, in the USTTA itself... But he also represents vitality and, in a complicated sense, which I have no intention of going into here, justice.
He is the New York player who loves table tennis, who knows the dark, underworld basement side of this racket game--which is also the passionate, dramatic side--and who, having grown up learning the Game year after year under the rooftops, the cracked ceilings that have felt much rain, is always psychically prepared for it, indeed seems to thrive on it--like some strange weed or, so difficult is it to tell, some perversely beautiful black flower.
All of which may or may not be a far cry from the parading little flower girls in white holding onto their guide rope....
(Next: Chapter 2: Nagoya, Japan, 1971: Swaythling/Corbillon Cup Ties)
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