Henry Miller once described table tennis as a game of endless fascination. The American novelist, who wrote such masterpieces as Tropic of Cancer and Black Spring, used to play at his home in California.
Howard Jacobson, too, is an aficionado of the little game. The Booker Prize-winner, who wrote The Mighty Walzer about his ping-pong obsession, started playing as a teenager in Manchester in the Fifties and never really stopped. For him, the game is synonymous with a certain type of ironic introspection, a method of engaging with and retreating from the world at the same time.
“Table tennis players,” he wrote, “are so lost in musings of a literary and erotic sort, and such spiders of indoor dedication to the airless game, that it is not so much surprising they are seldom seen, but a miracle they are even seen at all.”
But ping-pong, for so long a fringe activity, is undergoing a renaissance. At the elite end the sport is dominated by China, as it always has been, but elsewhere it has moved into some surprising cultural niches. In many British cities, such as Manchester and London, outdoor tables are positioned in garden squares and railway stations for passersby to use.
There is also a craze for the game among the fashionistas. At the Spin club in Manhattan, leggy blonds and advertising executives mingle around designer tables in a basement venue on the corner of Park Avenue and East 23rd Street. The last time I went down I played doubles with Susan Sarandon and a catwalk model called Jessica. I am not quite sure what Jacobson would have made of it, but Miller would certainly have approved.
Much of the latent charm of table tennis is captured in Ping Pong, a documentary directed by Hugh Hartford. The democracy of table tennis is that anyone can play, regardless of age, and Ping Pong introduces us to eight players as they prepare for the 2010 World Veteran Championships in China. They hail from diverse parts of the world and have very different training regimes, but they have one thing in common: they are all aged over 80.
Much of the film’s power derives from its moral seriousness. Over the course of 75 compelling minutes, table tennis becomes a metaphor for life. We meet Lisa Modlich, an 86-year-old Austrian now living in Houston, Texas, who won the Croix de Guerre after joining the French Resistance during the Second World War. Sassy and sexy, she is brutally honest about her longing for victory. “I should beat that old girl,” she says of a rival. “She can’t even move.”
We also meet Les D’Arcy, an 90-year-old Yorkshireman whose competitive instinct is rather more poetical, but no less implacable. “You have to dream of winning if you are going to have a chance,” he says. “If you don’t dream you can’t win.” Much of his preparation involves lifting weights in a large sports hall. “He is a living legend,” a fellow weightlifter says.
Although each player wants to win, they have also found a particular kind of salvation through table tennis. Inge Hermann, an 90-year-old German, discovered the sport after her husband passed away. “He died of cancer and suddenly my food didn’t taste so good. So I stopped eating,” she says. “I got an illness in my brain and couldn’t think clearly any more. Table tennis saved me. It helped me to regain the broken parts of my brain.”
Sport is invariably viewed through the prism of professionalism. We are preoccupied with full-time athletes and their frenzied pursuit of marginal gains. Ping Pong offers an important corrective. It shows that sport can be competitive, but also redemptive. Playing for love rather than money changes the moral basis of sport. When D’Arcy defeats Rune Forsberg, an 86-year-old Swede, the two men hug. “Table tennis has taught me how to win, “Forsberg says. “But it has also taught me how to lose.”
Certainly, watching Ping Pong reconnected me with something I had almost forgotten. There was a time, before rankings and pay cheques, when table tennis was important for its own sake. I would play in the garage with my older brother and lose myself in its rhythms and acoustics. We would play for hours, exploring the weaknesses and strengths of each other, but also something within ourselves. It felt almost like a kind of awakening.
Local leagues cater to this aspect of amateur sport. In the early 1980s we would play at venues that were often shacks in the middle of nowhere, with icy paths and dodgy electric heaters. The ball was forever getting lost behind the curtains. Tea and digestive biscuits would be offered at half time and tasted like heaven. We would play our matches, fighting like tigers, and then go back to our cars and return to obscurity.
It was — and is — marvellous. We were brought together, like nomads, by a shared passion. The only evidence that we had actually played against each other was not medals or fame, but the scorecards that were collected at the end of the season. We each, in our own way, embraced the paradox of sport as a vehicle to nowhere in particular except personal satisfaction and camaraderie. And, back then, in what seemed like a gentler sporting epoch, that was more than enough.
Ping Pong is a rather wonderful film, but it is much more than that. It is about aging, mortality, friendship, ambition and love. The stories stay with you for hours, weeks, after the credits have rolled. But perhaps its most powerful achievement is to leave us with a more humane conception of sport, and of life itself.
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