Curious About…Ping Pong.
Most of our offices have some form of lightly competitive communal sport going on - in many cases there is a central foosball table where folks break in the mid-afternoon; fueled by cookies and Red Bull, they gather round and raucously egg one another on. In our Shanghai office, naturally, it’s ping pong.
Ping Pong (乒乓) is the official name for the sport of table tennis in China. The game originated as a sport in Britain during the 1880s where it was played among the upper-class as an after-dinner parlour game, then commonly known as “wiff-waff”. A row of books were to be stood up along the center of the table as a net, two more books served as rackets and were used to continuously hit a golf-ball from one end of the table to the other. Later, table tennis was played with paddles made of cigar box lids and balls made of champagne corks. The popularity of the game led game manufacturers to sell the equipment commercially. Early rackets were often pieces of parchment stretched upon a frame, and the sound generated in play gave the game its first nicknames of “wiff-waff” and “ping-pong”. A number of sources indicate that the game was first brought to the attention of Hamley’s of Regent Street under the name “Gossima”. The name “ping-pong” was in wide use before British manufacturer J. Jaques & Son Ltd trademarked it in 1901. The name “ping-pong” then came to be used for the game played by the rather expensive Jaques equipment, with other manufacturers calling it table tennis. A similar situation arose in the United States, where Jaques sold the rights to the “ping-pong” name to Parker Brothers.
In the 1950s, rackets that used a rubber sheet combined with an underlying sponge layer changed the game dramatically, introducing greater spin and speed. These were introduced to Britain by sports goods manufacturer S.W. Hancock Ltd. The use of speed glue increased the spin and speed even further, resulting in changes to the equipment to “slow the game down”. Table tennis was introduced as an Olympic sport at the Olympics in 1988.
After the 2000 Summer Olympics in Sydney, the International Table Tennis Federation instituted several rules changes aimed at making table tennis more viable as a televised spectator sport. First, the older 38 mm balls were officially replaced by 40 mm balls. This increased the ball’s air resistance and effectively slowed down the game. By that time, players had begun increasing the thickness of the fast sponge layer on their rackets, which made the game excessively fast and difficult to watch on television. Second, the ITTF changed from a 21-point to an 11-point scoring system in 2001. This was intended to make games more fast-paced and exciting. The ITTF also changed the rules on service to prevent a player from hiding the ball during service, in order to increase the average length of rallies and to reduce the server’s advantage.
Deng Yaping (鄧亞萍) is a Chinese table tennis player who won six world championships and four Olympic championships between 1989 and 1997. She is regarded as one of the greatest players in the history of the sport. She began playing table tennis at age five, and four years later she won her provincial junior championship. She was age 13 when she won her first national championship. When she retired at the age of 24, she had won more titles than any other player in the sport. From 1990 to 1997, she retained the title of world No. 1 ranked female table tennis player for 8 years. She was voted Chinese female athlete of the century, and joined the International Table Tennis Federation Hall of Fame in 2003.
What Of It? It’s always fascinating to see one culture wholeheartedly embrace something from another; the fact that Indians love cricket so devotedly or that China has made ping pong their own, almost a national sport here, is fantastic. And the evolution from a simple parlor game played with books to an Olympic sport is also quite a journey: I have to say, I also love the concept of modifying the speed and rhythm of a game to make it more spectator-friendly.
I Am Curious about the cornerstones of any culture - the food, dance, traditions, clothes and in this case, sports that are carried through generations, and occasionally, as with ping pong, imported from elsewhere to become a treasured national icon.
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