I don’t think the book quite lives up to its grandiose title, but aspiring as it does, to be part of the genre of New York satire, I don’t suppose it ever intended to. It does however provide some useful ammunition to my half-baked thesis that it is ping pong and not football that has the real claim to be the peoples sport. By this I mean not simply that some 300 million citizens in the Peoples Republic of China are said to be registered players, a statistic I suspect is somewhat inflated. What I’be been hinting at is that in both East and West, North and South, while football has ingratiated itself, courtesy of News Corporation and other global media conglomerates, into the popular imagination, for countless millions, it is the humble game of ping, far more than football in all its varieties, that is likely to play an actual part in peoples weekly sporting and leisure routines.

To give just one example, the army of school dinner ladies, cleaners and caretakers, not to mention the teachers, assistants and clerical staff are a thousand times more likely to pick up a ping pong paddle and have a go, much like they used to do as kids, than kick a football around in the windswept muddy fields that pass as school football pitches. No real fanfare is made of their efforts but play they do. They do it for fun, they do it to prove a point, they simply do it to prove that they are still youthful and alive. And when they play they laugh even when they are deadly serious.

What Horowitz and Bennett provide in ample measure is a bookfull of amusing anecdotes of where table tennis has intersected and crisscrossed with some of the unfolding dramas of the past 100 years. The most well known and celebrated example is of course the ping pong diplomacy whereby table tennis became the medium of communication between Capitalist America and Communist China. It was an ice-breaker of historic proportions. A whole chapter is devoted to this endearing tale and it is well worth a read because not only do we get the broad contours of that historic rapprochement, but we also get an insight into how ping pong got itself entrenched in the world’s most populous nation. Our co-authors explain: when the People’s Republic of China was founded. Mao faced a slew of pressing yet thorny nation-building challenges, agrarian reform, and suppressing counter-revolutionaries among them. But near the top of his list was the critical task of defining a national sport. The 1953 decision by the International Table Tennis Federation to become the first sporting body to recognise China made the choice for him. The moment Mao deemed the game to be the nation’s priority, the State began to single-mindedly develop a nationwide strategy to ensure the country would soon dominate the world. P159

A wonderful dollop of political satire with just a touch of historical reality or a huge slice of historical truth with just a thin veneer of satire? The reader is left to decide.

Our learned American historians continue: A legion of bureaucrats was deployed to sweep the nation and test kindergarteners for catlike reflexes and eye hand coordination. Those demonstrating superior skills were removed from their parents and swiftly dispatched to ping pong academies across the nation where they did little else but train and sleep, tiny cogs in a giant ping pong machine designed to pump out champions. P161

I had the ambivalent honour of working with one of those high-flying products of the Chinese ping pong machine (Olympic silver medallist), and based on the continued Chinese domination of the sport, one must conclude that the machine is still well oiled. B & H continue:
The sport had another inherent advantage that appealed to Mao: it required little equipment, so it was cheap and easy to spread, in both urban and rural settings. China soon became a magical land in which concrete ping pong tables cropped up everywhere, from public parks and train stations to factory floors. The sport was effortlessly woven into the fabric of Chinese society at both elite and mass levels. P161

Slowly but surely, Sport England are arriving at the same conclusions that Mao reached some fifty years ago. In their never-ending quest to get more English people off their coaches and into some physical activity, table tennis is increasingly playing a lead role. The recent success of Ping London was yet another example of the continued attraction of table tennis to the general English citizenry. Celebrities live it, school kids love it and politicians are learning to love it. It is, as I never tire of reminding people, the people’s game.

The book offers other rewarding chapters including fashion and ping, celebrity and ping, sex and ping, technology and ping, aging and ping, and of course politics and ping. (NB, if you don’t want your young offspring to be confronted by naked bodies cavorting with ping pong bats, this is not a book to be left idly lying around the house. The pages contain some hard-core explicit stuff!) But, the chapter that most intrigued me was that outlining, How Ping Pong Created the American Suburb. Aided and abetted by some wonderful graphics, which incidentally, is a real bonus throughout the book, H&B unlock a whole chapter of the table tennis story I had not encountered before. Without wanting to give too much away, below is a good sample passage of how H&B explain how ping pong helped make America what it is today. Whether this influence is to be regarded as a glowing reference or a damning indictment of table tennis is again up to the proclivities of the individual reader.

Beloved ping pong was recruited to sell America on modern notions of the good life. The great challenge facing those early Mad Men (advertising executives) was the crushing uniformity and repetition of those suburbs, the centerless rows of ranch houses and colonials, bereft of community. External photographs were not useful for the simple reason that everything looked the same yard after yard, garage after garage, as far as the eye could see. But in agencies across the land the solution was soon discovered: leveraging the innocence of ping pong.
If the American way of life was to be tied to the notion that every man shall have his space, few things said space and freedom more than the hardwood panelling of your own finished basement a room no one had in the big city. And what glorified that underground wonderland better than a self-contained athletics arena? And so the romance of ping pong was used to promote the image of prosperity, happiness, and family togetherness, persuading urban dwellers to migrate to the sprawling, featureless world of the subdivisionsSimply put, to posses a ping pong table was to own a piece of the American dream. P42

It’s a strange thing, but the more I delve into this bazaar little table tennis anthology the more I get the feeling that perhaps the authors grandiose claim for ping pong is not all that exaggerated after all. If you have ever picked up a ping pong paddle at any time in your life, this book is a worthy use of your time. If you have never pick up a bat it’s about time you did.