GET A TABLE TENNIS TABLE
...ESQUIRE'S TIM LEWIS JUST DID
My peak as a whiff-whaffer came when I was 13. It was 1987-ish and there was a craze for table tennis at my school. The second the bell rang for a break, even before the teacher had stood up, we were organising four desks into a rectangle and jamming two polypropylene chairs between the legs to fashion a net (of sorts).
Our classroom was transformed into a Sino-style ping-pong hothouse, the only sounds the hypnotic pock-pock of ball on bat and the anguished yelp of a fluff or near-miss.
We’d play for 15 minutes midmorning, another hour at lunch and then until home time. And we got pretty decent. We switched from exclusively backhand to primarily forehand, our high-toss serves swooped, kinked and dipped; we experimented with different grips for the bat, and were merciless at exploiting the gap in the net where the chairs didn’t meet and the random bounce that came from landing the ball on the line where the tables came together.
I thought about this intense period of my life recently as, 30 years on,
I went shopping for a table-tennis table (mid-life crises take many forms, don’t judge). It wouldn’t be true that I hadn’t thought about ping-pong in three decades: there was a holiday in France with university friends where we did little else and a period when I was courting a girlfriend where we’d go to the local leisure centre and hire a table, until those games started getting a bit too competitive.
Professionally, table tennis comes up (disproportionately I’d say) in interviews I’ve done. Authors, especially, seem to love the sport: Howard Jacobson wrote a novel about a precocious ping-pong champion; Jonathan Safran Foer told me all Brooklyn novelists played. The sport seems to draw in the cerebral and the obsessive. The chef Heston Blumenthal is both of those things and has become so besotted with table tennis he's bought a robot that fires balls at him at 100mph, and has engaged a coach. He complains that no one bats an eyelid about having a tennis lesson, but practising with a ping-pong coach provokes open derision.
I’m with Heston. Not long ago, two burly men grunted and puffed, hauling a big slab of table to my door. After considerable fucking-around-on-the-internet — shout-out for Ben Larcombe’s Expert Table Tennis blog — I went for a Butterfly table topper for around £200. You can certainly spend a lot more and Larcombe coos over the sports car lines of the Killerspin Revolution SVR, which is 10-times the price. But one thing I learned from the jerry-rigged tables at school is that the design and dimensions of the playing surface do not really matter.
So, bring on the midlife crisis. As Foer grandiosely wrote, “If I didn’t spend so much time playing ping-pong, I would have a much fuller life. But I would have no life.”