The Unbearable Melancholy of Ping Pong

There’s a delightful piece by Howard Jacobsen in the latest edition of The New Republic in which the author mourns the sad decline of table tennis. I don’t know why the magazine hasn’t promoted it more. The problem, you see, is the sponge bat. It has changed everything, and not, you will be unsurprised to discover for the better. Sponge ushered in the era of Asian supremacy, thanks in no small part to an athletic revolution that, well, changed the game forever…

The single exception to Asian dominance, provided by Sweden, is only to be explained, I think, by that aspect of table tennis which no technology has ever been able to affect–its introversion. Perhaps because of the cribbed and sunless conditions in which it’s played, without space for exuberance of shot or personality, table tennis has always been a sad, inward-looking sport, and sad, inward-looking people enjoy a natural advantage at the table.The