Table tennis celebrates centennial this year

Press, 3 January 1979, Page 14

Table tennis celebrates centennial this year

Table tennis has come a long way from the days in 1879 when it was played with a champagne cork and bats devised from cigar boxes,, to become a major world sport and an important tool in international diplomacy. PAUL HARRISON of World Feature Services looks at the first century of the sport.

Two Cambridge University undergraduates with time on their hands in 1879 who started knocking champagne corks over a pile of books on a table, using the remnants of a cigar box as bats, are credited with the invention of a game which has in the century since, swept the world “ table tennis. Those two bored young men at Cambridge would not recognise the game today. Instead of champagne corks and cigar box lids, the modern players use sponge-surfaced bats which produce extraordinary control and spin, and the pace of the game would astound those early practitioners, to whom it was little more than a diverting pastime on a wet afternoon. The game has metamorphosed from its early name of “Gossima”, which never quite caught on, to “ping pong”, which did, to the present, day version, table tennis. The balance of power* has swung with successive stages of development over 99 years, firstly from Britain, its home, to Europe, and then to Asia, where it has remained since. The Chinese are the world’s masters, with table tennis reigning supreme among their 900 million people as THE game, although the current male world champion is Japanese.

Table tennis has also become, more than any sport, a major tool <n world diplomacy: The Chinese developed and refined what became known as “ping pong diplomacy” in the 1960 s and 70s, when the first gaps began to appear in the Bamboo Curtain of isolation which China had cast around herself. The visits to China early in the 1970 s of table tennis teams from overseas, notably from the United States, marked the be.' inning of China’s . reemergence into the world. Other nations have followed in her wake in using table tennis as a diplomatic tool, and weapon. Earlier this year, South Korea pronounced itself outraged when it was reported that an American table tennis team was going to compete in an international tournament being organised in the North Korean capital of Pyongyang next year. The Americans were accused by the South Koreans of plotting a “sports honeymoon” with the North Koreans, without informing their allies in the South. The furore brought an assurance from the United States that the visit, if it goes- ahead, will be. made by a private sports group without official backing.

All this would be strange indeed to those pioneers of the sport, who

soon discovered that champagne corks were hardly suitable and turned first to small rubber balls and later to hollow balls made out of celluloid. It was the noise of the celluloid ball hitting the bat which gave rise to the name “ping pong” which far out-lived the unfashionable Gossima tag, under which the game had first

been marketed 80 years ago in England. I ing pong swept first Britain and then Europe, becoming the first of a succession of crazes of the Edwardian era. In 1901, the first club was founded, in London, and the first tournament was held the same year. In those early years of the century, the game continued to hold public imagination, spreading to the United States. Only the French stood aloof — one Parisian newspaper asserting that ping pong was a further

proof of the moral degradation of the English, at a time when her soldiers were dying in South Africa’s Boer War. Ap early example, perhaps, of “ping pong diplomacy.” With rubber-surfaced bats replacirfe wooden ones, table tennis had become, by 1927, when the English Table Tennis Association was founded, more like the game it is today. That year, the first world championships were held, with India joining Austria, Czechoslovakia, England. Germany, Hungary and Wales. Europeans, particularly Hungarians, were the masters before the Second World War, while the Asians took over from the 19505. The development of the sport as a major world pastime has not been without controversy: as far back as the 19305, s t o n e-walling tactics threatened to ruin the game as a spectacle. In one world championship match between Poland and Rumania, the first point of the match alone took two hours and five minutes before the Pole won it on a net-cord. There was controversy also over the advent of the sponge-surfaced bat, which gave the Japanese and Chinese particularly the ability to bamboozle their opponents with spin allied to their Oriental tactical wiles.