Tennis is . . .

basically just ping-pong and the players are standing on the table.


For the past week, I’ve been playing ping pong at a small space in the lower east side. A small exhibition design company curates the space. They center itself around a different theme each time. Stopped by last Saturday and ended up playing for a few hours.

I haven’t played consistently since San Francisco and to play again feels good.

They have a ladder system where a person signs up, starts at the bottom, and can move up the ladder by beating a person, at most, 5 spots ahead.

When I walked in on that lazy Saturday afternoon, nobody was playing and started talking to the manager. A guy walked in and started staring at me and pacing. I was inwardly laughing at the alpha vibes he was directing toward me. Later I realized that he had scheduled a challenge match and thought I was the competition. The manager let us play and I beat him pretty soundly. I didn’t think I would join because I was worried about the caliber of games I would get and the guy talked way too much mierda. I played the manager and he played well and was really cool. Some games were close and we had some nice rallies. So I joined. Yesterday, I was stoked that I did.

I scheduled a challenge match yesterday with a guy 4 spots ahead. The manager told me that this guy and his friends were filming a documentary about going to the 2012 London Olympics in ping pong. They hired some professional coaches to train them. They were playing daily and entering tournaments.

I walked into the space after work yesterday and my jaw dropped. This guy was playing with his cellphone (a small one).He was hitting fast serves and hitting nice shots back. It turned out he was one of the coaches – professional ping pong player, the body motion model for the table tennis game put out by Rockstar, which sponsors him, and a rapper. He was a really nice guy and showed me serves I haven't seen in person since my time in China.

That's him in the lower right and the following is a little documentary filmed for Current TV.

I'm pretty motivated now to get better. After this places changes, I'm probably going to start playing at the Chinatown center.