World Junior Table Tennis Championships at Stanford
December 10, 2007

Canada's Shen Qiang (left) and teammate Andre Ho practice.
Photo Courtesy of Chronicle by Paul Chinn

Courtesy of San Francisco Chronicle

(DEC. 8th) - The best young players in the world did not come all the way to Stanford University this week to play pingpong.

The little white balls might look like pingpong balls, and the blue tables might look like pingpong tables. Calling the game pingpong, however, might just merit a paddling.

"It's a term we use when we're joking around," said Mark Nichol, manager of the New Zealand table tennis team.

Nobody was joking around at Stanford, where 200 of the best young table tennis players from 36 countries will compete over the next eight days for the world junior title.

Pingpong, say the coaches, is what chunky Americans play at a backyard barbecue while holding a can of beer. Table tennis is played by svelte athletes in nylon shorts who run, dive, sweat, leap and scream while playing it. Some table tennis players grunt as loud as some tennis players when hitting the ball.

There were a lot of grunts Friday inside the Stanford gym where the world's best players 18 and under were warming up for the first matches today.

Canadian coach Wang Zhen was watching his four players get limber. The balls were whizzing around like bumblebees. Players were slamming, slicing, whacking and smashing the ball with their rackets.

Nobody had a paddle. Paddles are for pingpong.

"They're trying to find a feeling for tomorrow," the coach said as he watched his top player, Qiang, Shen, impart a spin that would do credit to a White House briefing. "They know themselves. They know what they have to do. There's not a lot for me to tell them right now."

Qiang, Shen plays for Canada but, like most of the world's top players, hails from China, where table tennis is the national passion and not something to hide in the basement on a table that doubles as a platform for model trains.

The table, in fact, has its own rules. It must be exactly 2.74 meters long. The net must be 15.25 cm above the table. The ball must weigh 2.7 grams.

As for the little rubber bumps on the rackets, they are known as pimples. There is nothing funny about them.

"The pimples must be evenly distributed at a density of not less than 10 pimples per square cm and not more than 30 pimples per square cm," say the official pimple rules.

The opening day of the tournament got bumped from stately Maples Pavilion because of a regional college volleyball tournament. That's how it is for table tennis, its fans lamented - even the world championship gets bumped for a regional volleyball tournament.

It's hard to get respect when people keep calling it pingpong, according to the International Table Tennis Federation.

"Here we struggle to present table tennis on the world level," said Mikael Andersson, a federation manager.

Chinese juniors champ Ruifeng Xu said it's OK if he plays in a mostly empty hall.

"It's no problem," he said diplomatically. "I am here to concentrate on my match and my opponent. Not the empty seats."

If you want to go, the World Junior Table Tennis Championships will be played at Maples Pavilion, Burnham Hall and Ford Hall at Stanford University through Dec. 15. Tickets for the opening rounds are $10 and $15 for the championship round. They are available at the door, by calling (415) 946-8730, or at the Web site.