“He’d never even picked up a paddle and, just from his build and the way he walks, the coach knew he had potential.” “A coach came to my kindergarten when I was six,” Zhang told me, “and he just, like, touched my body, my shoulder, that kind of stuff, to see my potential.” For him, it long ago became “like a job.” He didn’t smile at all when Shortz first saw him compete, even when he won. Like puzzle-making, table tennis does not require imposing physicality: Zhang is five feet seven, weighs a hundred and twenty pounds, and has played table tennis almost every day for the past twelve years. That was the only day in the entire year that I missed.” ![]() Of course, I’d lined up a local club to play at that day, but I had trouble finding it-the street signs in Croatian were not helpful-and I finally arrived just as they were turning off the lights. The last time he didn’t play was October 3, 2012: “I was in Kraljevica, Croatia,” he told me, “for the World Puzzle Championship. He has also played table tennis on each of the past one thousand one hundred and twenty days-and counting. Shortz believes that he holds the record for having played in the most table-tennis clubs in the U.S.: more than two hundred and fifty. They first met in China, in 2011, when Shortz was visiting Beijing. “Remember ‘fanatical’?” Shortz asked Zhang. ![]() Shortz has helped: while driving into the city that evening, they practiced SAT words: “incongruous,” “unfettered.” (Zhang, a junior, would be taking the PSAT the next week.) On a recent Friday, I joined Zhang and Shortz at the New York première of a documentary film that the Los Angeles Times describes as “table tennis’ ‘Hoop Dreams.’ ” In less than three years, Zhang has become fluent in English, which wasn’t taught to him in China. What does their sponsorship arrangement entail? “Well,” Shortz told me recently, as we watched Zhang warm up for the October Open, “he lives with me.” Indeed, one of the most promising young table-tennis players in the United States has, in an unlikely twist of fate, come to share a roof with the “puzzlemaster,” “enigmatologist” and NPR personality Will Shortz, who is sixty-three and had, until recently, lived quite contently without children. He trains at W.T.T.C., where his sponsor is Shortz. One such young man is the eighteen-year-old Kai Zhang, currently ranked No. Those just below this level sometimes move to other countries, where reaching the Olympics in table tennis is a little easier and, not insignificantly, using Facebook is allowed. The best Chinese players can have careers in the game, earn money from sponsors, and a handful, every four years, attain Olympic glory. By ten, he may receive no other formal schooling. A Chinese child as young as six might be persuaded to attend an intensive table-tennis academy-where, to judge from one young man's experience, he’ll be expected to play for some six to eight hours a day, six and a half days a week, well into his teens, if he shows real talent. The silver and bronze medals have also mostly gone to China. Since it became an Olympic sport, in 1988, Chinese players have won every gold medal but one on the women’s side, and the majority on the men’s side, too (including four of the past five). ![]() Table tennis is one of the most popular sports in China. They regularly draw top talent from New York and beyond: Togo, Côte d’Ivoire, Poland, India, Mexico, Switzerland, and, of course, China. In late October, Westchester Table Tennis Center hosted one of Shortz’s monthly club tournaments, which are the largest in the United States, boasting as much as seven thousand dollars in cash prizes and a four-star rating from USA Table Tennis. ![]() “A coach came to my kindergarten when I was six,” Kai Zhang says, “and he just, like, touched my body, my shoulder, that kind of stuff, to see my potential.” Photograph by Henry Leeįive years ago, dipping into the small fortune that his crossword and Sudoku puzzles have brought him, the Times crossword editor Will Shortz bought an old “junk dealer’s warehouse,” near his home in Pleasantville, New York, and-because puzzles aren’t his only obsession-turned fourteen thousand square feet of it into a world-class Ping-Pong facility.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |