True Beginnings, and Shock and Awe

My full-blown obsession with ping-pong began four years ago with the semi-epic road trip. Semi because my original idea was to drive during the summer from Washington, DC, to where we had moved, all the way to California and back, with two teenage sons in tow. But then my wife, Stenie, decided that we'd fly to Albuquerque, New Mexico, rent a car there, and drive all over the southwest, eventually into Southern California, and then north to San Francisco, where we'd drop off the car and fly back.

The boys, glued to their smartphones, texted with abandon or dozed through most of the natural wonders, only to wake up in Las Vegas and keep wide awake in LA and Santa Barbara and all the way north along the precipitous Pacific Coast Highway in anticipation of San Francisco.

In Big Sur we chanced upon the Henry Miller Memorial Library, which instantly rang a bell. I hadn't forgotten how much the writer had amused me with his "forbidden book" Tropic of Cancer, engaged me with The Colossus of Maroussi, and surprised me, later on, with certain passages in Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch. And here we were in Big Sur.

I should have been content with the awe-inspiring redwoods, the writer's memorabilia, and the welcoming and quirky people at the library. My wife was. But in the shade of the towering trees I could not miss a ping-pong table. "Yes," a young librarian told me when I asked her about it, "Henry Miller was a good player. Back in 1963, for example, when he met with Bob Dylan, well ... they didn't really hit it off."

"No?"

"No. Henry found Dylan arrogant, and Dylan found Henry patronizing. But guess what? They did play ping-pong. Ping-pong has always attracted clever people, you know?"

I didn't, but it was flattering to the sport and nice to hear.

"For example," she continued, "when the composer Arnold Schoenberg moved from Austria to Hollywood to escape from the Nazis, he used to play ping-pong with his neighbor, George Gershwin. In fact, Schoenberg used to go around with a violin case, only in it was no violin but a ping-pong bat."

How about that, I thought. All this talk about ping-pong had definitively whetted my appetite. "Would it be possible to play a little?" I asked, pointing at the table in the distance.

"Sure. Here, take these bats, and here's the ball."

"Thank you," I said, looking at a more than ordinarily beaten-up ball and two vintage hardbats with their rubbers half peeled off.

"Excuse me," I said, "but these wouldn't by chance be the bats Henry Miller himself played with?"

"Oh no, they couldn't be that old."

They certainly looked it, but never mind. It seemed only natural that I should challenge Pietro, our then eighteen-year-old son. He accepted the challenge with a smirk on his face. We'll see about that in a minute, I thought.

As we reached the table, I took a better look at the hardbats. A hardbat is a racket that uses short outward pimples ("pips") with no sponge between the rubber and the wood of the blade. As it belongs to a much earlier era in the history of the sport, I had never played with it. Didn't somebody say, "Never play unless you have your own racket?" Maybe, but why so much caution? I would beat Pietro easily and teach him a lesson, too.

The match began and quickly went downhill for me. I was trying my spinny serves, but to no avail. My backspinned chops, too, seemed to have no effect on his returns. My top-spins had nothing on them. He, on the other hand, didn't bother with any fancy movement but simply hammered the poor ball whenever he could. He easily won the first game.

As for the second game, he was leading by a wide margin despite all my efforts when with one of his smashes he cracked the ball. I took the hint. Instead of asking the librarian for another one, I just returned the bats.

"Why didn't you ask her for another ball? I'd play on," Pietro said.

"Nah, that's enough."

"Fine by me, but this means you withdrew from the match, so I've won."

"Yes, yes, you've won."

Indeed, he and the redwoods had had the last laugh: he had beaten me, and he had taught me a lesson. With his no-nonsense, flat ping-pong, he had easily done away with all my attempts at spin. The orange ball had kept dodging me, as if Henry Miller himself had been throwing the oranges of Hieronymus Bosch — the visionary and wild Early Netherlandish painter — at me, but only rarely close enough for my decrepit bat to make contact. But Pietro's bat was just as decrepit; I had no excuse.

Shamed in defeat, I didn't contemplate hara-kiri, but I did wonder how on earth I could have lost. It seemed inconceivable given my experience, but he'd beaten me soundly. Whatever — it was time to drive on, and I left it at that, or so I thought.

A month later I had a routine checkup at the doctor's, and the diagnosis was high blood pressure. Not uncommon in men of my age, but still something that needed my attention. Physical exercise was prescribed. Physical exercise? I'd never liked it in the least, but I did like walking.

"Walking is fine," said the doctor. "Make it a couple of miles a day if you can, and walk briskly."

Walking on a treadmill was the most efficient and precise way to follow up on the doctor's recommendation, but, as it turned out, it was also dehumanizing. The more miles I walked without arriving anywhere, the more I felt like a mule pulling a grindstone around endlessly. Still, I needed to exercise. What to do?

Apart from skiing, the only sport I had enjoyed in my youth was ping-pong. They are at the opposite ends of the scale: the former being one of the most expensive sports and the latter, one of the cheapest. Skiing is seasonal and can hardly be practiced every day, even when in season. Ping-pong is much more manageable. It can be played all year round, and I still hadn't really metabolized the beating my son had given me in California. But I'd learned that buying a table and setting it up at home wouldn't work. No, I needed a place in which people were eager to play. My son Nico suggested I consult the popular oracle — Google — for the nearest ping-pong place. I did and was given the address of a community center nearby. I asked Nico to accompany me. There we went — and stepped into a circus.

The characters clustered around three tables: half a dozen Chinese men in their late twenties, thirties, and forties, all with a very strong accent. A...