My Chinatown: A New York Sketchbook

5. Just One More Game…

I walk down Cortlandt Alley every day. The metal shutters on the windows hang open like wrought iron eyelids. Graffiti stains the brick walls. Dead rats lie squished by truck tires on the street. When moviemakers are not using it for period flavor, it saves me a minute, to a minute and a half off my daily commute. The route twice counted saves me almost three minutes. In a year Cortlandt Alley spares me 1,092 minutes in and out of Chinatown. But for a certain type of person, down this alley is where time dilates— for the table tennis player, it is where time stops. The players that I’ve met there can spend hours of their lives entering and leaving this alley. In a basement room underneath the potholed street, they devote themselves to a game of back and forth, which sounds like the tick tock of a clock, except no one is keeping track of time.

Here, minutes routinely turn into hours. A nine-year-old Chinese kid hangs out with a middle-aged Frenchman and a Jamaican old enough to be his grandfather. The regulars — about 20 of them at any given time — frankly label themselves as “addicts.” Like classic addicts in search of their next fix, they can be ferocious. After scoring, they might be seen stumbling out of the alley, sweaty and shaky.

The New York Table Tennis Training Federation is the den of vice that breeds this behavior. It’s purportedly the biggest club of its kind in Manhattan, with nine tables arranged in 6,000 square feet of space. The orange balls fly and bounce swiftly across the blue tabletops. The pit-pit patter of balls on paddles sounds like a ticking clock. The constant oscillation seems to balloon time. “Just five more minutes, one more game” turns into an hour. An hour expands to two. Players in NYTTF sports shirt hike up their mesh shorts, take an athletic stance and prepare for approaching balls. Sweat drips, arms swing, and paddles slice the air with dizzying speed.

NYTTF is a serious place. Not much is heard above shouts (mostly in Mandarin), sneaker-squeaks, grunts, and game scores. Its patrons are usually immigrants from China, Vietnam, Ghana and even Brooklyn. There are students here, doctors, government employees, world-class table tennis players, retirees, and a model.

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Mario Yee, a mailman and NYTTF volunteer who appoints players to coaches and assigns tables, plays table tennis every day after work. “You can’t make any money with Ping-Pong,” he says, “but we’re here to keep the tradition going.” Though the English invented table tennis in the late 1800’s, the Chinese adopted it as their national sport in the 1960s and have dominated the game since then — except in the 1988 Olympics when the Swedes won the title. At NYTTF most players are middle-aged Asian men who come after work to sweat and indulge in an obsession with friends. However, to some, table tennis is more than a tradition or addiction. It serves as an after school hobby, it maintains health, and helps achieve Zen.

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His name is Alston Wang, but his coach calls him “Hidden Tiger,” because behind his always-present smile, says the coach, “is a killer.” With a paddle, of course. “I saw him kill 24 players,” said Robert Chen, Wang’s coach and director of NYTTF. “He killed 24 guys, not kids, but men!”

Alston is nine. His tender age can rile up opponents, especially when he beats them; in the October tournament, most of Wang’s two dozen opponents were ten to 20 years older. Said the sweaty nine-year-old, with an excited look: “Sometimes they say the ‘s’ word when they lose a point.”

When Alston first came to Chen’s club, he played four hours straight. Then, Alston at a beginner’s level, “gave me the impression of a hard worker, with respect and discipline,” Chen says. Now, six months later, Alston’s ranking is 1,700, which, according to the USATT ranking system, is intermediate level. Alston is considered a unique player and a great student, gifted with sharp eye-hand-foot coordination. “His touch is amazing, he listens and learns exactly how I coach him,” Chen says. “Other kids have their own way of thinking, but he absorbs what I teach.” Chen says table tennis has helped Alston Wang “discover his genius,” but neither Alston nor his coach, can take all the credit. “His parents should be credited the most,” Chen states. “Without his parents, there’d be no Alston. Without parents we’d have no players.”

As talented as Alston is, he still says table tennis is only a hobby, “but it’s also a way to beat my father.” Alston and his family moved to Brooklyn from Hainan, China two years ago. While in China his father taught him how to play table tennis. Alston, wearing shorts and a t-shirt emblazoned with the NYTTF logo says, “The first time I played my dad I couldn’t beat him. I just swung the paddle.” He twirls his paddle in his hand and continues, “but now, I can beat him 11-0.”

His dream is to be a table tennis professional and go to the Olympics, but first, he says he wants to beat his coach. Chen shrugged in disapproval when he heard Alston boast about his ability to beat his father and take on his teacher, but did positively remark of his student’s skill: “He already started and is on his way to be a star. For him, it is a career.”

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Leroy Smith returns the ball with ferocious speed and his 20-year-old opponent can’t reach the ball in time. “Come on! I’m an old man.” Smith yells, “you got to move your young legs. Let’s go! Let’s go!” Although Smith has a meeting to go to in ten minutes he cannot tear himself away from the table. After each game he compulsively pulls another ball from his pocket, saying, “This is the last one.”

Smith, the septuagenarian, has 38 table tennis trophies, was president of The Greater New York Table Tennis League, and plays five times a week with the vigor and intensity of youth. Forty years ago, Smith came to New York City from Jamaica with his wife and kids. He says he used table tennis to assimilate. When he started to play in the former downtown club at the old Firehouse on Lafayette Street (a block from this location) the group was like, “a little U.N.” He quickly bonded with the players—really all of them, Chinese and other ethnicities. “Once together in the club,” Leroy says, “we could never put the paddle down.”
While he eats shrimp fried rice, members surround him and ask about his day, his games and health, and claims to be the most recognized non-Chinese in Chinatown. They call him “Black-Chinese.”

Now, Smith plays for “survival.” He says: “I play not because I want to win, but because I know the damn benefits. It reduces my blood pressure; it’s an aerobic exercise. I’m 72 and I’m still jumping around.”

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Sitting out a game, Jean Philippe Kadzinski, or J.P., stands up from his seat and glances at a player who forcefully slams the ball across the table. “Don’t hit it aggressively, it’s all wrong,” J.P. says. “You have to feel the ball.” He half-squats, whisks his hands in the air and his feet and hips move along in a balanced glide and says, “You have to be in Zen.” Unlike many players, he does not play with aggressive movements, but with the tranquility of meditation. “Ping-Pong is a kind of philosophy,” J.P. continues, “like Tai-Chi.” He stresses that a player must be in harmony and balance with the body to be successful.

J.P. has icy blue eyes, a strong jaw line, a James-Bond-style smirk and hair that never seems out of place. He is a 44-year-old French model and has appeared in L’Oreal commercials, on Harper’s Bazaar covers, and in campaigns for Burberry and Mercedes-Benz. Despite only three years of experience in the game, he claims to be the number-one server in NYTTF, with 25 of his own original serves. After his first game, he realized he was a natural; since then he has won 20 tournaments and placed first in the “NYTTF Open” last August. “It’s strange,” he says, smiling after winning another game. “I feel like I was born with a paddle in my hand.”

J.P. says table tennis is not about winning, but about the philosophy behind the sport. He barely moves during a game; he seems to control where his opponent returns the ball. With a ball pressed to his lips he comments about his technique, “It’s a finished touch, a balance.”

Although few at the club emulate his style, the better players appreciate it. Longtime player and member Phillip Barren breaks it down like this: “It takes what we call touch—a delicacy, a finesse—to reach out and touch the ball so it can drop in the corner [of the table] and no one can reach it…”

Even with his meditative style and finesse, J.P. plays with an addicts’ intensity. He describes a day of table tennis as an erotic encounter he must hide from his wife. “I can’t go home for an hour,” he whispers. “My hands, they are shaking. I must stretch and relax.” And then, that word again: “It’s like a drug… an addiction like smoking or drinking or gambling.”

As hooked as they all admit they are, most NYTTF players don’t consider the game a vice. Phillip Truong, a Vietnamese immigrant, says he used his table tennis obsession to quit his pack-a-day smoking habit.

To Leroy Smith, it’s a downright virtue. “It is my responsibility to stay healthy,” he declares. “I am addicted to it now. The addiction is the realization that the body needs help. It’s an addiction with a purpose, an educated addiction.”

New York Table Tennis Federation New York Table Tennis Training Center has two entrances 384 Cortlandt Alley between Canal and White Streets, or on 384 Broadway. For more information, visit the website: www.nyttf.com. Open seven days a week, 11-a.m. to 10:30 p.m. on weekdays and 11 a.m. to 11 p.m. on Friday and Saturday. Closes Sundays at 6:30. It is the biggest table tennis club in Manhattan, with nine tables in 6,000 square feet of space, a lounge area, concession and equipment stand, and restrooms. NYTTF has been open since June 26, 2004.