How Ping Pong Works

an hour, but we never played. I remember that as being air hockey. I remember the staring. Uh. Yeah, dude, I love ping pong. I'm pretty good for you know, just a recreational pong er. Uh. And and I finally got a table. I'll get an outdoor table. Oh nice, and an outdoor table, fancy? I love it. Yeah, that's great. I don't have room inside. Well yeah, if you have an outdoor table, it doesn't matter. Yeah. I got one under the deck. Very nice, and it's just the best.

I'd love. I have had many times in my life where and now it's just kind of when I can get someone over or family, and I have a window. But um, at various points in my life, I have played a lot of ping pong, including when I lived in l A my buddy John Pindell, chef John, you know John. Um, he was I think living in a place that had an outdoor table. And this was outdoor in Los Angeles, so it's kind of great. It's just

out there in the backyard. Um. And then my brother and I have had epic, legendary ping pong battles at his house. Oh yeah, fund basement, like like matches, like a single game that went on forever kind of thing. Just I mean, not that, but like two out of three, Like every time family is over there, at one point we will disappear and everyone's like word Scott and Chuck o, and we're down there and at it. That's awesome. It's just so much fun. I love ping pong. I love

ping pong too. But my eyes are kind of open. I realized I'm not quite as much the ping pong officionado as I once thought I was. Yeah, between you and this article, I realized I'm a total schlub when it comes to ping pong. Yeah, I'm not bad. O good. Um, So we're talking ping pong today and chuckle, you can just phone this one in. I had to do a

lot of extensive shoe leather research on this one. Um. But the the idea of ping pong when you think of it, especially in this the twenty one century, most people think of um, China when they think of ping pong, especially here in the US, but really worldwide, because China is nuts for ping pong, and there are plenty of other countries too that love ping pong. Don't get me wrong. Sweden is known as one of the major homes of

ping pong. The Japanese love ping pong. It's basically almost every country except a Erica really has a thing for ping pong. Here it's just you know, fun recreational stuff. In other countries it has taken very very seriously, and there are pockets that take it seriously here too. There's the US Table Tennis Association, which has been around since

the thirties. But I think what I mean, as far as the public goes thinking about table tennis players, we don't exactly like put them hoist them on our shoulders and carry them around the room after a match like that, Like might what might happen to them? In other countries. That's a very good point. But but it's it's sort of more of a recreational Like you said, there are some competitive players, to be sure, and organizations, but it's a it's a sport you can play while you're drinking

a beer. You know. Sure, now you don't want to do that if you are actually competitive pro table tennis player. But I say all that chuck, because, um, while we think of China's like the home of table tennis, it actually is a British um invention. Did you know that I did? Well, of course you did your table tennis pro. No, I mean I knew that just because it was a

variation of tennis, which the Brits also gave us. Um, it is a racket sport, which, um, you can include things like bad mitten and uh, smosh ball and smash ball. What are those things they played down at ben As Beach. What is that called pickle ball? Is that what it is? It's basically like a miniature tennis court. I think it's called smash ball. Okay, I don't know. People are yelling at in their car right now at me. I mean I've heard I think you're talking about pickleball. Is it pickleball?

It's just sort of like a shrunken down tennis court. Um, But obviously they're playing it looks like tennis with oversized ping pong paddles, right exactly, Okay, yeah, that's pickleball, all right. It might be called smash ball too, you know, there's a regional difference in the grinder hero that kind of thing. I think pickle I think smashball is something else entirely. Are you thinking of smash mouth? God? That again, um,

reference to our lives show that we just did. Okay, But what I was saying was it is a known as a racket sport or a racket game wherein you have a racket, you hit something over a net to another human or maybe a robot even uh as we'll get to. But uh, and there's a there's a court, there are boundaries of some kind that you need to hit it in. It's not just a crazy fee for all right exactly. You can't just like win a point by crushing it over your opponent's head. That would be fun.

It takes skill and finesse, and it even takes more skill in finesse than like tennis does. Like lawn tennis because lawn tennis well so, so there's a difference. There's royal tennis, which is played like I'm trying to remember what movie it appeared in. Um, maybe it was even down to Nabby, I'm not sure, but whether you play it indoors, it's like tennis indoors and there's like the ball is hard and wrapped in cloth and squash. No. No, there's royal tennis, and then um there's lawn tennis or

modern tennis is what it's called. And ping pong is a variation on modern tennis, but it takes more finesse because yes, you can smash the ball and that is

a way to go aggressive attacks style um playing. But there's also a really good way to play too, which is is strictly defensive and it's all finesse and spin and we'll we'll see like there's a lot of thought that goes into it, which is why if you notice, if you start to look around at who plays table tennis, you'll find that there are table tennis um tables and in places where they're very smart people like m I. T has a table tennis club, and CERN has a

table tennis club and one of their one of their cafeterias. Like smart people like this because there's a lot of physics involved into it, UM and there's not a lot of running around either. Yeah, you don't see him. Uh, you don't see dumb dumps because they're just like I don't get it, yeah, like smash ball paddle. But we do know that the although we don't know like the the inventor. There's not one person that is credited with

its invention um. But the story goes that British soldiers in South Africa or India, we're board and you know, the weather wasn't so great and they were probably drinking, and so they came up with this little, smaller version of tennis played on a table um, as the story goes, using cigar box lids, using sabar o lids and a

whittled down champagne cork to make it round. Which you know that that wouldn't be a bad little first first go I saw that exact same story was attributed to some wealthy UM British aristocrats who were bored one day. That sounds about right, but there seems to be unanimous UM agreement that it was on a table with some cigar box lids and a cork whittled down. Yeah, and so you know, it grow from there, it grow it growed. Excuse me, uh, I think he's still got another try left.

It growed from there into wait wait, wait you mean grow right? You're kidding, right, okay, okay, that's the first time I knew you were kidding. The second time I was like, chuck, looking straight man, Um, you really are It grew from there and the names changed various times. The first UM manufactured, actually put out and sell ping pong tables was the Jacques Games Company and they called

it Gossama. Um. There was another trademarked name with whaff, which was the Slayinger Company's h name, and the world was like, you got another try there. That was one called flim Flam. I don't know if that was trademarked from a company or if that was just a nickname. And all these with with the exception of Gossama, they were meant to to um emulate the sound the ball made going back and forth. Right, really yeah, yeah, whiff whaff It didn't sound like whiff waff at all. What

about flip flam? Nope, maybe the sound of the paddle. It sounds like a whiff win, a whaff, but not the ball. Okay, fine, but gossima meant it was like after gossamer, which was kind of fine and thin and um elegant, which was like the ball play. It was what that was describing. They were all terrible, terrible names. I can't believe we just said that. So. Uh. They did use cork at first, but they didn't bounce great.

Rubber wasn't good because it had too much bounce. Um. The rackets were really kind of crazy looking at first. Someone had really long handles, kind of look like a bad mitten racket um with a vellum stretched over a wooden frame. But they were not Uh, they broke on

the table and stuff. So they were really kind of refining it in those early years as far as the equipment goes, right, Um, and I think it was that was it Jaque, No, you know, it was Jacques the J. J. Jackuin's son who um were the ones that were selling those like what you just described, just kind of cheap, not well made, not really well thought out equipment for ping pong, which it wasn't called ping pong at the time until the late eighteen nineties when that same company,

Jay Jacques and Son, who were a sporting goods outfit, started calling it ping pong in their catalog. It just converted from gossima over to ping pong through these guys. Yeah, and it was um before that. In eighty five, there was an attempt to patent it as table tennis by guy named James Debonshire. But uh, two years later he abandoned that pursuit. I don't know if it was just taking too long or if he saw the writing on the wall, but he he left that behind and then

it would be um. Like you said. Nineteen o one was when Jean Jack trademarked at ping pong name yep. And then Parker Brothers bought the North American or at least American rights to use ping pong exclusively and they brought ping pong to the United States with that um. And this is the reason why if you you know, look up any professional association or any um competitive like ping pong group, they always refer to as table tennis

because ping pong is a trademark, table tennis is not. Plus, also, over the years, ping pong has gotten an association with people like me. Yeah, just people having fun playing it, where table tennis has been the route that you know, most competitive. Um that that that it did notes competitiveness,

competition pro kind of thing. But I think if you're just hanging around the locker room or whatever with some table tennis pros, they'll refer to it as ping pong and no one's like, oh, I can't believe you just called it that, and you were like, no, that's locker room talk. So uh. The same year that ping pong was trademarked, in nineteen o one, there was an Englishman named James Gibb. He found these celluloid balls when he went to the US that were just it wasn't for

table tennis. It was just a toy and novelty toy. He's like, this is pretty great. Actually, it's pretty lively. It's light, uh, just the right amount of bounce. And so I think celluloid is kind of like the route we should take. And everyone seemed to agree and that sort of became the de facto ping pong ball, right, did say that way forever. Celluloid is a type of plastic. It's super flammable, like it's what film stock, like camera

film was made from forever um. But like I said, it's very flammable and your ball is gonna go up in flames if you pass it over a candle, like if you're lighting your game by candles. So that's not very good. But that was an enormous change that pushed ping pong way forward, because up to that point, a corkball didn bounced very well. Rubber ball bounced too much. You couldn't really play ping pong like we see it today. It was more like, oh, sir, oh sorry, here's another service.

Oh sorry, here's another service. My point, it was just boring. When that guy came along with the celluloid balls and introduced him for ping pong play, that was it made it fun. Finally, ping pong finally became fun. Yeah. Just a year after that to the paddle, and this is all sort of aligning perfectly. The paddle underwent a big change um over the years proceeding. They had used cork

to cover them and leather sometimes. I saw that you can still buy leather covered ping pong paddles, and Tiffany's yeah, I could totally see that pearl handled leather, leather facing. Uh, but they couldn't land on the right materials, and then Attwo at a tournament, a man named ec Good found this dimpled rubber coin mat wrapped it around his paddle and he's like, this thing is pretty boss. I can get a little spin on it. We got this ball from the year before, and everything sort of clicking at

this point, right. That was so you've got the great ball, You've got the great covering, um, and now Ping Pong is ready to explode, and it started to and then it just stopped. Let's take a break, okay, all right, that's a good cliffhanger and find out what killed Ping Pong right after this. Well, now we're on the road, driving in your truck. Want to learn a thing or two from Josh camp Chuck. It's stuff you should know, all right, all right, So Ping Pong's finally coming into

its own limbs, finally getting good. And then right as it is, it just it just drops off as a fad that craze, especially in the United States, and I think in Europe too. It just kind of went away. Um And there's no real obvious reason why. But our old pal ed dug up an example that he thinks

might be behind it. There was an ad for the National Guard in nineteen fourteen, where one of the major generals in the National Guards said that they don't want any ping pong warriors, which implies that the sport was seen as um effeminate or that you were kind of a whimp or something if you play ping pong. So it's possible that like that kind of um uh, the warlike masculinity rose above it and ping pong got pushed

down as a result. Well. And also World War One in the Spanish flu um probably put a dent in in fun games like this overall, I would say, I mean, that's just a guess. But they had more important, more important fish to fry than playing ping pong. But came back right after the war, right right after the war. And I don't think that it is coincidental that this was also a time when people started smoking pot a lot in America, the jazz age UM. So you had jazz, marijuana, cigarettes,

and ping pong. Those are the big three of the jazz age. Quite a mix, yeah, And then so Parker Brothers still had their their trademark on this whole thing. They're like, oh, great, hallelujah, it's the jazz age UM and they started throwing these competitions with cash prizes, and celebrities showed up. It was a big deal. Yeah. Imagine during the marijuana craze too, they were like, this is great for what we're doing, but we gotta keep score.

And that's a problem, right, somebody's gotta stay sober for this, Like who what was it? Who served? Was it? No way? Is it? Seven six? Man? You're way too uptight for this. So I believe in the twenties is when they started having these big tournaments Parker Brothers with prizes. Celebrities were coming out. Um, the i T t F. It was officially founded in the mid twenties. That's the International Table Tennis Foundation. Yeah, and they start having world championships in

nineteen six, Yeah, like right off the bat. Yeah, and it was a big deal. Like obviously they stopped during World War Two for a peer period of time, but pretty much every couple of years since ninety six, aside from the war, Um, they started holding these Uh I guess would it be bi annual or over two years? Well that could be, yes, bi annuals over two years, that's not twice here, I think it can be. That was one of those things I think you would use

semi semi annual, might even be quarterly. I'm not sure. I think it can be neither one, just like with weekly. Yeah, but those first years, uh, Hungarians were the dominant country. Um. They won eight of the first nine. Um. Four of those went to the same guy, a guy named Victor Bara one, thirty two, thirty three, thirty four, and thirty five. Man, that's good. Yeah, so he was doing pretty good. But the United States was not. No, they, like I said, the U s t t A didn't form until nineteen

thirty three. And even then, if you wanted to go play really like hih level table tennis, you went to one place in the entire country, Lawrence's Broadway Courts in Manhattan Town. You gotta go to New York if you want to play ping pong. See if you can make it there. You can make it anywhere in the US, but don't even try it in Hungary. Yeah, it just wasn't. Uh, it just didn't catch on like it did in Europe. No,

it didn't. And this is like this is the same, like there's never I think it was kind of big in the seventies to again POT in the United States, but um, it's never been like ex like explosively sustainably popular like it has in other countries and in particular. Um. So, the Europeans are dominating table tennis from about the mid twenties to almost went to the early fifties. Yeah, and then from thirty to fifty the Soviet Union banned it

for twenty years. That left of Soviet vacuum. Okay, so so the Hungarians, well, the Hungarians would have been an Soviet control then, huh. I don't know the answer to that question. Yeah, I guess they would have been, So that would have I guess. I wonder if that's when it moved over to Western Europe. Northwestern Europe, like Sweden in Germany. Yeah, supposedly the best all time players a Swede. That's what I've heard too, the Mozart table tenants U

Jean Jean ov Waldner. Oh you with the oh the gen part, I'm like, I don't know if he's Swedish and then the ove really got me. Probably not John, it's probably yahn yn Ova Waldner. Yeah, nice, supposedly the best ever. So is he contemporary? M hmm, I don't know. Okay, So, um, so you've got this, You've got Europe dominating America's like, we're not even trying right now. And this is basically from the twenties to the early fifties. And then in

n Asia steps in and says, don't forget Asia. UM in the form of a man named hiro Ji Sato and Uh. He showed up at the World Championship in ninety two, UH in Bombay or Mumbai, and he said, hey, you know how there's no rules about what kind of paddle I can use or what size it is, or there's not really a lot of a lot of guidance on the paddle. Check this out. He had put foam around his paddle, and boy did that make the ball

bounce back. It increased the speed of the ball tremendously and he just dominated that that tournament and became world champion in nineteen fifty two. By the way, that guy is totally contemporary. He's in his fifties, he's retired now. I don't know why you would retire from table tennis. So one thing I read, I read an article about a kid who is one of the best in the world, who is actually from America's an Indian American. Um. He Uh, he trains like he has to train to move around

the table fast off. Well, supposedly, if you're an advanced player, you can burn up to five calories an hour playing table tennis. Is that right? That's what they say. That's a that's a Snickers bar and a half. Yeah, I mean I work up a sweat. That's that's me as well, though, So take that in consideration. Yeah, I can sweat playing chess. I can't wait till you reach the age where you just walk around in public with a hand towel around

your neck. Who does that? What's his name from the office, Robinson? Is that his name? Oh Craig, Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I think he's famous for sort of just draping a sweat towel over his shoulder. Yeah, why not, you know, good for him. I'm gonna follow that lead. So there's worse leads you could follow, for sure. Yeah. So, um Heirogi Sato showed up with his foam paddled um paddle or foam covered paddle and just dominate and became the the hero or the champion of that tournament and of

the world. But there's two legends that happened to him afterward. One he returned home and was hailed a hero and a champion by Japan, and two he returned home and was scorned as a dishonorable winner because he used an unusual paddle and never played table tennis again. And um, it turns out that he doesn't show up in any other tournament after that one. So maybe he was like, well, I achieved it, I'm gonna go do some other stuff. Or um, maybe he really was like, this was this

everyone's right, this was dishonorable. I'm never going to play again. Interesting. I hope there wasn't some nefarious action taken. I hope so too. So Over the years, uh, a lot of changes have taken place to make it more um playable and more and this is like the official rules in competition. To make it more playable and to make it better for people watching it. Um, they lower the net by about an inch over the years, um to make it

guess a little zippier and more fun. Uh, they increase Actually, not too long ago, in two thousand, they increased the size of the ball by two millimeters to slow it down a little bit. Um, because it was getting so fast people couldn't even follow it. It was like Forrest Gump up in there and people like it doesn't I mean, it has to be a I mean it's not a big TV sport here obviously, but it's a big TV sport in a lot of the world, Like people watch

this stuff. Yeah, I mean the camera has to be able to see where the ball is going, which isn't hockey. You know, people want to see what's going on. They could do the glowing ball like they did in hockey for a while. Oh, I forgot about that. Yeah, same company that did the ten yard line or the first down line. Oh right, yeah, was it really yeah, yeah it was. I think Pat did glowy things, right. Um, I think we talked about I can't remember what episode

we talked about that one before. But okay, so you have the foam paddled padded paddle, you've got um balls that work really well, and um you had have uh what else, chuck, you have a lowered net. Yeah, you have a bigger ball you have and and then probably the cream of the crop. That's not what I'm looking for, man, am I just no, that's the death below, um the

uh well, the pinnacle. They made it an Olympic Summer sport. Ah, yes, yes, Which now it's like, okay, now you're not just wasting your life being a pro table tennis player just just in it for the pot. You know, you can actually train to go to the Olympics for your country. That's right, pretty monumental. Um, should we talk about playing styles a bit? I think we should. I like where you're I like

where you're going or not going with this next? Well, uh so the point is made in this article that, um, table tennis is is a game all about the style of play, sort of like boxing. You can come out swinging hard, you can come out with the rope a dope. You can play defense in boxing, and you can kind of do that in tennis. You can be really aggressive and try and set up for the big smashes, or you could be what's known as a chiseler or a pusher and just be really fundamentally sound and wait for

your opponent to make a mistake. Right, And that was Chiseling was huge, um back before the phone paddles, because that's all you really had. You couldn't you couldn't attack with a huge, super fast return. I mean you could try, but it wasn't going to really work. Um, But once the introduction of foam came around, chiseling became like a decision. You could also be an attacker as well. Yeah, I mean I think now you've got to have all of the weapons in your ping pong arsenal right, exactly. You

know you can play the spin game. You can be defensive, but you also gotta hang fifteen feet back off the table and hit those big loop shots, right. Yeah, you want to be able to do both for sure. So with the chiselers though, the defensive minded uh people in this legendary match took place the World Championships between two of the greatest chiselers of all time, um, a Polish player named Alex Rlick and a Romanian named Penneth Farcas. This was such a like, I mean, I've read into

this too. It just doesn't seem like it's possible that the following took place. Okay, well, that's this is how it was recorded in nine and Sports Illustrated. All right, there are a lot of little points here. By the way, Did you say that the most epic part of this is it was the first point? Um? Supposedly, the very first point took two hours and twelve minutes to complete, so they just kept hitting it back and forth. It was a two hour and twelve minute volley. It was

zero zero at two hours in twelve minutes. That's how good these guys were at chiseling or just playing defensively. Like somebody his do you hit it right back? Somebody has do you hit it right back? You're not trying to smash it down their throat. You're just patiently waiting

for them to make a mistake. It's a fast game still, It's not like playing with a six year old, right, But the thing is is it's a fast game, but you, as the player and probably as a spectator, are like start to feel like you're about to go insane because you're locked into this zero zero like this. For at the time ping pong was played to twenty one. Whoever got to twenty one first, and then you had to

still win by two points. So if this was zero zero for two hours and twelve minutes, the ball cross the net twelve thousand times, I just don't know if I buy it. That's a problem time wise. Yeah, So here's all the things that supposedly happened. Um a referee in the match his neck locked up and had to be replaced. Midpoint, his neck had to be replaced. Yeah, Orlick switched hands because he got tired and played with his left hand for a little while every now and then.

I believe that um during ring the point, the I T T F got together to negotiate shortening the match, the game to five points instead of twenty one. Right, But they had to have the proper representatives from the different countries there, and it air Like was the representative from Poland, so they couldn't have this meeting without him.

So they had the meeting table side during the match, like during this point as it was going on, Supposedly Airlic had a chessboard set up table side and during the match was also playing chess and saying what move to make? I don't know about that, That's what he said. That's why I don't believe any of this. This all sounds like tall tale. Well there are other people there, all right, Well, then he played chess, I don't I don't know about that one, but I do think that

there are definite elements to that. I believe that there was a two hour and twelve minute period where there were zero to zero I don't know. Um, at least that's that's true. Well, there's so much stuff attached to this it makes me doubt the whole thing. Um. Austrian players suppose he went to a movie, came back still during the first point um, and then finally the Romanian paneth Farcas Mr return erlic goes up one oh, and

then they started on point number two. They get twenty minutes into that one, and supposedly other members of the Polish team pulled out knives and bread and a two ft sausage, thinking that they were going to be there forever, and this made Farcas basically lose his mind. He lost his marbles. Like Burger King, he went on the attack. At that point, he went from being a what do they call the chiseler to going hard on the attack. Hit it twice, erlick returned both and then he basically

lost it. Supposedly just blasted the ball over his head and ran out screaming. I love that story. That's one of the better ping punk stories around. Yeah, I believe about it all right, But even if the only thing you believe is that they were zero zero for two hours and twelve minutes. Now you keep saying I believe that. I'm saying even if that is the only thing you believe, then that's good enough. I don't buy any of it. What do you think, like that there was a match

between these two and then that's it. Everything else is made up? No, I think I think Laura has taken over and that it has been enriched over the years to where people were going to movies and the dude was playing chess. Sure, sure, yeah, I just I don't I don't buy it that it went down like that. But do you believe that they were zero zero for two hours and twelve minutes. I don't know if I believe that or not, because I haven't seen a verified

source other than this guy telling the story. Okay, where did you see it other than this guy telling the story? Nowhere? But I mean, like that takes a lot of goal to just make up that story, tell it to Sports Illustrated, have it printed in Sports Illustrated, knowing that anybody could go behind you and say, well, let's look at the records for that night and see and just say, well,

this guy is totally lying. Is people have goal? Yeah, Well, you and I are going to agree to disagree, just to keep things moving, because I think at the very least they were zero zero for two hours and twelve minutes. I buy that. Here's what I think. I'm definitely not gonna say. Well it was in Sports Illustrated what so it had to be true? Alright, alright, So enough for waging on Sports Illustrated from you. Hey, and I got that magazine for many many years. You know who's on

my first cover? Giselle Bunching Muhammad Ali. Oh wow, I started getting it when I was a kid. Jeez, wow, do you still have that one? I'll bet it's worth like seven ten dollars now, I do. I think my mom kept all the like many many years in a box. It's kind of fun to go through and look every now and then. Oh yeah, for sure. All right, so this fake match happens uh in the nineteen thirties, um Jewish table tennis players, and we should point out that

many of the early world champions were Jewish men. Um. They fled Germany for England and then uh Erlick, who we just mentioned the Polish player was threatened. Obviously, he was in Poland when the Nazis invaded and he was sent to Auschwitz and he was literally being led to the gas chamber when a German Nazi guard recognized him and spared his life. Yeah, like he was about to die.

And he got moved around from concentration camp to concentration camp until the Allies liberated him and others from the concentration camp he was in. And then right after the war he went right back to table tennis. Yeah, it's pretty crazy, all right. I think we should take a break, okay and go talk about Sports Illustrated some more, alright, that the bastion of and journalism, and we'll be back right after this. Well, now we're on the road, driving

in your truck. Want to learn a thing or two from Josh M chuck It stuff you should know, all right, all right, So Chuck Um, we were talking about like chiselers and attackers and all that. And at first, if you played ping pong up until the fifties, up until Sato showed up with his phone paddle, um, you're basically just chiseling. Everybody was chiseling. This is a patient, back

and forth game. Once the phone paddles came up and change the game so radically, like you said, they actually enlarged the size of the ball to increase the air assistance to it to slow it down, which was a huge change for everybody to get used to as well. I think that was in the two thousands that that change was made, But from the fifties to the two thousand's people were just crushing the ping pong ball. It got really fast and really fast paced. It was fun,

but it got too fast. So um, the the I T. T F stepped in and said, now we got to make some changes. And that's some of the other things that they've done too. They've made changes and rules over the over the lifetime of ping pong to to make the game hard and interesting, but also to make it fun to watch too. Yeah, they now you play to eleven in competition play um used to be twenty one for most, uh, just sort of backyard fund players. It's still twenty one, but these people are these people are

so good though that twenty one. It's just way too long of a game. You can play a point for two and a half hour, right, two hours and twelve minutes to be precise. Uh. They change sometimes the serve rotation, like how many times you serve in a row before you switch it up. Um, which side do you play on? Um? You can't hide the ball when you serve, because you know, trying just trying to make the game as fair as possible. Um. The dimensions of the table are kind of interesting if

you're looking at it in meters. Uh. And if you're from the United States, it's a nine ft long table, five ft wide, two and a half feet high. But that's two point seven four meters one point five to five wide, seventy high. Um. The net is six inches high. Uh, but that's after they lowered it a bit. Have you seen how they make balls? Uh? Yeah, like the little factory. Yeah, you saw like video of it being made. I can

watch that stuff all day long. I know. Same here. Um. If you if you look at ping pong balls before their armed into balls, to actually start as little flat plastic circles, and that that was that is one half of a ping pong ball. And they take it and they form it. They press like a like a ball bearing ping pong ball size ball bearing in hot water to mold it. And they take two of those two halves and put them together and seal them. And then they trim off the fat and there's your ping pong ball.

But that's not the end of the life of the ping pong ball manufacturing process because the the companies that make ping pong ball specifically, there's one that's like a globally dominant, dominating ping pong equipment company called Double Happiness, which we'll talk about later. But they do so much quality control it's astounding. Before they settle a ping pong ball. Oh,

I'm sure, Like there's there's a to measure bounce. There's like a specific amount of bounce that the I T. T A requires for a ping pong ball, and so a company will will measure it by dropping it a set height I think like three millimeters and it has to bounce back up like two forty two sixty and they measure it with the digital camera. It has to have a specific hardness, so that use a robot with a needle to test the pressure it takes to puncture

it with a needle. Um It's like Casper mattresses, but they drop a human exactly, they drop, they roll it down and incline to see where it veers. I mean, like there's a lot going on there just to make a ping pong ball that's that's usable in a game. I think that. I mean, I just think it's top notch that they take it that seriously, you know, I mean any competition, uh, sporting ball undergoes incredible testing, right, Like they just don't throw out an NFL football or

a basketball either or a tennis ball. What it's pretty amazing, Yeah it is. But ping pong, ping pong balls, That's what I'm talking about here. I think you, I think you secretly are kind of making fun of ping pong. I don't mean to be. I'm just my pong. My idea of ping pong has changed as a result of UM researching this. How about that? So the paddles themselves, they are laminated wood. When you look at him, you can tell it's sort of pressed together of different woods. Um,

some of them are fire fiberglass. There are carbon fiber paddles, which I would love to give that a whirl. Yeah, but I saw that of the thickness has to be would does that mean there's like carbon fiber in the middle of it, maybe just to make it like slightly lighter, would be my guests. Um, there are all kinds of materials, like from just the regular you can still get like

the sand paper paddles very low fi. But those that padded rubber on one side, uh, and the textured little rubber dimples on the other side, which have to be two different colors, by the way, because the other players supposedly needs to know which side you're hitting it with so they know what's coming or you know, to a varying degree what might be coming. Right, But that's sort of like the classic paddle that most people have settled

on right now. Yeah, and the the smooth, padded side would be for chiseling, and the um the dimpled side would be for attacking and for probably the most important part of ping pong spin to add spin to the ball. Yeah, I'm a pretty good spinner. Oh you are, huh, Like, not just one kind of spin? Can you do multiple

kinds of spin? Yeah? I've got a good batcan spinner shot that's very fast and then sort of a flick of the wrist that it just shoots off the paddle and then has a nice little top spin to it. And I try to angle that to like that farthest corner than I can. That's really impressive, Chuck, Well, I didn't say it was great. At it, But that's the aim. This is what's going on in your head at least, right, Yeah, but I'm not like a great uh, I mean, what do you can call it a smash or a slam

an attacker? Well, just the big you know, Oh that's ash mouth. Yeah, the smash mouth. I'm not a good smash mouth or I'm not great. I mean and get lucky every once in a while, but I still try because it's such a boss move. It really is pretty cool. Um. But that's sort of the variation of the loop stroke, which is what you see on TV when someone just

throws a big hay maker. Uh. It's all in the hips and the legs, tons of top spin, and that's sort of like that main shot for what would be a big smash to me is sort of the regular shot that people volley back and forth on in competition, right. And when you when you're doing the loop, it's like from what I saw, it's an upward chopping motion where you're just basically bringing the paddle up really quick as it comes in contact with the ball, which, like you said,

because it tons of top spin. And there's this thing called the Magnus effect with fluid dynamics. Whereas this ping pong is moving through the air, the bottom or the side of it that's spinning into the air is generating more resistant so there's higher air pressure there then there is on top and I'm sorry, on the bottom, which makes the ball fall because there's less air pressure there.

So when you put spin on the ball, depending on which direction it's going, you can make it go left, right, up, down, and depending on the type of um the type of what's it call when you hit the ball, not the grip, the depending on this, I guess it's the stroke. Depending on the stroke you use, you can apply different spin to the ball. But that's the big reason why, like one side of a ping pong paddle is dimpled so that you can make contact with the ball and really

kind of grip it while you're giving it that spin. Yeah, so they're all kinds of grips. Um. The shake hand grip is sort of if you don't play a lot of ping pong, it's probably just the standard little grip that you would want to use. The pinhole grip is what you see. My brother and Asian players use that Scott's move, the one with the thumb on the back

side of it. Yeah, it's uh, basically, your thumb and forefinger kind of wrap around the handle and almost touch each other, and then your other three fingers are resting on the back of the paddle itself, and it sort of sort of looks like you're holding the paddle upside down, well because you kind of are. Yes, but that's my brother is a total uh pin holder. Got you? What about the c Miller grip? Do you ever do that? That's Danny c Miller. That's I didn't really quite get then.

That's like the shake hand. But what I saw was like the thumb and forefinger are kind of resting on the face of the paddle. Sometimes the finger forefinger is wrapped around sort of on the side of the paddle. What I saw was that, so you've got your three your pinky finger, your ring finger, and your index finger that's on the paddle. Your middle finger are all rap Yeah, that's on the handle. Your forefinger and your thumb are

like control. They're like up against the edges of the paddle, and it makes it easier to spin the paddle and control it. That's what I saw as the c Miller grip. Yeah, Well it's easier to flip the paddle to use both sides of it right exactly. So you want to chisel here and then maybe a little attack there, put some spin on, and then just push it back. You just

flip it back and forth. Thanks to Danny C. Miller. Yeah, and I love the next part of this article, which is, like, um, if you want to know all the rules of ping pong, go look them up, right, because it will be kind of boring just to read all those out. But there are um, I mean, if you're playing in someone's house, you play house rules, just ask what they are. Be a good guest, to be a good guests and say

what are the house rules? Because people play differently. Um, some more not obscure rules but sort of sort of nitpicky rules that casual players might not know. Um And depending on on where you play the house rules, it may take effect or not. You're supposed to toss the ball at least sixteen centimeters into the air before you serve, right, Um, My house rule is you just have to have some air between the like you can't just hold it in

your hand and hit it off your hand. Like, we don't say it has to be sixteen centimeters, but there has to be a little bit of air between your hand. The ball has to be suspended before you serve it. So what happens if someone violates your house rules? Are they like tired, tired and feathered? Now you say, dude, what are you doing? Not cool? Here's a smash mouth for you. Uh. And you have to serve behind the in line. Um, that's a pretty standard even and for

house rules, like you're leaning over the table. Oh, I see what you mean you can't lean forward a couple of feet because I was going to say, I thought you were saying, like you have to get it inside a square? Do you get it to the other square? And I saw that that's that only applies in doubles. Yeah, you can serve it to either side when you're playing singles. Right, and then if you if it touches your hand that

you're holding the paddle with. Apparently according to the I T T F, your hand is part of the paddle as far as they're concerned. So if it if it bounces off of your hand, that's there's nothing wrong with that. Yeah. I always get the thumb hit though, and it it always sends it off in a bad direction and I always go, ah, I'm hit. You need to do more

c Miller more see Miller less thumbsies. The pimples, believe it or not, those are regulated, Um, they cannot be larger than two millimeters, But astoundingly, the size of the paddle is not at all regulated. You could show up with them a pickle ball paddle if you wanted to, and they'd be like, yep, it works. Um. But the foam padding on either side. If you're a competitive table tennis player, you glue your own foam on and you

can cheat it too, right. Yeah, For a lot of until the Beijing Olympics, you could from I think the sixties until the Beijing Olympics, they would use a specific kind of glue that UM would would it would expand but at the same time soften the foam underneath the exterior um of the phone padding. So you've got like the the layer that like the rubbery layer, and then

underneath that is foam like a spongey material. It would get into the pores of that spongey material and it would make that ball bounce even faster, and UM would

just give it an enormous amount of speed. But just for a short amount of time though, right, right, So if you were in a tournament, you were pulling off and then regluing your um your phone pads on multiple times over the course of that weekend, because you get about three or four hours of good um um, I don't know, ricochet return off of those things, um, and then they would dry up and and it wouldn't be quite as as useful cheaters. I love the article you

sent and where they were basically like everyone was doing it. Everybody. They called it doping. Table ten is doping. But the problem is that it had a lot of volatile organic compounds. So the International Table Tennis Foundation said, no, we don't want people getting cancer, so we gotta ban it, and they actually test paddles now in a little machine that tests for volatile organic compounds. Ye, get those rats out

of the game. Get about uh, you gotta win by two, like we said, generally played at twenty one at home eleven in competition, I think we said. And then um, obviously you just anything as a point. If you get the point. It's not like volleyball. You don't have to be serving to get the point, right, which I love that too. It makes the game go a lot faster. Yeah, and just my whole problem is keeping up with that score. Yeah, that's why you want a sober person. They're taking keeping

score for you. Uh. And I guess we should finish with this well a couple of things. But um, you've heard the term ping pong diplomacy. Yeah, there's a big story there. Yeah, that came from a real thing that happened. Um. Obviously, China live um in isolation for decades and decades from the rest of the world. And then during the Cold War, of course we were on the US was on the

opposite side of China. Not a lot of travel going back and forth or allowed between the countries until the International Competition of nine where the Chinese table tennis team went to the championships in Japan. Uh met some Americans, and in particular one American named Glenn Cowen, and he was like, hey, man, like, we're all the same, really, we all love table tennis regardless of our grip. Let's shake hands. And he rode the bus with him on the way back to the hotel. So so let me

let me just interject here. He got on the bus accidentally, he had missed his own bus and these were busses that were taking the teams to the hotel, and there was like the first ten minutes of this fifteen minute bus ride were silent in tents because these two enemy groups were on the same bus and no one knew what to do until Juang Zedong stood up and said, I'm going to go talk to this guy. Yeah. But they got along great. Like I said, they had more

in common than they thought. And table tennis or ping pong is literally what brought them together, and it was seen as a sort of an emblematic thing. Uh. Flash forward a bit to the press covering this, it becomes a big deal. The US table tennis UH competition team said we want to go to China, uh and like because they're the best of the best over there, and mal Z Dong said, sure, come on over. They did so in April one. They spent a week there. It was big in the news and it literally kind of

thawed relations between the US and China. I mean it paved the way for a trip by Richard Dixon. Like the the U S table tennis team went over there before Nixon did UM and just shared love of table tennis and this this um, this kind of international exposure of these two enemy countries, like getting along. Whatever it takes to build common ground and consensus. If it's table tennis, awesome,

so much the better. So um that it led to um to normalized relations between the two countries very quickly, like within a year after after the or the beginnings of normalized relations within a year after the thing. Where all because Xiang Zadong came over and said, hey, man, I just want to say thank you for playing table tennis and gave him a scarf, and Glen Cowen had a comb on him, and He's like, this isn't a

good enough reciprocal gift. So he he later gave Ziang ze Dong a m a T shirt with a peace symbol on it, which is pretty cool. Man Richard Dixon, well known lover of session in cuisine and marijuana, Yes, and peace symbol t shirts. He was a reared one of those in public. Uh. We should also talk a little bit about ping pong robots. Um. They built a

table tennis robot. Um. It was okay, Um, you could program it to to imitate different styles, um, but it wasn't like when when you played again, when it played against the human being um. It was what what what? What would happen there? It was just shooting them all to the same place at the same exactly where it's going to go. Yeah, there wasn't a lot of training

from it. But then they started inventing robots. I could like add spin to it and pick its own moves And that was in like the early nineties when they first came out with those and the ones they have today. One came out in six two thousand and sixteen called uh four FEUs f O r p h e U. Yeah it is and it can play some mean ping pong um, but it's a it like actually plays you. It's a an ai that plays you in ping pong. But it's like a giant mechanical spidery kind of looking thing. Yeah,

it's really creepy looking. It looks like a Yeah, it looks like a big spider sitting high above the table across from you. And Uh, I saw the video the guy playing it at ces and he he was I felt bad for the guy because you cannot beat the thing. Well. Plus he also goes, we'll pus some kind of nervous because all these people are watching. Well in the ass at one point, He's like, is there literally, like nothing I can do that this thing won't returning. They're like nope. Yeah.

So then he was like, well, why I'm even here? Well, yeah, it's an ai. It's it's it's um tracking the ball's velocity and trajectory and like making calculations about how to best return it. It's you're not gonna win against it, Nope, but you can train really well to beat other human socks off with it. That's right. So I don't have anything else, do you. I'm looking at my fun facts

I got in three of the four. The last one here is the world record was set between two players who, um, if you're doing like speed ping pong, they hit it back and forth one d and seventy three times in sixty seconds. Oh my god. That is some serious speed play. That is. That's an amazing fact. But it's got nothing on the two hour and twelve minute point. Fake news. All right, Now, you got anything else? I got nothing else? All right? Well, if you want to know more about

ping pong, go start playing. It's the greatest thing you can ever try to do with your life. And since I said that, it's time for listener and mail we should have a totally have a ping pong table here at work. I agree. I don't think we have room for it anymore, but at one point we probably did. I know now where it's all this like production space, production space, and we're like, where's ping pong? I'm gonna

call this. Uh, well, we've been getting a lot of heat lately for two errors, one of which was sort of a joke by me which I'm gonna read now. But we should also say about figs and dates and same things are all the same thing. It's like it's like pork ham and bacon. Now we we heard from a lot of people about that and we understand now, yeah, we I mean, I got it flat out wrong. So sorry about that everyone. Uh, you can stop telling us now right. This is about average life expectancy, which I

was kind of just kidding about. I can't It was I think Spanish Flu episode. I made a joke about the life expectancy being like fifty or something, and I was like, so I'd almost be dead. Um, so I'll just read this, Hey, stuffers, I hope this doesn't come across being snarky or trolley, but I think you should try and clear up the difference between average actual life expectancy and average life expectancy. UM chuck more than once.

So I guess I've said this before. You've made it sound as if people in the past could only expect to live into the thirties or forties. But that is not the case. People live well into their sixties, seventies, eighties, and nineties, just like today. UM. And he gives some prominent examples of old people back in the day, and then he says what drove the average life expectancy down was the insanely high rate of infant and childhood mortality. People had huge families back in the past just to

try and ensure this. Some of their children survived into adulthood because so many died his infants and others never made it past their second or third year due to mom's measles, influenza, etcetera. Uh, the absolute horror of whooping cough. Let's not forget polio and any number of plagues that modern medicine has managed to render vastly less lethal, thanks mostly to our friend of vaccines. So more and more children are surviving the battlefield called childhood, growing into adults,

and the average life expectancy has become much longer. This is a great email, Thank you Western Medicine. That's from Joseph Catrell and Joseph, I was kind of just kidding about that which time, well every time it was a recurring joke. But um, that was very kind email and it was fun and funny and you you did it right, So thank you for sure. Plus also, you gave you a chance to tell everybody that you know that that's

the case. Yeah, and it gave everybody. It gave me a chance to let everybody know that I was totally wrong about dates and figs. Um. Well, if you want to correct us like Joseph did, that was an a plus correction email. Joseph, you can get in touch with us. You go to stuff you shao dot com and check out our social links, or you can send us an email to stuff podcast at how stuff works dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff works dot com