Ping-Pong Diplomacy by Nicholas Griffin

Author:Nicholas Griffin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner

CHAPTER 35 | Long Hair, Light Heart

The same year that the Chinese world champions had stepped off a plane straight into the Cultural Revolution, Glenn Cowan was still a kid, the oldest son of a middle-class Jewish family from New Rochelle. Just a short ride from Manhattan, in 1966 the New York suburb did a good impersonation of the American heartland. It had a Woolworth’s where you could still buy a Coke for a nickel, no stores higher than an elm tree, and a Main Street dominated by redbrick banks. “We were crew-cut kids,” explained his brother, Keith Cowan, fitting seamlessly into the All-American landscape.

Cowan was one of those boys who seemed to be able to pick up any sport, but he was smitten by table tennis for the simple reason that he’d won the first tournament he’d ever entered within a week of taking up the game. Then he won the next seventeen in a row. His father put a table above the garage, a lopsided affair on an uneven floor. By the age of twelve, Cowan was writing poetry about the game of Ping-Pong:

This small white ball I hit is quick to lead,

It travels on the table everywhere,

Sometimes it happens I’m not always there,

It surely travels fast with mighty speed.

On the newly built interstate, Cowan’s father could commute to his job in public relations at the Manhattan headquarters of Metromedia in twenty minutes on a good day. On the weekends, father would occasionally take son into the city to match up against older players. One of the centers of the New York table tennis scene was a club in the basement of the Riverside Plaza Hotel on West 73rd Street, where a suburban kid could find a glimpse of the city’s underbelly. It belonged to Cowan’s future mentor and agent, Bob Gusikoff, himself once one of the country’s best players. It had a “smelly, filthy, undersized playing area, poor lighting, and a bathroom that looked like it hadn’t been cleaned, ever.” Parents who dropped their children off for the afternoon were horrified to return to find their teenagers “playing poker with men in their thirties and forties.” The magazine Table Tennis Topics explained:

Most table tennis locations were in skid row type locations. This naturally produces good table tennis. In order for the players to get to their clubs, they inevitably develop great reflexes. They can’t help it—avoiding muggers, rioters, falling buildings etc., can’t help but improve your footwork, coordination, and general speed of reaction.

At fourteen years old, Cowan was considered a good-enough table tennis player to be asked for an interview by the Los Angeles Times during a West Coast tournament. With his big smile and Leave It to Beaver crew cut, the teenager explained that table tennis just wasn’t that hard for him. “The most amazing thing,” said the newspaper, “is that he seldom practices.” The Chinese coaches would have been horrified, but why should Cowan be serious about the sport? His father had been trying to nudge him in the right direction.

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