Ping Pong

Recently a friend I had not seen in about 20 years found my extremely inactive Facebook location. (I think I have been on there an average of once every 2 months or so).  This contact reminded me of one of my favorite activities growing up:ping pong.

I LOVED ping pong. In what will be a total shock to exactly none of you, I was very, very good at it. At Montavilla and then Crossroads, by third grade I was beating 6th graders regularly. What is more amazing is the table I used at home.

See, we did not have a ping pong table. We did, however, have an oval kitchen table. 

We did not have ping pong paddles, either.

We did, however, have hard back songbooks.

So yeah, we played ping pong using song books and an oval table. Sometimes we would have a real net, other times we would fake one out of stuff that would stand up on end.

Now, on a REAL table with REAL paddles, I could put spin on the ball, side-spin, top-spin, I even mastered a shot with so much back-spin it would hit on their side of the table and bounce back to mine. 

I got so good with the song book paddles I could even put side spin on the ball with them. 

It got to the point where I would play left-handed and still just absolutely destroy people. In fact, the worst I ever did was "Around the World", a game in which lines form on either side of the table, after you hit the ball you go to the end of the line at the far end of the table, and whoever makes a mistake is out.

People would deliberately set me up. High lobs so my opponent could slam it on me, leaving the paddle at the far end of the table, stuff like that.

It was a lot of fun.

By the time I went to public school, in 7th grade we had a Junior High ping pong tournament, 25 cents to enter, winner take all. I am not going to say who won, but neither Aaron nor John ever paid me.

*Sigh*. Now I look at the X-box 360, the computer I am typing on, the Nintendo DS, etc., all the fun stuff I have...and I miss Ping pong. 

I know, random, pointless. But my blog, so deal with it :-)

2 comments:

Riot Kitty said...

Not pointless, I think it's a cute story!

Unknown said...

Wish we still had a place to play even though, like most games played against you, it was never really competitive. :P