Ping Pong – Errr… Table tennis takes a great deal of concentration and focus

Sports News - March 19, 2010

I was browsing through images earlier today and was startled when I ran across the above photo of German professional ping pong table tennis player Timo Boll staring intently at the small white ball I assume he was about to paddle across the table at some mind-blowing rate of speed.

My first reaction was to giggle as the photo seems little more than silly, but when my laughing stopped I had one of those “one hand clapping” moments and the picture began to take on a Zen-like quality: A man intensely contemplates a perfect white sphere suspended in mid-air. I was reminded of that heavy-handed plastic bag moment from American Beauty. And for some reason I am also reminded of this Rainer Maria Rilke poem:

The leaves are falling, falling as if from far up,
as if orchards were dying high in space.
Each leaf falls as if it were motioning “no.”

And tonight the heavy earth is falling
away from all other stars in the loneliness.

We’re all falling. This hand here is falling.
And look at the other one. It’s in them all.

And yet there is Someone, whose hands
infinitely calm, holding up all this falling.

So. I started searching for table tennis photos and lo and behold it’s seems to be a genre of sports photography! (Perhaps these photographers understand that all of art is the futile attempt to stop a falling leaf?) So I collected a whooooooooole bunch of ’em and slapped them together, half expecting the seas to split and Heavenly angels descend. But alas, all that descended was a cavalcade of my own laughter! Art is dumb, but table tennis ball face photos are hilarious!

After looking at so many of these pictures I’ve decided that there are four basic kinds of table tennis ball face photos: staring, cross-eyed, erroneous focus balance-on-head and magical levitation. The “balance-on-head” variety is the most rare with just plain “staring” being the most common. Categories can, and often do overlap. Ah heck, I’ll shut up…..

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