Graduate student Alex Chong played for the top ping-pong team in Panama. J
Toby Kutler was in training. He’d flown halfway around the world to play against the best opposition around, but it wasn’t easy.
He was an American in China, and he was not welcome: When he vomited the first day of training, the security guard laughed at him. The coaches largely ignored him, and the other trainees looked down on him.
Kutler gave them nicknames so he could talk about them to the one other American without their knowing. There was Shrek, Tweety Bird and Fresh To Death; Monkey Queen was the hardest worker, and one of the few who didn’t prolifically smoke cigarettes.
Spartan was the villain.
“He would beat up kids just for fun,” Kutler said. “The [younger] kids are the bitches of the older kids.”
They practiced for hours each day. Coaches responded to mistakes with violence. Kutler spent four weeks there honing his skills. He wants to be an Olympian.
Kutler plays ping-pong.
The 19-year-old is one of six players on this university’s table tennis team and one of two members who have qualified for February’s Olympic trials, where they will compete against more than 40 other players in a tournament to get to the London 2012 games.
Kutler picked up the game as a 12-year-old, gaining interest in the sport after his dad returned from business trips to China with table tennis paraphernalia.
“One year he brought me back a lot of ping-pong stuff: a paddle, a video of [Swedish table-tennis phenom] Jan-Ove Waldner, and when I saw him play I wanted to start playing because I thought the sport was really cool.”
Though Kutler said he “didn’t really care that much” until he realized he didn’t have the skills to play college baseball, he still won three medals in the Junior Olympics before he was 16 years old. In the three years since, his life has been ping-pong. He went to China last summer, where he was profiled for an upcoming ping-pong documentary, Top Spin.
Kutler said he practices three hours per day, plus general fitness training. He doesn’t actually go to this university yet — while he said he hopes to transfer in the spring, he’s currently taking one class at Montgomery County Community College so he can focus on table tennis.
Teammate and senior business major Raghu Nadmichettu is similarly devoted to the Olympic dream. Nadmichettu got serious about ping-pong after a knee injury prevented him from playing basketball and tennis. Though his new court is much smaller — a table only nine feet by five feet — the ball hasn’t slowed down: Table tennis volleys can been clocked anywhere between 60 and 120 mph. But after 11 years of competitive play, he’s learned winning is as much about brains as it is about brawn.
“It’s like tennis and chess combined,” Nadmichettu said. “When you get to the higher levels, a lot of the time the skill level is the same and it’s the strategy that wins you the game.”
Nadmichettu and Kutler have been competing at those higher levels, attending tournaments around the country and meeting people who seem more likely to stumble out of a comic book than a gym.
“I’ve gotten in fights, I’ve lost friendships over ping-pong,” Kutler said. “Everyone is a character.”
Kutler mentioned one man — “a good player, out of shape though” — with a notorious temper who once “went completely crazy and got in my face and started cursing me out” over a disputed call. Kutler said the man once told him that he runs a combined porn store and head shop.
The team has also encountered a pair of home-schooled brothers from Pennsylvania who enjoy hunting and riding horses — the two said they sometimes compete for a prize of 20 bullets when they play against each other.
Alex Chong also occasionally makes an appearance — a graduate student at this university, he doesn’t play as much as the others and didn’t make the team but still beat both Kutler and Nadmichettu at a team fundraiser last month. Chong said he competed as a young teen in Mexico, Guatemala, Costa Rica and El Salvador as a member of Panama’s junior national team before eventually being selected for its top national team. As a 14-year-old, he practiced in Taiwan for nearly two months and encountered a strenuous regimen similar to the one Kutler encountered in China.
“My coach used to hit me every time I did something wrong,” Chong said. “They have a bamboo stick and they hit you.”
Though the sport hasn’t gained the cultural prominence in the U.S. that it has in Asia (it’s China’s national sport), team member Charlie Sun said it is still much more than a basement hobby.
“If someone told me that ping-pong wasn’t a sport I would tell them to go to a local tournament and watch for eight minutes,” said Sun, a freshman economics major. He said his parents made him start playing table tennis when he was 7 years old and that the community is as diverse as in any other sport.
“It’s just interesting,” Sun said, “seeing how you meet people through a piece of wood and a little plastic ball.”
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