Following the suggestion of one of my friends, some of my posts will be reflections on times from my past, since my memory for these things has proven to be better than average.
I started playing ping pong when I was 12, at gym class in the UAE. I was not very athletic as a child, my enthusiasm for tennis and sports in general began when I was around 14, although for tennis it began around 12. So anyway ping pong was the natural go-to sport if I wanted to avoid getting pushed around at soccer or getting yelled at in cricket. Children can be very competitive sometimes, especially when their parents are very strict.
Ping pong did not come naturally to me, very few sports actually ever did, and I received most of my ping-pong related training in the form of humiliating beat-downs that began when I was 14 years old. I met a guy on the street (literally) in Grade 8 summer. He was playing street hockey with the neighbourhood children and I would periodically poke my head out to try and get a game in. We instantly became acquaintances, most alliances made at that age are fragile and fleeting anyway. Him and I ended up in high school together, and I found out he had a ping pong table. Impressed, I was enthusiastic to play him since I had already beaten him at carrom at that point (but he had beaten me at chess, which is disappointing on a whole other level for me). I went to his garage, and found out they played fast and loose with the word "Table" at that house. The ping pong table was two wooden rectangles painted with the official lines, with the corners and edges scraped up from so much sliding, stacking and moving over the years. We ended up mounting the tables on boxes and cement blocks (I think) and we played inside the garage, lengthwise. Since the garage wasn't exactly a greenhouse, there was a "dark" side and a "bright" side, and since my friend was the superior in skill, he would always play on the dark side of the table. Day and night (not really, just day) we would battle for the title of champion of the universe (another gross exaggeration) and I never did manage to win enough points to count as a game, until perhaps much later. Eventually we added a third to our ping pong games, and when two people were playing, the third would press the garage door every 10 minutes so that the garage light would come on. There was no tube light in the garage, just a door-timed light.
Then something interesting happened when I met our fourth. He would find out what we were all into, somehow get interested in it, and buy whatever platform was necessary to facilitate the entertainment. He bought a ping pong table, a Risk 2210 board, a poker set (he's a professional poker coach and player now, so he definitely didn't miss on that hobby) etc, and then we stopped playing garage table tennis in favour of table tennis with him. The problem was that, for the longest time, nobody could beat the guy. This guy practiced on his table at home and managed to hone his technique so well that it was impossible to return his shots most of the time, it was really quite impressive. I'd break into a sweat trying to play him, I can't distinctly remember improving to his level. One thing I did manage to find out about this guy when I played him at ping pong, or anything for that matter, is that he hated (and , to this day, still hates) losing. I beat this guy at bananagrams a year ago and you'd think he just got back from a funeral or something. The guy with the garage table doesn't hate losing, he just tends to play with his head all the time, which is a very useful skill I managed to learn mainly from him. He does whatever he has to in order to win, as long as it's permitted within the rules of the game, regardless of the conventional method involved in playing. He's always looking for an edge, and he's always looking for the best strategy. I guess, retrospectively, there was much more to those ping pong games than just ping pong.
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