Yuen: Rediscover table tennis — and prepare to be humbled

Even if you think you’re pretty good at table tennis, chances are you will get dusted by any of the players who spend their Saturday mornings battling across the tables in a Korean church basement in Brooklyn Park.

Or maybe that’s just me.

Table tennis was my dad’s sport. We regularly duked it out on family game night (when our pingpong table wasn’t used to hang laundry). All these years I thought I was better than average, until I stopped by a session hosted by the Northwest Table Tennis Club.

The weekly gatherings attract a mishmash of working professionals and retirees from various walks of life, including immigrants who picked up their first racquets in other parts of the world. A truck driver from Nigeria. A medical-device engineer from the former Soviet Union. Heck, even an aerial acrobat from Mongolia.

Oleg Mosesov, the engineer, grew up playing table tennis on his family’s kitchen table. When I lamented that my skills were no match for the present company, he understood. It’s similar to when Americans tell Russians that they know how to play chess.

“You can’t play chess,” Mosesov says. “You know how to move figures.”

Club organizers paired me with Peter Li, a native of Xiamen, China, who works as a manufacturing engineer in the Twin Cities. It had been a while since I was handed a table tennis racquet. It felt comically small; these days I’m much more accustomed to gripping a pickleball paddle. Li served, and I whiffed the first few.

But once I got my rhythm, Li fed me some easy high ones.

“Go ahead,” he instructed. “Kill it!”

I slammed the ball, remembering why this simple sport, often relegated to suburban basements and dive bars in the United States, produced so much glee in my childhood. Li, backing up several feet from the edge of the table, returned them. It was humbling to see him effortlessly volley while hardly moving, Matrix-style, as I worked up a sweat.

He also gently informed me that my serve was illegal. (It must be tossed at least 6 inches vertically in the air.) Li let me win a game, and I was shocked that it ended at 11 points.

“I thought we went to 21,” I said.

“That was 20 years ago,” Li said.

A rule change in 2001 capped games at 11 points, rather than 21. “Because no one can beat the Chinese,” he explained. If you’re winning and play to 21, he said, “they can always come back.”

(While table tennis is considered China’s national sport, the more commonly accepted explanation for shortening the games is that the governing body wanted to make the sport more exciting, especially to television viewers.)

The Twin Cities table tennis community remains active, albeit overshadowed these days by its trendier cousin of pickleball. A handful of clubs welcome players all across the metro area (see list below).

At the round-robin matchups in Brooklyn Center, game outcomes are recorded into a system and are applied to each player’s rating, a number that gives you a sense of the person’s skill level.

Players say the game keeps them active and is good for the heart, as well as the brain. Studies have suggested table tennis can have positive effects on people with Parkinson’s disease and dementia. People of all ages and abilities can enjoy it. Or as organizer Ruvin Oh explained to me, “You can play until you die.”

That makes it foolish to predict winners based on age.

“I’m 77 and half-ticked-off about getting old and my body not doing what it used to do,” said player Jeff Shapiro. “You have a 24-year-old athlete who moves like the wind, and I can beat him because I’m more experienced. It’s a coping mechanism for me.”

Shapiro gave me a few pointers, too, after recognizing some of my weak spots (no spin and an awkward grip that made it hard to move from backhand to forehand).

The eclectic crew of Saturday players has become a second family to him, “a real melting pot where I get to know, laugh and compete with people I would likely never meet,” Shapiro said. “Every time I go, I leave smiling and shaking my head over how wonderful and unlikely it is.”

Try your hand at table tennis through various clubs in the Twin Cities. Before you go, check with the organization’s website or Facebook pages to confirm the sessions are still on.

Northwest Table Tennis Club. 9 a.m.-noon Saturdays at Korean Presbyterian Church, 5840 Humboldt Av. N., Brooklyn Center, $10. www.nwttc.com

Table Tennis Minnesota. Nonmember open play is 6-9 p.m. Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays at 1185 Concord St. N., Suite 305, South St. Paul; $10. A community league with round-robin play is held 12:30-5 p.m. Saturdays at the Sabes Jewish Community Center, 4330 Cedar Lake Road S., St. Louis Park; $15. www.tabletennismn.com

Fluid Table Tennis. 7-10 p.m. Tuesdays at the Minneapolis Cider Co., 701 SE. 9th St., Minneapolis, $8; and 7-10 p.m. Wednesdays at the Table Tennis Minnesota training center in South St. Paul; $12. fluidtabletennis.webnode.page