Messages de Aptaleon - Page 10

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Pourquoi pétanque, pourquoi curling ? Ce sont des sports aussi noble que les autres !

On est tous d'acord pour dire, quon doit etre fier de notre sport, et que c'en est vraiment un. mais malgré tout quoiqu'on fasse, le,ping ne fera jamais revé les gens et surotut pas le demoiselles

Back-and-Forth Sport Is Back Again
Rob Bennett for The New York Times





THE evening usually starts with an unmarked door, poorly lighted stairs and a familiar popping sound.

Table tennis.

Wally Green, 29, from the Marlboro Houses in Coney Island, picked up the game after losing money to pool hall hustlers. Susan Sarandon, the actress, discovered the game through her son Miles, 16. She and Mr. Green find themselves at the same events sometimes.

“There was no table tennis over there,” Mr. Green said of the Marlboro Houses. “There was a lot of bullets going over, but no table tennis.”

Ms. Sarandon was not running from pool hustlers or bullets when she became interested in the game. “I started finding out that there was this subculture of Ping-Pong and all these people that you wouldn’t expect are serious about it,” she said. “I just worked with Ed Norton, and he’s so committed that he trained in China while he was shooting a film there.”

Mr. Green and Ms. Sarandon are part of a growing number of players in New York City and beyond who are meeting in clubs, apartments, art galleries and even laundry rooms that have a table, brought together by their fervent, almost evangelical love for the game — known generically as table tennis but often called Ping-Pong (a trademark) by its devotees.

Now, it seems, this secret society may soon emerge from behind unmarked doors: the trickle of places in the city that serve up the sport is becoming a flow. Some billiards halls are removing pool tables to make way for the sport. Fat Cat, a sprawling shabby chic spot featuring jazz and games in the West Village, added three table tennis tables over the summer, and plans to add more to the 10 it now has.

“We just have a lot more people who want to play,” said Noah Sapir, 32, the owner. “Every night of the week we have a waiting list.”

Slate, a hall with 16 pool tables near Madison Square Park, reports waiting times of an hour for its six table tennis tables. Ocean’s 8 at Brownstone, in Park Slope, Brooklyn, added its first five tables this year because customers using its 33 pool tables kept asking to play.

A tournament in the spring in Brooklyn, at the Powerhouse Arena, a gallery, attracted 32 corporate teams representing entities like Google, MTV, Red Bull and Comedy Central. There were lines out the door, said Khairi Mdnor, the organizer.

Grand Opening, a glass-fronted gallery space between tenement buildings on the Lower East Side, has old Chinese men playing hipsters on its table despite the language barrier. “People can communicate through their game,” the owner, Ben Smyth, 27, said.

Soho House, in the meatpacking district, has a tournament every other month. On Gramercy Park, the 110-year-old National Arts Club, complete with wood paneling and portraits of esteemed members, like Dwight D. Eisenhower, now regularly echoes with the sound of the game.

USA Table Tennis, the sport’s national organizing body in the United States, said it has had a steady increase in membership of just below 10 percent since 2006. There are 457 Yahoo groups related to the sport, including ones for collegiate players (almost 2,000 members, 53 new ones in a recent week) and regional groups of about 500 members.

Three filmmakers, Jonathan Bricklin, Bill Mack and Franck Raharinosy, have teamed with Andrew Gordon, a former investment banker, to open a 12,800-square-foot table tennis and social club on Park Avenue near Madison Square Park. The filmmakers became accidental promoters when they put a table in their loft office for their own amusement a couple of years ago.

“People would come over all the time to play us,” said Mr. Mack, 35. “Our then-girlfriends got tired of it and made us limit it to one night.”

That night became an unexpected hit, attracting the likes of Owen Wilson, Salman Rushdie, 50 Cent, the Beastie Boys, Jimmy Buffett and as many attractive people as there were lightweight hollow balls.

Il faudrait que Sarko en fasse autant en France