While on the bus to Kuranda last Friday, I noticed a yellow Lego block of a building bearing the letters "CAIRNS TABLE TENNIS STADIUM". It was the second and third words - "table tennis" - that caught my eye, but it was the fourth - "stadium" - that really intrigued me. Surely there wasn't seating for an audience in there? Later, I looked on the internet and found that it seemed to be a table tennis club, rather than a stadium, and I also discovered that it was open Tuesday evenings. Perfect. I would be in Cairns on Tuesday between leaving the rainforest and starting my journey down the coast.
From ages 8-18 I played table tennis once or twice a week and competed in leagues and a handful of tournaments. Then after hardly playing at all during university I got really into the sport during my year in Chicago, where I bought a fast, spinny bat for $100 and played weekly at the brilliant Chi-Slam Table Tennis club. I really improved there, twice making the final of 'intermediate' tournaments, both times losing to the same French kid. This was going to be my first time back in action since leaving Chicago and I was excited to dust my bat off and see how I would fare against the Queenslanders.
Upon walking up a flight of stairs and into Cairns Table Tennis Stadium I was instantly astonished by the quality of the facility. Eight tables, each individually fenced off providing Olympic standard space around the table in every direction, the wooden floor was polished, the lighting perfect, and every table even had an umpire's chair and scoreboard next to it. As expected, there was no grandstand. I was hoping for an easy, conventional opponent to ease my way back into the game after an eight month absence, but I could tell from the very first shot that this wasn't going to be the case. To warm up, usually you roll a forehand serve in crosscourt then forehand topspins are robotically traded crosscourt to get your eye in. However, this Swiss man began by deploying a heavy backspin serve. Indeed, it was five minutes before he hit anything other than chop, and then it was a peculiar floaty shot that had a deceptive amount of topspin on it. Here was a a tricky defensive player in the mould of Matthew Syed - the former British No.1 who took the unlikely career path of professional table tennis player to Times sports writer to Times journalist of everything. We started a match and I was doing alright until 9-9 in the first game, when I overconfidently tried to pull off my spinniest serve and served a fault. I lost the first two games 11-9 before capitulating in the third and going down 11-3.
My next opponent was a quiet Australian who plays table tennis on the ship he works on, there not being much else to do during his six week stints at sea. He had some nice topspins but I comfortably dismissed his challenge in straight sets. However, it may have been a different story if we had played in his usual table, where he has developed cunning strategies to take advantage of the 30 degree angles the table tilts to when the ship is rocking over the waves. Next, I had a short hit with an elderly fella then rallied with the guy who runs the place. A Yorkshireman who emigrated at 17, he was passionate about his table tennis and was very interesting to talk to. He informed me that the facility has been there since the seventies (although the club goes back further) and the club owns the entire building and rents out the shop downstairs, a space which also used to be filled with tables back when more people played. Apparently, the excellent wooden floor is Queensland Oak, which is now illegal to fell and thus the whole floor is worth $180,000! I also learned that most towns along the Queensland coast have a table tennis club, so hopefully I'll be hitting those up on my way south.
As I looped forehands and unleashed my tennis-style backhand I couldn't help but think about Chi-Slam and the good times I had there. I would go there after a drab day in the office and it would be therapeutic to be on my feet trading quick fire crosscourt rallies or trying to read devilishly spinny serves. I loved the atmosphere at Chi-Slam - people of all ages, nationalities, races, and tax brackets, all really positive, energetic, and just so happy to be having fun playing ping pong. It was an oasis of warmth in a cold city. Cairns Table Tennis Stadium didn't quite have the same vibe. The players seemed tired and started trickling out at around 8.30, whereas at Chi-Slam there were always people still going by the 10 o'clock closing time, and they often stayed much later, only putting down their bats when the owner Ardy ordered them to stop so he could get a moment of peace from the pop of ping pong balls before going to bed. Although it was no Chi-Slam, my evening of table tennis in Cairns was a throw back to my past life in Chicago, and thus I was a melancholy beans-on-toast eater back at the hostel that night.
No comments:
Post a Comment