Table Tennis

CHICAGO - How does a city that gained international acclaim for placing fiberglass cows on street corners come up with an encore? For Lois Weisberg, the answer is no further than the pingpong table gathering dust in her basement. "My grandson came into town for a visit, and after he found the table in the basement, he didn't come upstairs for three days," says Weisberg, Chicago's commissioner of cultural affairs. "He had such fun with it that I started thinking, why not try to bring pingpong out of the basement and bring it out into the city?"

SYDNEY, Australia - Got a press pass, got a cup of coffee, got a newspaper. We're doing the Olympics before lunch. Today. Absolutely live. These are the Summer Games as you never see them on television. They're qualifying rounds and heats, sports like field hockey and archery, table tennis and volleyball, the old-time version, without the bikinis or the beach. The morning isn't about medals - it's about survival as the athletes try to advance to finals and the fans scamper from place to place.

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An article in Sunday's Maryland section misidentified a participant in the Baltimore Classic Table Tennis Tournament. He is Mike Branch, not Mike French.The Sun regrets the errors.Pub Date: 11/25/98

Balls of Fury Rating -- PG-13 What it's about -- A down-and-out ex-table tennis champ is recruited by the FBI to help bring down the pingpong kingpin who killed his father. The Kid Attractor Factor -- Christopher Walken and table tennis. Good lessons/bad lessons -- Pingpong isn't about what paddle you use. It's what's in your heart. Violence -- Gunplay, martial arts punches and crotch shots. Language -- The odd curse word, and the title is a bawdy pun. Sex -- A make-out moment or two and interesting underwear.

They have their own national association. They have their own clubs throughout Maryland and the country. And they have their own bimonthly magazine.They are table tennis players. Serious table tennis players. Suffice it to say, they don't call it Ping-Pong.For most this game is a simple hobby: a pastime practiced in basements on rainy days.But not for those you find Tuesday and Thursday nights at the Howard County Table Tennis Club in the Oakland Ridge Industrial Park in east Columbia.These are people who dedicate hours each week to studying the game, the spin of the ball, the angle of its descent.

Donald Byrd Marston Sr., an English and reading teacher who was once a top-ranked table tennis player, died of pneumonia Jan. 9 at Sinai Hospital after an extended illness. He was 79 and had lived in Sykesville. He taught for more than 30 years at the old Brooklyn Park Junior/Senior High School in Baltimore. He was stern in the classroom, said his daughter, Barbara Fost of Catonsville, but was also funny and passionate about his work. Mr. Marston, who was born in California, earned a bachelor's degree from the Johns Hopkins University and a master's degree in education from the University of Maryland.

It has been nearly 30 years since "pingpong diplomacy" helped forge a new relationship between the United States and China, but the sport of table tennis remains relegated to the basement of America's sporting consciousness.That may be a source of frustration for players and coaches who have tried to elevate the game's stature in the United States, but they keep plugging, hoping Americans eventually will start taking pingpong more seriously.The 1999 North American Teams Open Table Tennis Championships, which open today and run through the weekend at the Baltimore Convention Center, could be a step in that direction.

Brady Anderson is carving a small block of time out of his packed training schedule to demonstrate the true purpose of the athletic life, which is not about money or women or fame or even fun. It's about beating you. The field of play - in this case - is a pingpong table in the middle of the Orioles' spring clubhouse at the Ed Smith Stadium Complex, where the team is preparing - with Anderson's help - for the 2012 baseball season. But it could just as well be a tennis court or a flag football field or the running track.

When major-league pitchers hurl an 80-mph fastball, batters can study its travel for about 60 feet to figure out how to slam it into the bleachers. Brian Pace looks at a ball moving that fast, and he gets to analyze it for the length of a dining-room table. Welcome to competitive table tennis, better known as really hard pingpong. Pace is one of 726 players from around the world playing in the North American Teams Table Tennis Championships at the Baltimore Convention Center. The competition, which is open to spectators, began yesterday and will continue through tomorrow.