Millennials making pingpong popular in Indiana
INDIANAPOLIS (AP) - Sports are known more for discipline than creativity, but weirdness always has been a key part of Ping Pong. Coleman Clark preached it in his 1933 "Modern Ping Pong": "Experiment - try everything."
"If you don't have (a Ping-Pong table)," said Steven Shattuck, Bloomerang's marketing vice president, only half jokingly, "you can hardly call yourself a tech company."
Even staid, buttoned-down, 140-year-old Eli Lilly & Co. has Ping-Pong.
"Ping-Pong is tragically hip," said Jonathan Scott, 34, a member of Lilly's digital and social media team and an unusual person in that he prefers his backhand to his forehand. "And it's a good way to relieve stress."
Pingpong, or table tennis, not to be confused with another, vaguely related millennial activity called beer pong, dates to the late 19th century. The game's popularity has ebbed and flowed. Right now, among millennials, it's flowing.
"This is certainly a thing," said Jim Walker, who heads Big Car Collective, a sort of arts/play/economic development hybrid that this past summer placed two tables on Monument Circle. Surprised passersby made much use of them. Big Car recently collaborated with the City Market to put two tables at the market. The tables will be available for a couple hours during lunch and from 4 to 6 p.m.
Pingpong tables are still a rarity in bars and restaurants. Shoefly and The Mousetrap each have a table. Imbibe in the Fountain Square building has two. Flat 12 had a table, but it got broken from overuse. There may be more. Still, arcade games and darts are more common. They take up less space than pingpong and are better for the bottom line.
But no other game is as closely associated with the millennial-focused office and lifestyle as pingpong. "We used to have a foosball table but no one used it, so we got Ping-Pong," said Matt Swanson, a 28-year-old software developer with Carmel-based Software Engineering Professionals and a founder of the Indianapolis Tech Table Tennis League. "When we switched to Ping-Pong, people got competitive. I have a pretty good spin serve. That's my strength."
It's hard to say exactly why the game has surged. "Forrest Gump"? "Balls of Fury"? The simple fact it is "retro"?
Table tennis was was invented when the hot startup was Thomas Edison's electric company and, as Kait Mariutto, who with her husband owns Shoefly, observed, "retro comes back no matter what it is."
Among millennials, the trend seems to have begun in Silicon Valley, where several years ago table tennis, along with foosball, replaced pool as the "techie" thing to do on break. During the American troop surge in Iraq in 2008, American soldiers played table tennis tenaciously in the rec rooms of forward operating bases. Frequently they waited in line for "winners" at tables while nearby pool tables sat dormant.
The trend has shown in sales. From 2013 to 2015, Ping-Pong's 11 percent sales growth in the U.S. outpaced pool and darts, according to the National Sporting Goods Association.
It has helped that celebrities have taken up the game. Susan Sarandon opened the first of five table tennis bars called SPiN in New York in 2009. It was there in 2013 that Prince took down Jimmy Fallon, a story Fallon told last spring on "The Tonight Show" after the musician died. Last winter in Toronto, Reggie Miller's defeat of Drake was televised on TNT with Marv Albert doing the play-by-play.
Ping-Pong, especially when it's played by the kind of intense people who call it table tennis, can be a fierce battle of wills involving cunning spin, lightning reflexes and top-notch hand-eye coordination - not to mention deception. It has been an Olympic sport since 1988. In Indianapolis, serious, high-level play goes down at the Monon Community Center in Carmel and the Table Tennis Club of Indianapolis on East Washington Street.
Most millennials, however, would be better classified as enthusiasts.
"I'm more of a basement and fun time player," said Ian Oehler, 30, who designs and builds his own paddles in his Fountain Square home. He has a table in his living room and a dog, Lodie, who is trained to gently fetch errant balls and return them intact to the server. "I like the movement and the dance of Ping-Pong," Oehler said. "Ping-Pong is a conversation - you're having a clear back-and-forth with your opponent."
Bloomerang's table, in the company's Lawrence break room, gets used practically every day, Shattuck said. And while none of the players is "particularly good," the play "helps communication because it gets departments interacting with each other when they normally wouldn't. And it's good for blowing off steam, and it's quick. A match is usually 10 to 15 minutes, and you get sweaty, which is good for getting the juices going."
Not only does that sound reasonable, there's science behind it. New York University neuroscience professor Wendy Suzuki declared that the game improves cognitive thinking by stimulating both the prefrontal cortex and the hippocampus.
Smart, innovative people seem drawn to table tennis. Will Shortz, the creator of the New York Times crossword puzzles, plays almost daily. "Chess on steroids," he calls the game. Scott, the Lilly social media staffer, prefers "chess with sticks" - stick being a slang term for paddle.
The writer Kurt Vonnegut was an avid Ping-Pong player. The writer Henry Miller was a fiend. In his late 80s, Miller carried on a torrid romantic letter-writing relationship with a 20-something actress and Playboy model named Brenda Venus. Four years, 1,000 letters, well-written letters.
Miller was asked once in an interview the secret to the longevity of his zest for life. Three things, he said: "the purity of my soul"; "love"; and "playing Ping-Pong."
Miller competed in tournaments. The author of "Tropic of Cancer" played to win.
Oehler sees table tennis differently. While he possesses "a really sweet cross underhand scoop shot" that "sort of corkscrews and stays out in the far corner," he is too nice to employ it . much. "I grew up in the era when everybody did a great job and got a trophy because they tried," Oehler said, "and I'd rather have a long rally than score a nasty point on somebody with a cruel shot. Most of the time."
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Source: The Indianapolis Star, http://indy.st/2cHrztq
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Information from: The Indianapolis Star, http://www.indystar.com