Ping Pong History and Rules

Ping Pong traces its origins to the similar game of table tennis played back during the time in England when all those stuffy upper crust types needed something to do to amuse themselves after a dinner of steak & kidney pie and blood pudding. Since they couldn’t step outside for fear of trampling upon all those pickpocketing, gruel-eating orphans who controlled the muddy streets-not to mention the fear of a certain Ripper named Jack who might at any moment decide to turn his attention away from women of easy virtue and toward the corseted young ladies being courted by Hugh Grant-looking fops and dandies-they needed something simple and fun to play indoors. Those wacky English! In between such clever retorts as “Bob’s your uncle and Fanny’s your aunt”, they played table tennis using such things as a champagne cork for a ball.

Ping pong as we know it today can pretty much be traced back to one James Gibb. Long before he became a member of the famous singing brothers known as the Bee Gees, in 1899 this engineer was struck by a brilliant Shelbyville idea. He took a piece of string and tied it across the traditional table tennis table (lovely alliteration, that) and then smacked a rubber ball across it. Before too long, grape-stompers across France were out of work as a recession hit the champagne industry hard, and ping pong became a stable of play even among those with little leisure time on their hands. Of course, Gibb had to make an even more brilliant discovery before the old-fashioned table tennis turned into the newfangled ping pong we all love today.

One word: celluloid.

Gibb had taken a holiday across the pond and discovered the one thing created between 1850 and 1950 that Thomas Edison hadn’t claimed to invent. Celluloid balls. Gibb realized that these little balls bounced much better than the old rubber ones he had been using and quickly introduced them to the game of ping pong. The fun of playing ping pong increased exponentially. And so did the popularity. And so did the reputation of this little game that had been the sport of ladies and gents who were drunk from the bubbles of champagne. So popular and respectable was the sport of ping pong, in fact, that it took only 90 years, give or take, from the moment that Gibb first picked up a celluloid ball to when table tennis, or ping pong, became an official Olympic sport.

The game picked up a certain amount of the popularity it had lost over the intervening years when it was featured as one of Forrest Gump’s amazing abilities. In fact, the game can be played with a certain martial sense of aggressiveness, but don’t let the professional caliber fool you. Much like golfing and bowling and auto racing, pretty much anyone can play ping pong at a level or proficiency not that much less than the professional level.

How do you play ping pong? First you need a table. Ping pong tables measure 9 feet, 5 inches long by 6 feet wide and 30 inches high. Spread across the middle of the table is a inch high net. (Word of advice: Don’t try to jump over the net Bobby Riggs-style when you win.) The ball is still celluloid and you hit it with paddles, usually called rackets, made of wood covered with a thin layer of ribbed rubber. Like tennis, it can be played both in singles and doubles styles.

The person who hits the ball first is called the server. Once the ball is hit, it has to bounce one on the server’s side of the table and then clear the net and bounce once more on the other side of the table. If the other person hits it back into the net or fails to make contact with the ball at all, the server gets a point.

The actual rules of the game depend on whether you are playing the 11 point version or the 21 point version. Basically, however, the service alternates back and forth and the first one to reach either 11 or 21 wins, provided they are two points ahead. If the game is tied at 10 or 20, the service ping pongs back and forth until a player wins by two points.