Ping-Pong

If you asked Bobby Jones to play a round of midget-golf with a 25-c- putter, he might refuse but he would not be shocked. But if you asked Lo Wenching to play a game of table tennis, his small Chinese face, no longer inscrutable, would assume an appalled expression, as though you had insulted one of his ancestors. Lo Wenching comes from Peiping and he learned to play ping-pong at Tsing-Hua University. He, like other ping-pong players, hates mention of table tennis because so many people confuse it with ping-pong which is played with patented equipment, on a standard court, by standard rules.

Lo Wenching and 255 other able ping-pong players last week assembled in Manhattan for the second annual U. S. championship. The matches were played in the grand ballroom of the Waldorf-Astoria hotel. Among the 1,000 spectators was Bridge Expert Sidney Lenz, President of the American Ping-Pong Association, who 30 years ago introduced the full-hand grip, now used by almost all ping-pong players. Happily watching the matches from a lavish box was George Swinnerton Parker of Boston, decorated by a white goatee and a pique evening waistcoat. He had donated the Parker cup, to be engraved with the name of the champion. Mr. Par ker helped invent ping-pong. His firm, Parker Brothers, controls the U. S. rights to ping-pong and manufactures 640 other indoor games of which Mr. Parker person ally invented more than 200.

For the early rounds, 16 ping-pong tables were set up in the Waldorf ball room, with eight feet of free space behind each. Most of the contestants wore leather-soled shoes because rubber ones gripped the carpet and made it slide. They wore blue shirts, to improve the background. One S. A. Hamid, a Hindu, got his picture taken because he wore a picturesque beard, but he was soon beaten. Only 10% of the players used the old-fashioned penholder grip. Their rackets were faced with rubber, not sand or wood. The peculiar patter of the balls sounded like a storm of hollow hail, interrupted by happy squeals of "Good shot!" and "Beauty!" or disappointed grunts.

By the time he reached the quarter finals, Lo Wenching was the favorite to win the championship. Then he was beaten by one of the smallest players in the tournament, Abraham Krakauer of New York University. Krakauer, an unseeded player whose entry had been accepted only when someone else withdrew, played Coleman Clark of Chicago in the final.

Clark, accustomed to the finest ping-pong room in the U. S. (at the Chicago Inter-Fraternity Club), is an investment banker with A. C. Allyn & Co. He used to be on the University of Chicago football team and was a tennis star in the Western Conference. The amazing speed and variety of his strokes -- chops, drives, sidespins, baffling changes of pace -- were too much for little Krakauer who stood well back from the table and played in a shrewd but more defensive style. When he began to make Clark miss his shots in the last game, it was too late to do any good. Clark had match & championship, 21--10, 21--13, 21--15.

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