Stuff You Should Know - How Ping Pong Works

Episode Date: January 29, 2019

While Asia is well-known for being cuckoo for Ping Pong, the game was actually invented by bored British Victorian aristocrats. Go back and forth about Ping Pong’s place in the world with Chuck and Josh. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

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Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and there's Jerry over there.

This is Stuff You Should Know, the podcast about ping pong. I'm excited about this one. Oh, I'm glad. I love ping pong. Are you any good? I don't think we've ever played, have we? I don't think we have.

It's crazy. There was that one time we were at that ping pong bar, and we just stared at each other for an hour. But we never played. I remember that as being air hockey. I remember the staring. Yeah, dude, I love ping pong. I'm pretty good for a, you know,

just a recreational ponger. And I finally got a table, I got an outdoor table. Oh, nice, an outdoor table, fancy. I love it. Yeah, that's great. I don't have room inside. Well, yeah, if you have an outdoor table, it doesn't matter. Yeah, I got one under the deck.

Very nice. And it's just the best. I love, I have had many times in my life where, and now it's just kind of when I can get someone over or a family and I have a window. But at various points in my life, I have played a lot of ping pong, including when I lived in LA,

my buddy, John Pindell, Chef John, you know, John. He was, I think, living in a place that had an outdoor table, and this was outdoor in Los Angeles, so it's kind of great. It's just out there in the backyard. And then my brother and I have had epic legendary

ping pong battles at his house. Oh, yeah? And it's a fun basement. Like matches like a single game that went on forever kind of thing? Just, I mean, not that, but like two out of three, like every time family is over there, at one point we will disappear

and everyone's like, where'd Scott and Chuck go and we're down there going at it. That's awesome. It's just so much fun. I love ping pong. I love ping pong too, but my eyes are kind of open. I realize I'm not quite as much the ping pong aficionado as I once thought I was.

Oh, yeah? Yeah, between you and this article, I realized I'm a total schlub when it comes to ping pong. Yeah, I'm not bad. Good. So we're talking ping pong today and Chuck, you can just phone this one in. I had to do a lot of extensive shoe leather research

on this one. But the idea of ping pong when you think of it, especially in the 21st century, most people think of China when they think of ping pong, especially here in the US, but really worldwide because China is nuts for ping pong. And there are plenty of other countries too that love ping pong, don't get me wrong.

Sweden is known as one of the major homes of ping pong. The Japanese love ping pong. It's basically almost every country except America really has a thing for ping pong. Here it's just fun recreational stuff. In other countries, it is taken very, very seriously. And there are pockets that take it seriously here too. There's the US Table Tennis Association,

which has been around since the 30s. But I think what I mean, as far as the public goes, thinking about table tennis players, we don't exactly like put them, hoist them on our shoulders and carry them around the room after a match, like what might happen to them in other countries. That's a very good point.

Kids here, it's sort of more of a recreational, like you said, there are some competitive players to be sure in organizations, but it's a sport you can play while you're drinking a beer, you know? Sure. Now you don't want to do that if you are actually a competitive pro table tennis player.

But I say all that Chuck, because while we think of China as like the home of table tennis, it actually is a British invention. Did you know that? I did. Well, of course you did your table tennis pro. No, I mean, I knew that just because it was a variation of tennis, which the Brits also gave us,

it is a racket sport, which you can include things like badminton and smooch ball and smash ball. What are those things they played down at Venice Beach? What is that called? Pickleball. Is that what it is? Hmm.

It's basically like a miniature tennis court. I think it's called smash ball. Okay. I don't know, people are yelling it in their car right now at me. I mean, I've heard, I think you're talking about pickleball. Is it pickleball? It's just sort of like a shrunken down tennis court.

Yeah. But obviously they're playing, it looks like tennis with oversized ping pong paddles. Right, exactly. Okay, yeah, that's pickleball. It might be called smash ball too. You know, there's regional differences, hockey, grinder, hero, that kind of thing.

I think pickleball, I think smash ball is something else entirely. You're thinking of smash mouth. Oh God, not that again. Yes. Um, reference to our live show that we just did? Okay. But what I was saying was,

it is known as a racket sport or a racket game, wherein you have a racket, you hit something over a net to another human, or maybe a robot even, as we'll get to. But, and there's a court, there are boundaries of some kind that you need to hit it in. It's not just a crazy fee for all. Right, exactly.

You can't just like win a point by crushing it over your opponent's head. That would be fun. It takes skill and finesse. Yeah. And it even takes more skill and finesse than like tennis does, like lawn tennis. Because.

Lawn tennis. Well, so, so there's a difference. There's royal tennis, which is played like, I'm trying to remember what movie it appeared in. Maybe it was even Downton Abbey. I'm not sure, but whether you play it indoors, it's like tennis indoors, and there's like the ball is hard and wrapped in cloth,

and- Is that not squash? No, no, there's royal tennis, and then there's lawn tennis or modern tennis, is what it's called. And ping pong is a variation on modern tennis. But it takes more finesse, because yes, you can smash the ball,

and that is a way to go aggressive attack style playing. But there's also a really good way to play too, which is strictly defensive, and it's all finesse and spin. And we'll see, like there's a lot of thought that goes into it, which is why if you notice, if you start to look around,

who plays table tennis, you'll find that there are table tennis tables in places where there are very smart people, like MIT has a table tennis club, and CERN has a table tennis club, and one of their cafeterias. Like smart people like this, because there's a lot of physics involved into it,

and there's not a lot of running around either. Yeah, you don't see dumb dumps, because they're just like, I don't get it. Yeah, like smash ball paddle. But we do know that the, although we don't know like the inventor, there's not one person that is credited with its invention, but the story goes that British soldiers

in South Africa or India were bored, and the weather wasn't so great, and they were probably drinking, and so they came up with this little smaller version of tennis, played on a table. As the story goes, using cigar box lids. Using Sibarro lids. And a whittled down champagne cork to make it round,

which, you know, that wouldn't be a bad little first go. I saw that exact same story was attributed to some wealthy British aristocrats who were bored one day. That sounds about right. But there seems to be unanimous agreement that it was on a table with some cigar box lids and a cork whittled down. Yeah, and so, you know, it grow from there, it grow,

it growed, excuse me. I think he's still got another try left. It growed from there into, wait, wait, wait, you mean grew, right? You know, kidding, right? Oh, okay. That's the first time I knew you were kidding. The second time I was like, chuck.

We could straight man. You really are. They grew from there and the names changed various times. The first manufacturer to actually put out and sell ping-pong tables was the Jacques Games Company and they called it Gossama. There was another trademarked name with WAF, which was the Slesinger Company's name.

Yeah, and the world was like, you got another try there. There was one called Flimflam. I don't know if that was trademarked from a company or if that was just a nickname. And all these, with the exception of Gossama, they were meant to emulate the sound the ball made going back and forth, right? Really?

Well, yeah. Yeah, Wifwaf. That doesn't sound like Wifwaf at all. What about Flimflam? Nope. Maybe the sound of the paddle, sounds like a Wif when I WAF. Right.

But not the ball. Okay, fine. But Gossama meant, it was like after Gossamer, which was kind of fine and thin and elegant, which was like the ball play was what that was describing. They were all terrible, terrible names. I can't believe I just said that. So they did use Cork at first,

but they didn't bounce great. Rubber wasn't good because it had too much bounce. The rackets were really kind of crazy looking at first. Some had really long handles, kind of looked like a badminton racket with a vellum stretched over a wooden frame, but they were not, they broke on the table and stuff. So they were really kind of refining it

in those early years, as far as the equipment goes. Right. I think it was, was it Jacques? No, yeah, it was Jacques. Jay Jacques and Son, who were the ones that were selling those, like what you just described, just kind of cheap, not well made,

not really well thought out equipment for ping pong. Yeah. Which it wasn't called ping pong at the time until the late 1890s when that same company, Jay Jacques and Son, who were sporting goods outfit, started calling it ping pong in their catalog. It just converted from Gossama over to ping pong

through these guys. Yeah, and it was before that in 1885, there was an attempt to patent it as table tennis by a guy named James Devonshire, but two years later he abandoned that pursuit. I don't know if it was just taking too long or if he saw the writing on the wall, but he left that behind.

And then it would be, like you said, 1901 was when Jean Jacques trademarked that ping pong name. Yep. And then Parker Brothers bought the North American or at least American rights to use ping pong exclusively. And they brought ping pong to the United States with that. And this is the reason why if you look up any professional association or any competitive

like ping pong group, they always refer to it as table tennis because ping pong is a trademark. Table tennis is not. Plus also over the years, ping pong has gotten an association with- People like me. Yeah, just people having fun playing it

where table tennis has been the route that most competitive, it denotes competitiveness, competition pro kind of thing. Yeah, for sure. But I think if you're just hanging around the locker room or whatever with some table tennis pros, they'll refer to it as ping pong. And no one's like, oh, I can't believe you just called it that.

And you were like, no, that's locker room talk. Right. So the same year that ping pong was trademarked in 1901, there was an Englishman named James Gibb. He found these celluloid balls when he went to the U.S. that were just, it wasn't for table tennis. It was just a toy, a novelty toy. He was like, this is pretty great actually.

It's pretty lively. It's light, just the right amount of bounce. And so I think celluloid is kind of like the route we should take. And everyone seemed to agree and that sort of became the de facto ping pong ball. Right, and it's seen that way forever. Celluloid is a type of plastic.

It's super flammable. Like it's what film stock, like camera film was made from forever. But like I said, it's very flammable and your ball's gonna go up in flames if you pass it over a candle. Like if you're lighting your game by candle. So that's not very good.

But that was an enormous change that pushed ping pong way forward. Because up to that point, a cork ball then bounced very well. A rubber ball bounced too much. You couldn't really play ping pong like we see it today. It was more like, oh, sorry, here's another serve. Oh, sorry, here's another serve.

That's my point. It was just boring. When that guy came along with the celluloid balls and introduced them for ping pong play, that was, it made it fun finally. Ping pong finally became fun. Yeah, just a year after that too, the paddle, and this is all sort of aligning perfectly.

The paddle underwent a big change. Over the years proceeding, they had used cork to cover them and leather sometimes. I saw that you can still buy leather covered ping pong paddles at Tiffany's. Yeah, I could totally see that. Pearl handle, leather. Yeah.

Leather facing. Yeah. But they couldn't land on the right materials. And then at 1902, at a tournament, a man named E.C. Good found this dimpled rubber coin mat, wrapped it around his paddle, and he's like, this thing is pretty boss. I can get a little spin on it.

We got this ball from the year before, and everything's sort of clicking at this point. Right, so you've got the great ball, you've got the great covering, and now ping pong's ready to explode. And it started to, and then it just stopped. Dude, let's take a break. Oh, okay, all right, that's a good cliffhanger.

And find out what killed ping pong right after this. Well, now when you're on the road, driving in your truck, why not learn a thing or two from Josh and Chuck? It's stuff you should know. Stuff you should know. All right. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called,

David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends

to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal?

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blowing on it and popping it back in, as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to

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Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general, can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody,

about my new podcast, and make sure to listen, so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. All right, so, Pink Pong's finally coming into its own and it's finally getting good. And then right as it is, it just, it just drops off as a fad.

The craze, especially in the United States, and I think in Europe too, it just kind of went away. And there's no real obvious reason why, but our old pal Ed dug up an example that he thinks might be behind it. There was an ad for the National Guard in 1914, where one of the major generals in the National Guard said that they don't want any ping pong warriors,

which implies that the sport was seen as effeminate, or that you were kind of a wimp or something if you played ping pong. So it's possible that like that kind of war-like masculinity rose above it and ping pong got pushed down as a result. Well, and also World War I and the Spanish Flu probably put a dent in fun games like this overall, I would say.

Sure. I mean, that's just a guess, but they had more important, more important fish to fry than playing ping pong. But after the- They came back right after the war. Right, right after the war. And I don't think that it is coincidental that this was also a time when people started smoking pot

a lot in America, the Jazz Age. So you had jazz, marijuana cigarettes, and ping pong. Those were the big three of the Jazz Age. It's quite a mix. Yep. And then so Parker Brothers still had their trademark on this whole thing. They're like, oh, great, hallelujah, it's the Jazz Age.

And they started throwing these competitions with cash prizes and celebrities showed up. It was a big deal. Yeah, I imagine during the marijuana craze, too, they were like, this is great for what we're doing, but we got to keep score, and that's a problem. Right, somebody's got to stay sober for this. What was it?

Who serve was it? No, wait, is it 7-6? Do we play to 21? Man, you're way too uptight for this. So I believe in the 20s is when they started having these big tournaments, Parker Brothers with prizes, celebrities were coming out, the ITTF was officially founded in the mid-20s.

That's the International Table Tennis Foundation. Yeah, and they start having world championships in 1926. Yeah, like right off the bat. Yeah, and it was a big deal. Like, obviously they stopped during World War II for a period of time, but pretty much every couple of years since 1926, aside from the war, they started holding these, I guess, would it be biannual or what's every two years?

Well, that could be, yes, biannuals over two years. That's not twice a year. I think it can be. That was one of those things. I think you would use semi-annual might even be quarterly. I'm not sure. I think it can be neither one, just like with weekly. Yeah, but those first years, Hungarians

were the dominant country. They won eight of the first nine. Four of those went to the same guy, a guy named Victor Barra won 32, 33, 34, and 35. Man, that's good. Yeah, so he was doing pretty good, but the United States was not. No, like I said, the USTTA didn't form until 1933.

And even then, if you wanted to go play really high-level table tennis, you went to one place in the entire country, Lawrence's Broadway Courts in Manhattan Town. Got to go to New York if you want to play ping-pong, see? If you can make it there, you can make it anywhere in the US. But don't even try it in Hungary. Yeah, it just didn't catch on like it did in Europe. No, it didn't.

This is the same. I think it was kind of big in the 70s, too, again, POT and the United States. But it's never been explosively sustainably popular like it has in other countries. And in particular, so the Europeans are dominating table tennis from about the mid-20s to almost, what, to the early 50s?

Yeah, and then from 30 to 50, the Soviet Union banned it for 20 years. Oh, really? That left a Soviet vacuum. OK, so the Hungarians, well, the Hungarians would have been under Soviet control then, huh? I don't know the answer to that question. Yeah, I guess they would have been.

So that would have, I guess, I wonder if that's when it moved over to Western Europe, Northwestern Europe, like Sweden and Germany. Maybe. Supposedly the best all-time player was a Swede. That's what I've heard, too. What's his name? The Mozart of table tennis?

I don't know. Jean-Ove Waldner. Oh, the Jean part, I'm like, I don't know if he's Swedish. And then the Ove really got me. It's probably not John, it's probably Jan, Jan Ove Waldner. Yeah, nice. Supposedly the best ever. So is he contemporary?

I don't know. OK, so you've got Europe dominating. America's like, we're not even trying right now. And this is basically from the 20s to the early 50s. And then in 1952, Asia steps in and says, don't forget Asia in the form of a man named Herogi Sato. And he showed up at the World Championship in 1952 in Bombay or Mumbai.

And he said, hey, you know how there's no rules about what kind of paddle I can use or what size it is? Or there's not really a lot of guidance on the paddle? Check this out. He had put foam around his paddle. And boy, did that make the ball bounce back. It increased the speed of the ball tremendously. And he just dominated that tournament

and became world champion in 1952. By the way, that guy is totally contemporary, Jan Ove Waldner. He's in his 50s. He's retired now. I don't know why you would retire from table tennis. So one thing I read, I read an article about a kid who is one of the best in the world, who

is actually from America, is an Indian American. He trains. Like he has to train to move around the table fast enough. Well, supposedly, if you're an advanced player, you can burn up to 500 calories an hour playing table tennis. Is that right? That's what they say. That's a Snickers bar and a half.

Yeah. I mean, I work up a sweat. Sure. That's me as well, though. So you have to take that into consideration. Yeah. I can sweat playing chess. I can't wait till you reach the age

where you just walk around in public with a hand towel around your neck. Oh, who does that? What's his name from the office? Craig Robinson. Is that his name? Oh, Craig, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I think he's famous for sort of just draping

a sweat towel over his shoulder. Yeah. Why not, you know? Good for him. I'm going to follow that lead. So there's worse leads you could follow for sure, man. So Hiroshi Sato showed up with his foam-covered paddle and just dominated and became the hero or the champion

of that tournament and of the world. But there's two legends that happened to him afterward. One, he returned home and was hailed a hero and a champion by Japan. And two, he returned home and was scorned as a dishonorable winner because he used an unusual paddle and never played table tennis again. And it turns out that he doesn't show up

in any other tournament after that one. So maybe he was like, well, I achieved it. I'm going to go do some other stuff. Or maybe he really was like, everyone's right. This was dishonorable. I'm never going to play again. Interesting. I hope there wasn't some nefarious action taken.

I hope so, too. So over the years, a lot of changes have taken place to make it more playable and more, and this is like the official rules in competition, to make it more playable and to make it better for people watching it. They lower the net by about an inch over the years and to make it, I guess, a little zippier and more fun.

They increased, actually, not too long ago, in 2000. They increased the size of the ball by 2 millimeters to slow it down a little bit because it was getting so fast, people couldn't even follow it. It was like forest gump up in there. And people were like, I mean, it has to be a, I mean, it's not a big TV sport here, obviously, but it's a big TV sport in a lot of the world.

Like, people watch this stuff. Yeah, I mean, the camera has to be able to see where the ball's going, which isn't hockey, you know? People want to see what's going on. They could do the glowing ball like they did in hockey for a while. Oh, I forgot about that.

Yeah, same company that did the 10 yard line, or the first down line. Oh, right. Was it really? Yeah, it was. I think we patented glowy things. Right. I think we talked about, I can't remember what episode,

but we talked about that one before. But OK, so you have the foam paddled, padded paddle. You've got balls that work really well, and you have, what else, Chuck? You have a lowered net. Yeah. You have a bigger ball. You have, and then probably the cream of the crop.

That's not what I'm looking for. Man, am I just shocked. The cougar. No, that's the death below. OK. The, well, the pinnacle. They made it an Olympic summer sport. Yes, in 1988.

Yes, which is like, now it's like, OK, now you're not just wasting your life being a pro table tennis player. Just in it for the pot, you know. You can actually train to go to the Olympics for your country. That's right. Pretty monumental. Should we talk about playing styles a bit?

I think we should. I like where you're going or not going with this next. Well, so the point is made in this article that table tennis is a game all about the style of play, sort of like boxing. You can come out swinging hard. You can come out with the rope a dope. You can play defense and boxing.

And you can kind of do that in tennis. You can be really aggressive and try and set up for the big smashes, or you could be what's known as a chiseler or a pusher, and just be really fundamentally sound and wait for your opponent to make a mistake. Right. And that was chiseling was huge back before the foam paddles,

because that's all you really had. You couldn't attack with a huge super fast return. I mean, you could try, but it wasn't going to really work. But once the introduction of foam came around, chiseling became like a decision. You could also be an attacker as well. Yeah, I mean, I think now you've got to have all the weapons in your ping pong arsenal.

Right, exactly. You can play the spin game. You can be defensive, but you also got to hang 15 feet back off the table and hit those big loop shots. Right. Yeah, you want to be able to do both for sure. So with the chiselors, though, the defensive minded people. In 1938, this legendary match took place.

The world championships between two of the greatest chiselors of all time, a Polish player named Alex Erlich and a Romanian named Panath Farkas. This was such a like, I mean, I've read into this too. It just doesn't seem like it's possible that the following took place. Okay, well, this is how it was recorded in 1965 and Sports Illustrated.

All right, there are a lot of little points here. This is 1938, by the way, did you say that? Yeah, the most epic part of this was the first point. Supposedly, the very first point took two hours and 12 minutes to complete. So they just kept hitting it back and forth. It was a two hour and 12 minute volley. It was zero, zero at two hours and 12 minutes.

That's how good these guys were at chiseling or just playing defensively. Like somebody hits to you, you hit it right back. Somebody hits to you, you hit it right back. You're not trying to smash it down their throat. You're just patiently waiting for them to make a mistake. That's a fast game still. It's not like playing with a six year old.

Right, but the thing is, it's a fast game, but you as the player, and probably as a spectator, are like, start to feel like you're about to go insane because you're locked into this. Zero, zero, at the time, ping pong was played to 21. Whoever got to 21 first, and then you had to still win by two points. So if this was zero, zero for two hours and 12 minutes,

the ball crossed the net 12,000 times. I just don't know if I buy it. That's a problem time-wise. Yeah, so here's all the things that supposedly happened. A referee in the match, his neck locked up and had to be replaced midpoint. His neck had to be replaced. Yeah, Erlich switched hands because he got tired

and played with his left hand for a little while every now and then. I believe that. During the point, the ITTF got together to negotiate shortening the match, the game to five points instead of 21. Right, but they had to have the proper representatives from the different countries there,

and Erlich was the representative from Poland, so they couldn't have this meeting without him, so they had the meeting at table side during the match, like during this point as it was going on. Supposedly, Erlich had a chessboard set up table side, and during the match was also playing chess and saying what move to make. I don't know about that.

That's what he said. That's why I don't believe any of this. This all sounds like tall tale. Well, there are other people there. All right, well, then he played chess. I don't know about that one, but I do think that there are definite elements to that. I believe that there was a two hour and 12 minute period

where there was zero to zero. Yeah, I don't know. I think at least that's true. Well, there's so much stuff attached to this, it makes me doubt the whole thing. Austrian players, supposing he went to a movie, came back still during the first point. And then finally, the Romanian, Panath Farkas,

Mr. Return, Erlich goes up 1-0, and then they start in on point number two. They get 20 minutes into that one, and supposedly other members of the Polish team pulled out knives and bread and a two foot sausage, thinking that they were gonna be there forever. And this made Farkas basically lose his mind. He lost his marbles like Burger King.

He went on the attack at that point. He went from being a, what do they call it, a chiseler, to going hard on the attack. Hit it twice, Erlich returned both, and then he basically lost it, supposedly just blasted the ball over his head and ran out screaming. I love that story.

That's one of the better ping-pong stories around. Yeah, I believe about 10% of it. All right, but even if the only thing you believe is that they were 0-0 for two hours and 12 minutes. No, you keep saying I believe that. I'm saying even if that is the only thing you believe, then that's good enough. Yeah, I don't buy any of it.

What do you think, like, that there was a match between these two and then that's it? Everything else is made up? No, I think Lore has taken over and that it has been enriched over the years to where people were going to movies and the dude was playing chess. Sure, sure, yeah.

I don't buy it that it went down like that. But do you believe that they were 0-0 for two hours and 12 minutes? I don't know if I believe that or not because I haven't seen a verified source other than this guy telling the story. Okay. Where did you see it other than this guy telling the story?

Nowhere, but I mean, that takes a lot of gall to just make up that story. Tell it to Sports Illustrated, have it printed in Sports Illustrated, knowing that anybody could go behind you and say, well, let's look at the records for that night and see and just say, well, this guy's totally lying. Well, my answer is people have gall.

Yeah, well, you and I are going to agree to disagree just to keep things moving because I think at the very least, they were 0-0 for two hours and 12 minutes. I buy that. Here's what I think. I'm definitely not going to say it while it was in Sports Illustrated.

What? So it had to be true. All right, all right. So enough ragging on Sports Illustrated from you. Hey, I got that magazine for many, many years. You know who's on my first cover? Giselle Bunchen. Muhammad Ali.

Oh, wow. That started getting it when I was a kid. Geez, wow. Do you still have that one? I don't know, but it's worth like $7, $10 now. I do. I think my mom kept all the like many, many years in a box. It's kind of fun to go through and look every now and then.

Oh yeah, for sure. All right, so this fake match happens. In the 1930s, Jewish table tennis players, and we should point out that many of the early world champions were Jewish men. They fled Germany for England. And then Erlich who we just mentioned, the Polish player was threatened obviously.

He was in Poland when the Nazis invaded and he was sent to Auschwitz. And he was literally being led to the gas chamber when a German Nazi guard recognized him and spared his life. Yeah, like he was about to die and he got moved around from concentration camp to concentration camp until the Allies liberated him

and others from the concentration camp he was in. And then right after the war, he went right back to table tennis. Man. Yeah, it's pretty crazy. All right, I think we should take a break. Okay. And go talk about sports illustrated some more.

All right. That bastion of education and journalism. That's right. And we'll be back right after this. Well now when you're on the road driving in your truck, why not learn a thing or two from Josh and Chuck? It's stuff you should know. Stuff you should know.

All right. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back

into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64?

Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing.

Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast,

Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation?

If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man.

And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life.

Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. All right, so Chuck, we were talking about like chisellers

and attackers and all that. At first, if you played ping pong up until the 50s, up until Sato showed up with his foam paddle, you were basically just chiseling. Everybody was chiseling. This is a patient back and forth game. Just chiseling. Once the foam paddles came up,

it changed the game so radically. Like you said, they actually enlarged the size of the ball to increase the air resistance to it, to slow it down, which was a huge change for everybody to get used to as well. I think that was in the 2000s that that change was made. But from the 50s to the 2000s, people were just crushing the ping pong ball. It got really fast and really fast paced.

It was fun, but it got too fast. So the ITTF stepped in and said, no, we gotta make some changes. And that's some of the other things that they've done too. They've made changes and rules over the lifetime of ping pong. To make the game hard and interesting, but also to make it fun to watch too. Yeah, now you play to 11 in competition play.

It used to be 21 for most just sort of backyard fun players. It's still 21. But these people are so good though that 21, it's way too long of a game. Yeah, you can play a point for two and a half hours. Right, two hours and 12 minutes to be precise. They change sometimes the serve rotation, like how many times you serve in a row before you switch it up,

which side you play on. You can't hide the ball when you serve because trying to make the game as fair as possible. The dimensions of the table are kind of interesting if you're looking at it in meters. And if you're from the United States, it's a nine foot long table, five feet wide, two and a half feet high.

That's 2.74 meters, 1.5 to five meters wide, 76 centimeters high. Right. The net is six inches high, but that's after they lowered it a bit. Have you seen how they make balls? Yeah, like the little factory? Yeah, you saw like video of it being made.

I can watch that stuff all day long. I know, same here. If you look at ping pong balls before they're formed into balls, they actually start as little flat plastic circles. And that is one half of a ping pong ball. And they take it and they form it. They press like a ball bearing ping pong ball size ball bearing

in hot water to mold it. And they take two of those two halves and put them together and seal them. And then they trim off the fat and there's your ping pong ball. But that's not the end of the life of the ping pong ball manufacturing process because the companies that make ping pong balls,

specifically there's one that's like a globally dominating ping pong equipment company called Double Happiness which we'll talk about later, but they do so much quality control. It's astounding before they sell a ping pong ball. Oh, I'm sure. Like there's a, to measure bounce, there's like a specific amount of bounce

that the ITTA requires for a ping pong ball. And so a company will measure it by dropping it a set height, I think like 300 millimeters. And it has to bounce back up like 240 to 260. They measure it with the digital camera. It has to have a specific hardness. So they use a robot with a needle to test the pressure it takes to puncture it with a needle.

It's like Casper mattresses, but they drop a human. Exactly. They roll it down an incline to see where it veers. I mean, like there's a lot going on there just to make a ping pong ball that's usable in a game. Sure. I think that, I mean, I just think it's top notch that they take it that seriously, you know?

Oh, I mean, any competition sporting ball undergoes incredible testing. Right. Like they just don't throw out an NFL football or a basketball either or a tennis ball. What? It's pretty amazing. Yeah, it is.

But ping pong, ping pong balls, that's what I'm talking about here. I think you secretly are kind of making fun of ping pong. I don't mean to be, I'm just, my ping pong, my idea of ping pong has changed as a result of researching this, how about that? So the paddles themselves, they are laminated wood. When you look at them, you can tell it's sort of pressed

together of different woods. Some of them are fiberglass. There are carbon fiber paddles, which I would love to give that at whirl. Yeah, but I saw that the 85% of the thickness has to be wood. So does that mean there's like carbon fiber in the middle of it or something like that?

Maybe, just to make it like slightly lighter would be my guess. Uh-huh, okay. I have no idea. Okay. There are all kinds of materials, like from just the regular, you can still get like the sandpaper paddles, very lo-fi.

But those, that padded rubber on one side and the textured little rubber dimples on the other side, which have to be two different colors, by the way, because the other player supposedly needs to know which side you're hitting it with, so they know what's coming or, you know, to a varying degree, what might be coming. But that's sort of like the classic paddle

that most people have settled on right now. Yeah, and the smooth padded side would be for chiseling and the dimpled side would be for attacking and for probably the most important part of ping pong spin, to add spin to the ball. Yeah, I'm a pretty good spinner. Oh, you are, huh?

Like not just one kind of spin? Can you do multiple kinds of spin? Yeah, I've got a good backhand spinner shot that's very fast and sort of a flick of the wrist that it just shoots off the paddle and then has a nice little topspin to it. Wow. Okay, so. And I try and angle that to like that,

far this corner that I can. That's really impressive, Chuck. Well, I didn't say I was great at it, but. You try. That's the aim. This is what's going on in your head at least, right? Yeah, but I'm not like a great, I mean, what do you even call it, a smash or a slam? An attacker?

Well, just the big, you know. Oh, the smash mouth. Yeah, the smash mouth. I'm not a good smash mouther. I'm not great. I mean, I can get lucky every once in a while, but I still try because it's such a boss move. It really is pretty cool.

But that's sort of the variation of the loop stroke, which is what you see on TV when someone just throws a big haymaker. It's all in the hips and the legs, tons of topspin. And that's sort of like that main shot for what would be a big smash to me is sort of the regular shot that people volley back and forth on in competition.

Right. And when you're doing the loop, it's like from what I saw, it's an upward chopping motion where you're just basically bringing the paddle up really quick as it comes in contact with the ball, which like you said, gives it tons of topspin. And there's this thing called the Magnus Effect

with fluid dynamics, whereas this ping pong is moving through the air, the bottom or the side of it that's spinning into the air is generating more resistance. So there's higher air pressure there than there is on top. And I'm sorry, on the bottom, which makes the ball fall because there's less air pressure there.

So when you put spin on the ball, depending on which direction it's going, you can make it go left, right, up, down. And depending on the type of, what's it called when you hit the ball? Not the grip, the swing. A pong. Depending on the stroke, I guess it's the stroke.

Depending on the stroke you use, you can apply different spin to the ball. But that's the big reason why like one side of a ping pong paddle is dimpled. So that you can make contact with the ball and really kind of grip it while you're giving it that spin. Yeah. Ping pong.

So there are all kinds of grips. The shake hand grip is sort of, if you don't play a lot of ping pong, it's probably just the standard little grip that you would want to use. The pinhold grip is what you see my brother and Asian players use. That's got to move.

Is there one with the thumb on the back side of it? Yeah, it's basically your thumb and forefinger kind of wrap around the handle and almost touch each other. And then your other three fingers are resting on the back of the paddle itself. And it sort of looks like you're holding the paddle upside down.

Well, because you kind of are. Yes. But that's, my brother is a total pin holder. Gotcha. What about the sea miller grip? Do you ever do that? That's Danny sea miller. That's, I didn't really quite get then.

That's like the shake hand. But what I saw was like the thumb and forefinger are kind of resting on the face of the paddle. Sometimes the finger, forefinger is wrapped around sort of on the side of the paddle. What I saw was that, so you've got your three, your pinky finger, your ring finger and your index finger. That's on the paddle.

Or your middle finger are all wrapped. Yeah, that's on the handle. Your forefinger and your thumb are like control, they're like up against the edges of the paddle. And it makes it easier to spin the paddle and control it. That's what I saw as the sea miller grip. Yeah, well, it's easier to flip the paddle

to use both sides of it. Right, exactly. So you want to chisel here and then maybe a little attack there, put some spin on and then just push it back. You just flip it back and forth. Thanks to Danny sea miller. Yeah, and I love the next part of this article,

which is like, if you want to know all the rules of ping pong, go look them up. Right. Because it would be kind of boring just to read all those out. Sure. But there are, I mean, if you're playing at someone's house, you play house rules, just ask what they are.

Yeah, be a good guest. Be a good guest and say, what are the house rules? Because people play differently. Some more, not obscure rules, but sort of nitpicky rules that casual players might not know. And depending on where you play the house rules, it may take effect or not. You're supposed to toss the ball

at least 16 centimeters into the air before you serve. Right. My house rule is you just have to have some air between the, like you can't just hold it in your hand and hit it off your hand. Like we don't say it has to be 16 centimeters, but there has to be a little bit of air between your hand.

Yeah, I see. The ball has to be suspended before you serve it. So what happens if someone violates your house rules? Are they like tired and feathered? No, you say, dude, what are you doing? Not cool, bro. Here's a smash mouth for you. And you have to serve behind the inline.

That's a pretty standard even for house rules. Like you're leaning over the table. Oh, I see what you mean. You can't lean forward a couple of feet. That's not good. Cause I was going to say, I thought you were saying like you have to get it inside a square to get it to the other square.

And I saw that that only applies in doubles. Yeah, you can serve it to either side. When you're playing singles. Correct. And then if it touches your hand that you're holding the paddle with, apparently according to the ITTF, your hand is part of the paddle

as far as they're concerned. So if it, if it bounces off of your hand, that's, there's nothing wrong with that. Yeah, I always get the thumb hit though. And it always sends it off in a bad direction. Yeah. And I always go, ah, thumb hit. You need to do more sea miller.

More sea miller, less thumbsies. Right. The pimples, believe it or not, those are regulated. They cannot be larger than two millimeters. But astoundingly, the size of the paddle is not at all regulated. You could show up with a pickleball paddle if you wanted to, and they'd be like, yep, it works.

But the foam padding on either side, if you're a competitive table tennis player, you glue your own foam on. And you can cheat it too, right? Yeah, for a lot of, until the Beijing Olympics you could from I think the sixties until the Beijing Olympics, they would use a specific kind of glue that would, it would expand,

but at the same time soften the foam underneath the exterior of the foam padding. So you've got like the layer, like the rubbery layer. And then underneath that is foam, like a spongy material. It would get into the pores of that spongy material and it would make that ball bounce even faster. And would just give it an enormous amount of speed. But just for a short amount of time though, right?

Right, so if you were in a tournament, you were pulling off and then regluing your foam pads on multiple times over the course of that weekend, because you get about three, four hours of good, I don't know, ricochet return off of those things. And then they would dry up and it wouldn't be quite as useful. Cheaters, I love the article you sent

and where they were basically like, everyone was doing it, everybody. They called it doping, table tennis doping. But the problem is, is it had a lot of volatile organic compounds. So the International Table Tennis Foundation said, no, we don't want people getting cancer, so we gotta ban it.

And they actually test paddles now in a little machine that tests for volatile organic compounds. I love it. Yep. Get those rats out of the game. Get them out. You gotta win by two, like we said. Generally you played a 21 at home, 11 in competition,

I think we said. And then obviously just anything is a point if you get the point, it's not like volleyball, you don't have to be serving to get the point. Right. Which I love that too. It makes the game go a lot faster. Yeah, and just my whole problem

is keeping up with that score. Yeah, that's why you want a sober person there keeping score for you. And I guess we should finish with this, well, a couple of things, but you've heard the term ping pong diplomacy. Yeah, there's a big story there. Yeah, that came from a real thing that happened.

Obviously China lived in isolation for decades and decades from the rest of the world. And then during the Cold War, of course, we were on, the US was on the opposite side of China. Not a lot of travel going back and forth or allowed between the countries until the international competition of 1971 where the Chinese table tennis team

went to the championships in Japan, met some Americans and in particular, one American named Glenn Cowan. And he was like, hey, man, like we're all the same really. We all love table tennis regardless of our grip. Let's shake hands. And he rode the bus with them on the way back to the hotel. So let me just interject here.

He got on the bus accidentally, he had missed his own bus. And these were buses that were taking the teams to the hotel and there was like the first 10 minutes of this 15 minute bus ride were silent and tense because these two enemy groups were on the same bus and no one knew what to do until Zhuang Zidong stood up and said, I'm gonna go talk to this guy. Yeah, but they got along great.

Like I said, they had more in common than they thought. And table tennis or ping pong is literally what brought them together. And it was seen as a sort of an emblematic thing that flashed forward a bit to the press covering this. It becomes a big deal. The US table tennis competition team said, we wanna go to China and like,

because they're the best of the best over there. And Mao Zedong said, sure, come on over. They did so in April of 1971. They spent a week there. It was big in the news. And it literally kind of thawed relations between the US and China. It paved the way for a trip by Richard Nixon.

Like the US table tennis team went over there before Nixon did and just shared love of table tennis and this kind of international exposure of these two enemy countries, like getting along, whatever it takes to build common ground and consensus, if it's table tennis, awesome, so much the better. So it led to normalized relations between the two countries very quickly,

like within a year after the, or the beginnings of normalized relations within a year after the thing where, all because Ziang Zedong came over and said, hey man, I just wanna say thank you for playing table tennis and gave him a scarf and Glenn Cowan had a comb on him. And he's like, this isn't a good enough reciprocal gift. So he later gave Ziang Zedong a T-shirt

with a peace symbol on it, which is pretty cool. And Richard Nixon, well-known lover of Szechuan cuisine and marijuana. Yes, and peace symbol T-shirts. He was all retired in one of those in public. We should also talk a little bit about ping pong robots. In 1992, they built a table tennis robot. It was okay.

You could program it to imitate different styles. But it wasn't like when you played against, when it played against a human being, it was, what would happen there? It was just shooting them all to the same place at the same velocity. Oh, that's right. You knew exactly where it was gonna go.

Yeah, there wasn't a lot of training from it, but then they started inventing robots that could like add spin to it and pick its own moves. And that was in like the early 90s when they first came out with those. And the ones they have today, one came out in 2016 called Forpheus, F-O-R-P-H-E-U-S. This thing is scary looking.

Yeah, it is, and it can play some mean ping pong. But it's like actually plays you. It's an AI that plays you in ping pong, but it's like a giant mechanical spidery kind of looking thing. Yeah, it's really creepy looking. It looks like a, yeah, it looks like a big spider sitting high above the table across from you.

And I saw the video of the guy playing it at CES and he was, I felt bad for the guy because you cannot beat the thing. Well, plus he also goes, well, plus I'm kind of nervous because all these people are watching. Well, when he asked at one point, he was like, is there literally like nothing I can do

that this thing won't return? They were like, nope. So then he was like, well, why am I even here? Well, yeah, it's an AI, it's tracking the ball's velocity and trajectory and like making calculations about how to best return it. It's, you're not gonna win against it. Nope.

Nope, but you can train really well to beat other human socks off with it. That's right. So I don't have anything else to you. I'm looking at my fun facts. I got in three of the four. The last one here is in 1993, the world record was set between two players

who, if you're talking like speed ping pong, they hit it back and forth 173 times in 60 seconds. Oh my God. That is some serious speed play. That is, that's an amazing fact, but it's got nothing on the two hour and 12 minute point. Fake news. All right, now you got anything else?

I got nothing else. All right, well, if you want to know more about ping pong, go start playing. It's the greatest thing you can ever try to do with your life. And since I said that, it's time for listener mail. We should have a, totally have a ping pong table here at work.

I agree. I don't think we have room for it anymore, but at one point we probably did. I know, now where it's all this like production space, production space. And we're like, where's ping pong? I'm going to call this, well, we've been getting a lot of heat lately for two errors,

one of which was sort of a joke by me. Oh boy. Which I'm going to read now, but we should also say about figs and dates and prunes and raisins. They're all the same thing. It's like pork, ham and bacon. Now we heard from a lot of people about that.

And we understand now. Yeah. I mean, I got it flat out wrong. So sorry about that everyone. You can stop telling us now. Right. This is about average life expectancy, which I was kind of just kidding about.

It was, I think Spanish flu episode. I made a joke about the life expectancy being like 50 or something. And I was like, so I'd almost be dead. So I'll just read this. Hey stuffers, I hope this doesn't come across as being snarky or trolly, but I think you should try and clear up the difference

between average actual life expectancy and average life expectancy. Chuck, more than once. So I guess I've said this before. You've made it sound as if people in the past could only expect to live into the 30s or 40s. That is not the case. People live well into their 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s,

just like today. And he gives some prominent examples of old people back in the day. And then he says what drove the average life expectancy down was the insanely high rate of infant and childhood mortality. People had huge families back in the past, just to try and ensure that some of their children

survived into adulthood, because so many died as infants and others never made it past their second or third year, due to mom's measles, influenza, et cetera. The absolute horror of whooping cough, let's not forget polio, and any number of plagues that modern medicine has managed to render vastly less lethal,

thanks mostly to our friend, vaccines. So more and more children are surviving the battlefield called childhood, growing into adults, and the average life expectancy has become much longer. This is a great email. Thank you, Western Medicine. That's from Joseph Cottrell.

And Joseph, I was kind of just kidding about that. Which time? Well, every time. It was a recurring joke. But that was a very kind email, and it was fun and funny, and you did it right. So thank you. For sure.

Plus also, you gave you a chance to tell everybody that you know that that's the case. Yeah. And it gave everybody, it gave me a chance to let everybody know that I was totally wrong about dates and figs. Sure. Well, if you want to correct us, like Joseph did,

that was an A plus correction email, Joseph. You can get in touch with us. You can go to stuffyshano.com and check out our social links, or you can send us an email to stuffpodcast at howstuffworks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself,

what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen

so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.