ping pong table: Ping Pong in Jerusalem

Nine years ago I lived in Jerusalem in a place called the Jerusalem Center which sponsors a study abroad program by Brigham Young University (Although the study abroad program has been on hold the last several years due to terrorism concerns in the region). The Jerusalem Center has housing for close to two hundred students, a cafeteria, several classrooms, a concert hall which has one of the best views of the city while you watch the concert, a basketball gym, and a game room, among many other unique things. In the game room there were two ping pong tables.

Up until this time in my life I hadn't played too much ping pong also known as table tennis. One of my close friends had a table in his basement and I would play from time to time so I knew the rules and such, but I really didn't know any technique and wasn't very good. All the same I still enjoyed ping pong immensely. When I arrived in Jerusalem in the summer in 1996 I quickly began to play a lot of ping pong. I started to learn a few good serving techniques and I became pretty good, at least for an amateur/beginner.

One day one of the students at the Jerusalem Center decided to get a little creative with the two ping pong tables we had there. He put both of the ping pong tables together lengthwise and put one of the table's net in the middle of both tables. The double long ping pong table was invented. The rules we played with were almost virtually the same although the style was much different. When one player hit the ping pong ball across the net he had to make sure that it didn't go "out of bounds." The Out of Bounds rule was the only other new rule that existed. It was needed in case the server served the ping pong ball in a manner that it would land to the left or right of the extra long table. In other words the ping pong ball needed to leave the table area at the end of the extra long table or with in one foot of the end of the table. This obviously makes sense since the player receiving the serve could never return certain types of serves on an extra long table otherwise.

The most exciting part of the extra long table to me was the ability to have more control on the spinning of your serves. On the regular table I was never able to get the topspin or downspin types of serves to work for me. On the extra long table I learned the spinning technique quite well. The difference between the extra long table and the regular size table was that I could not get the ping pong ball to spin in time to reach the other player on the regular size table, but on the extra long table I was able to get the spin to work quite well since it had time to start and end the direction the spin would take it before going out of bounds.

It was great. I felt like a great ping pong player because I would win regularly against whoever I played. The truth, however, is that I was not that great of a ping pong player. Instead I had helped to invent a different way to play ping pong and was pretty good at the new rules we invented.

I think the most exciting part about this experience I had in Jerusalem at the Jerusalem Center is that I learned the valuable lesson of being unconventional. There are many games out there that are great and fun, but we can all be creative and make alternate rules to the games we play. It makes for a never ending relationship with the games we all love.


Michael Van Orden is a Ping Pong Specialist with Yard Game Central. For more information on ping pong or to purchase a ping pong table visit http://www.TablePong.com