Portland’s love of table tennis means a major league team today and a rich history in ‘ping-pong diplomacy’

At a Major League Table Tennis tournament earlier this month, software salesman Sung Choi cheered with glee.

“It’s got all the excitement of any sport,” he said. “It’s fast. There’s athleticism. There’s excitement. People love watching it.”

Choi is an avid ping-pong player. He hopes having a major league team in town – the Portland Paddlers are part of Major League Table Tennis – will convince others of the joys of the game.

“There are lots of sports out there,” he said. “But I think if people see it, then they’ll get hooked.”

Two dozen of the world’s best table tennis players were at Portland State University’s Viking Pavilion earlier this month for the pro league’s second season opener. Four of the eight league teams competed: the Florida Crocs, the Bay Area Blasters, the Princeton Revolution and the Paddlers.

“It’s amazing to watch,” Choi said.

Players sprang from side to side smashing the ball with professional-level speed and accuracy. The Portland Paddlers won the weekend and now sit atop the Western Conference. Paddlers coach Christian Lillieroos said Oregonians need to understand that it’s significant the league chose to start the second season in the Rose City.

“According to the owners and commissioners of Major League Table Tennis, Portland had the best audience,” Lillieroos said. “They wanted to start in Portland to get a good beginning.”

Two-time Olympic table tennis player Sean O’Neill lives in Tigard and is an NBC commentator. He thinks fans embraced the league in its first season for one main reason, Portland’s top player Jiwei Xia.

“They were on a 12-match losing streak, and he got the ball rolling,” said O’Neill “He beat one of the Nigerian Olympians and from there they went on a nine-match winning streak.”

Jiwei Xia, who is originally from China but has now lived in Portland for eight years, coaches table tennis for a living. He thinks there were other reasons the crowd went so wild.

“I had 12 pickleball friends who came to cheer for me,” he said.

Lillieroos said table tennis makes sense in Oregon.

“I think the Portland crowd is more open to international things. And table tennis is a very big sport internationally,” he said.

“We also have this idea that Portland is weird. Or Oregon is weird. So maybe table tennis is a weird sport and that’s why people like it.”

Portland’s link to table tennis goes back much further than the “Keep Portland Weird” ethos.

Lillieroos believes the city’s passion for the game started in 1971 and the era of so called “ping-pong” diplomacy.

Back in 1971, the United States hadn’t had diplomatic relations with China for more than two decades, largely because of the Korean War and China’s Cultural Revolution. But at a table tennis championship in Japan, an American player missed his bus and ended up on the Chinese bus instead. It could have been an international Cold War incident. But players made friends and organized a series of international matches.

“We didn’t know what was going on in China,” said Judy Hoarfrost, the owner of Paddle Palace table tennis club in Tigard. She was 15 when she played those matches. She said two players turned the trip down because it was so unclear what might happen.

“The (Chinese) were a big mystery to us. We wondered: ‘Are they going to play well? What have they been doing during these missing years?’” she said. “We had heard that they’d been in prison or sweeping the streets.”

She said the language difference made it very difficult to actually talk to other players. But the exchange was embraced by the public and is partially responsible for the warming of diplomatic relations between China and the West.

Hoarfrost, a member of the U.S. Table Tennis Hall of Fame, thinks Portland’s love of table tennis runs deeper even than ping-pong diplomacy. Her father ran what she believes was the nation’s first full time table tennis club in the Old Elks Temple in downtown Portland, the original Paddle Palace.

“The table tennis tables were in this beautiful big ball room that had chandeliers, carved angels in the ceiling,” she said.

Hoarfrost’s company is still called Paddle Palace, and it’s a distributor for big table tennis brands. The company also makes wooden paddles in Oregon and glue to stick on the rubber faces that help players spin the ball.

At the major league tournament earlier this month, it was clear local fans were enthusiastic. Less clear was whether professional table tennis can survive in the United States. O’Neill thinks the odds are improved by the arrival of the major league because it gives young players a way to potentially make a living in the sport.

“After you graduate from high school or college you’re like: ‘What do I do next?’ Major League Table Tennis will be that platform where they can be in a team. They can play with world class players,” O’Neill said.

Top European players can make $250,000 a year with sponsorship. But average players bring home about $40,000 a year, more if they are willing to coach.