BACK TO THE BASEMENT.(ping-pong)

I loved the house I grew up in, a big mock-Tudor, built in the twenties, with stained-glass windows and an old-time solidity, but I was afraid of the basement. It had two rooms where, for all eighteen years that my parents owned the house, I thought I might die. One was a storage room, with a raw rock outcropping that extended back farther than the light in the room allowed you to see. I thought that the black space above the rock went on more or less forever, and I was always expecting a man to emerge from it and kill me. The other was the small, hot room where the furnace was; there was a blood-red switchplate with a printed warning on it telling you not to turn the switch off, and, hanging next to the furnace, a large glass container full of red liquid, whose function I never knew. I was sure that if I touched it or the light switch the house would explode. And then, if I didn't actually die, I would be in a lot of trouble. Beyond those two rooms, down a hallway and two steps, there was what we called the playroom. There wasn't much in there--nothing good that might get ruined, and not much to play with, either--but there was a Ping-Pong table, which for me was, if not quite a reason for being, at least a reason for risking a trip to the basement. In this room, I was the killer.

My father had made the Ping-Pong table himself: it consisted of two pieces of plywood hinged in the middle and stained dark green, with a white painted center line, laid over a brown wool blanket on an old dining-room table from the Philippines, where my parents had lived when they were first married. It was the only piece of furniture in the room, except for an ugly blue couch in a corner, which sometimes had to be pulled scrapingly across the linoleum floor in order for you to get at an inevitably errant Ping-Pong ball. At some point, we got a pool table, adding another obstacle under or around which you had to go to fetch the ball.

I had one friend who liked to play almost as much as I did, but mainly I played with my father, starting when I was about six. He was a very good tennis player, and a very good Ping-Pong player, and he didn't tone down his game for me. I really wanted to beat him, and I knew that one day I would. Because I was good, too. I was really good. I had excellent hand-eye coordination and timing--I knew when and how to put spin on the ball, dump a short ball just over the net, or put it away with a slam. I loved everything about the game: the rhythmic pock-pock, pock-pock of the ball hitting the table and racquet again and again, the hummy all-over pleasure I got when I hit a ball well, the back-and-forth conversational aspect of it. I was always in the mood to play. Dick Miles, a ten-time United States champion in the nineteen-forties, fifties, and sixties, wrote in one of his instructional books, "Table tennis is, for me, one of those world-blotting-out activities, the ultimate escape." It was a little like that for me, too. I was completely at home with a racquet in my hand; I played without any tentativeness or self-consciousness, which made the game different from everything else in my life. My father, who had a military bent and was not a big proponent of self-assertion in his children, nevertheless allowed me my insistence on my own existence when it came to Ping-Pong--my killer instinct, my agonized howls after missing a big shot--and he would laugh appreciatively when I went all-out and hit a winning slam. He had his little jokes, which became my little jokes. If either of us had the other person at zero and the other person got a point, we'd say, "There goes my love game," as if we'd been sure we had a shutout going. Each time we finished playing, my father would pretend to be a boxing announcer and declare himself "the winner and still champeen!" And for quite a few years, until I was twelve or thirteen, and good enough to beat him at the game he'd taught me, he was.

After I left home and went to college, I stopped playing, except once or twice a year at my parents'. They'd sold our house, in a suburb of New York City, and bought a place in Massachusetts. The green plywood, the wool blanket, and the dining-room table are set up there now, in an uninviting storage room that has an off-putting number of places for a ball to hide after a missed shot. I always beat my father when we play these days, but perhaps I should add that he is now eighty-two. Once, after I moved to New York, in 1979, I played in the Ping-Pong parlor on Broadway and Ninety-sixth Street, which was owned by the legendary player Marty Reisman. It was just a few blocks from my apartment, but the place closed a year later, to make way for a never-to-be-legendary high-rise. Not playing much Ping-Pong for all those years cemented my belief that I was a good player--not to mention the fact that I'd gone out on a high note, having won my high-school championship in my senior year. I only had to beat two people to do it, but still.

Here's the thing, though: I really wasn't very good. I was . . . O.K. . . . sort of. Other ...