Ball of Fury
Inside Chicago’s cut throat world of ping pong
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When the owner came back, she saw people playing pong in the backroom. It pissed her off. She was livid with Stockwell, who pleaded to keep the table. He thought it could help bring in customers. She didn’t. “But I was right,” he says. “About a week later, she changed her mind. By then, enough people heard about Happy Village having a table and the place filled with players.” These players brought their friends and sales of liquor and beer rose. They added their second table the following year.
About a month later, Danny Giamalis moved in across the street. “When I heard they had a table,” he says, “I was like: I am going to be there all the time.” As a kid growing up in Berwyn, Giamalis had a pong table in his basement. He’d play against his brother and church friends. “But I didn’t play anywhere near as much as I play now.”
On Tuesday nights, the old pong aficionados of Chicago come out to play, heckle and coach. The two main ones who have been coming to Happy Village for more than a year are Bob Hegberg, a retired specialist in tax shelter investments, and Dr. Harvey Ostreicher Ph.D., a speech pathologist. Both helped Giamalis improve his game, just like they’ll help any new comer.
“The thing to remember,” says Ostreicher, “—and this is the first thing I taught Danny— is to chop when they top the ball and top the ball when they chop. Chop the top. Top the chop. It’s easy to remember, but hard to do.”
Ostreicher is a self-titled “ex-Hassidic Jew” from Brooklyn. He has thinning hair and skinny legs with well-defined calves. While he plays, he encourages spectators to look at his body, a slightly rotund, pale physique. “Do you see how little I’m moving?” he asks. He counters and controls his opponents from the middle-left of the table in cotton shorts and a t-shirt. His arm moves back and forth like a pendulum. He’s 62-years-old and says the hardest part about playing pong is picking up the ball once it falls to the floor. “Bending over is a motherfucker.”
Ostreicher uses a hard wooden paddle, a type that is banned from competitions because it negates spin and speed. It’s traditional and was used before the advent of the carbon fiber and sponge rubber paddles in use today. It’s also the reason why Giamalis is reluctant to play him, though they regularly hit around for practice. Ostreicher believes that
Giamalis could be a very good player, if he would only control his temper.
“The one time we actually played,” Ostreicher says, “I got up on him a couple points. I was playing really well and he couldn’t take it.” Toward the end of the match, Giamalis threw his paddle down and yelled, “I can’t believe I’m losing to this fat old fuck?” Ostreicher laughs at the memory and then says that Giamalis was so frustrated that he walked out of the bar before finishing the game. “He has a temper,” he says. “It gets him into trouble.”
Hegberg nods in agreement. The 74-year-old Korean War veteran says
Giamalis reminds him a bit of himself. “I was your usual red-headed
Irishman with a quick temper as a kid,” he says. Hegberg wears an eggshell blue polo shirt and white calf socks that match his short white beard. “It took playing ping pong to understand how controlling [his temper] could make me a better player.”
In his heyday, Hegberg was known as “the chopper.” He played a defensive game that would force his opponents’ shots into the net. At Happy Village, he continues the pattern and takes puffs off the cigarette he holds one hand as he swings the paddle held in the other. He regularly beats the shit out of the young guys. Between points, he grimaces. “I’m not the player I once was,” he says, after edging-out his opponent by six. “Back in the day, he wouldn’t have scored on me.” He laughs and lights a fresh cig. Pong is one sport, apparently, that you can play lit-up.
Hegberg believes it will take time before Giamalis can raise his game to a semi-professional level. “He’s got potential,” he says. “He’s got quick reflexes, a quick mind, good strokes and the basic idea of how to play the game. But [he] doesn’t have the temperament to play at a high level consistently.” Hegberg says that in pong’s upper echelon, everybody gets the ball back, so you’ve got to be very level headed. “He’s too emotional to get that good yet,” he says and then adds. “Over a period of time ago,
I ran into a psychologist and he said that all of the good, high-level pong players had 3-4 things in common: almost all are quiet intelligent; most of them like classical music or play chess; they are very good at 2-3 other sports; and all were individualists. Mavericks. People who push themselves… perfectionists.”
