Throughout the world, people, places, and things can become polluted. I don’t mean polluted in the sense of becoming smoggy, soiled, or splattered with your toddler’s unwanted supper. Rather, I mean impure or contaminated. Desacralized. Like cooties, albeit for adults. For example, on an atoll in Micronesia where I conducted fieldwork, the highest chief possessed such sacred power, what we might think of as holiness, that he could not touch his own food without contaminating it. He would thus be fed by his kin, especially his dutiful older daughters. I thought it too impertinent to ask, but I always wondered whether during dinnertime this holy papa would sit next to his grandchildren, so they could all be spoon-fed together.
Mary Douglas wrote the classic anthropological text on the subject of pollution, Purity and Danger. She recognized that all cultures categorize things in their environment—this is an animal, this is a house, this is a sport, this is a hobbit, and so forth—but the world does not fit neatly into boxes. Mary Douglas argued that cultures often designate those items that don’t fit into a box as polluted, that is, dangerous and to be avoided. Her classic example was drawn from the Torah, where the Israelites, being pastoralists, categorized animals by whether or not they were cloven-hoofed ruminants. If an animal is neither cloven-hoofed nor a ruminant it is forbidden, but if an animal possesses both traits, such as cattle, it can become a tasty kebab. But the animals the Torah explicitly prohibits by name are those that are not neatly categorized within this system. For example, hare and hyrax, which were believed to chew their cud but are not cloven-hooved, and pigs and camels, which have those desirable cloven-hoofed feet, but do not ruminate. Like all good anthropological theories, there are plenty of supportive examples in the ethnographic literature and no shortage of counter-examples, hence debate surrounds the theory. Anthropologists enjoy a good argument (so do Jews for that matter, so fair warning that a conversation with a Jewish anthropologist can be treacherous—just ask my kids), and this argument has lasted over 50 years.
Questions of holiness, impurity, boundaries, and things that don’t fit comfortably into humanly constructed boxes fascinate me. Maybe especially the last on that list, because I include myself among such things, although I think I would fit comfortably in a hobbit hole. For many years I lived (above ground) and conducted fieldwork in northern Israel in a town called Tzfat. Residents would often tell me that the air in Tzfat was holy, and I couldn’t disagree; the air in Tzfat felt special. Tzfat, nestled among the Galilean hills, is the ancestral home of Jewish mysticism, and to this day it is a sacred place that carries a spiritual vibe for both secular and religious Jews; you can feel it in the air, so to speak. Personally, as one who prefers snow to sun I found the afternoon breeze during the hot summer months, whether holy or not, to be a genuine blessing. As a curious anthropologist (admittedly, in both senses), this so-called holy air intrigued me. I wanted to understand how people thought about holiness, so I would ask residents, “When does the air become holy? Does it become holy when it crosses the Jordanian border? How does it become transformed—suddenly or gradually? If a breeze passes through a neighboring town’s garbage dump before it reaches Tzfat, does it lose its holiness?” As you might imagine, such questions were met with stares of bewilderment and won me not a single friend. Apparently, human minds do not easily roam across such terrain. Nor does Judaism offer much guidance on these matters. As far as religions go, Judaism is particularly focused on the here and now—that is, this world—generally not overly concerning itself with the abstract. Knowing how and when air becomes holy does not impact practical or ritual life. Thus, of the countless fanciful questions the rabbis have considered throughout Jewish history—Does a house remain kosher for Passover if a mouse brings a breadcrumb into it?—the boundaries of holy air is not one of them. By the way, the answer is yes—you can invite a breadcrumb-carrying mouse to your Seder.
We encounter boundaries and thresholds all the time, yet we often leave them remarkably vague, or determine them on a seemingly ad hoc basis. A divorced Jewish friend recently told me that she met someone she liked who is not Jewish. She will not date anyone who is not Jewish, but in her eyes, this guy seems so Jewish. As she explained to me, “He’s a short, bespectacled, left-leaning Deadhead with a receding hairline and a healthy nose—how could he not be Jewish? He must have a Jewish relative somewhere, right? Maybe a great aunt who hid her identity to avoid an arranged marriage with pimply-faced Sheldon Moskowitz?” Okay, I took some poetic license with that last question. In any event, what is her solution to this age-old dilemma? A very modern one: before dating, this naïve, innocent potential object of her affection must take an ancestry DNA test, in hopes, as it were, of finding Uncle Moshe in the family tree. Humans really are fascinating. As an anthropologist, to tickle my fascination, I have a habit of posing questions that are logical to me but annoying to their targets (just ask the residents of Tzfat, or again, my children), so without hesitating I asked my friend, “What percentage of his ancestry has to be Ashkenazi Jewish for him to be acceptable dating material?” Oddly, she hadn’t thought that far ahead; I received the same blank stare I received in Tzfat. She had no clue what percentage would make him a kosher paramour.
But unlike breezes, breadcrumbs, and boys, knowing the threshold of when some things are no longer holy does indeed impact daily practical life, so clear resolutions are imperative. As Mary Douglas intuited, food consumption across cultures is among the most commonplace practical arenas requiring clarity. Within Judaism, the rabbis evidently appreciated that there had to be some threshold level of impure exposure, below which a food item would remain unaffected and thus edible, but above which the food would become, in Yiddish parlance, treif, or unkosher. So, what is that threshold? Or, we can make this a little less abstract via a word problem, one you were certainly never asked in middle-school math class: If my divorced friend’s potential boyfriend was cooking a pot of kosher chicken soup (maybe a better sign of his heritage than a DNA test?) and the children in the neighborhood were playing a game with a pig’s foot (cloven-hoofed, need I remind you) and it flew through the kitchen window and landed in his soup, how big would his pot of soup have to be for it to remain kosher? Maybe not a great math word problem, but a wonderful anthropological question if there ever was one! The rabbinic answer? As long as the contaminant—in our case, that airborne cloven foot—is less than 1/60 the volume of the kosher food, it remains kosher and can be served for supper (Chulin 96b).
How the rabbis arrived at this threshold is a bit curious. Jewish cuisine is known for its artery-clogging residue more than its taste, yet, somehow the rabbis decided taste, in this instance, was important: below 1/60, they claimed, the taste of the impurity would be undetectable by the Jewish palate. I often think about this rabbinic threshold at the end of each semester when I am invariably confronted with a tiny impurity that pollutes the otherwise ‘kosher’ feedback I receive from my students. It never ceases to amaze me that no matter how well a semester of teaching goes, all it takes is one negative student review to send me spiraling downward toward a state of agonizing self-doubt. I try to tell myself that food remains kosher even when it comes in contact with small amounts of treif, so 60 positive student reviews should surely negate one negative review, right? But it doesn’t! The one negative review is what I dwell on and obsess about, and discussions with my colleagues suggest I am not alone. Hurray that I found a profession where everyone is neurotic and obsessive! And yes, it is fair, albeit annoying, to ask: “How big does your class need to be before you can ignore the one bad review?” Like my divorced friend and fellow Tzfat residents, I don’t know. But it must be pretty big!
For a blog on table tennis it sure has taken me a while to get to table tennis, but that time has finally arrived. As I mentioned in my previous post, I recently attended the US Table Tennis Nationals in Fort Worth, Texas in order to promote my forthcoming book, The Ping Pong Player and the Professor. In that blog I mentioned how I was touched by the interest and support of everyone I spoke to at the Nationals. Shamefully, I lied. Not everyone showered me with love and encouragement. What I failed to mention was that among the dozens and dozens of wonderfully supportive conversations I had, I experienced one uncomfortable conversation. Needless to say, on my plane ride home it was only this conversation that kept running through my mind.
It all began innocently enough. I was talking with an Olympian and decorated coach, who I’ve known for years, and I was telling her about my book. During the conversation she mentioned that the annual USATT Hall of Fame dinner had been held the previous evening and it was a shame I was not there to discuss the book. Indeed. Nonetheless, she said she would introduce me to other Hall of Famers and within a few minutes I found myself being introduced to an elderly man who I did not know. I consider myself a bit of a table tennis history buff so I was surprised that I had never heard of him, but he was evidently an important player in his time, and according to my friend, a Hall of Famer. Table tennis star or not, from the outset, the conversation was awkward.
“The book is a memoir of sorts, about my son Eliel and I,” I explained. “The title of the book is The Ping Pong Player and the Professor.”
“Oh, so your son is a sandpaper player,” he commented nonchalantly.
“What?” I responded in some confusion. “No, he’s a sponge player. He has fiddled around with hardbat and sandpaper, but never seriously.”
“Then why do you refer to his him as a ping pong player?” Had there been any hint of humor in his voice or demeanor I would have assumed he was joking with me, but his earnestness was obvious.
“I thought the alliteration in the title worked,” I said meekly—almost apologetically—annoyed that I had to justify the straightforward title of my book.
“So you received approval from Parker Brothers to use ping pong in the title?”
“Huh?”
Sensing my confusion, he continued, “Well, if not, you are probably going to get sued.”
“What?” I responded, probably with a bit too much force. His earnestness was starting to get under my skin.
“Ping pong is copyrighted by Parker Brothers. They’ll probably sue you. I hope you know a good lawyer.”
I was getting frustrated and I did not want to continue this conversation. So, I did what I often do when I don’t want to do something—I vanish. I didn’t have Bilbo’s ring, but fortunately table tennis tournaments provide no shortage of excuses to be somewhere else, so I made up an excuse of where I needed to be, which in my mind was anywhere far away from this blunt raconteur.
I realize this conversation requires a little unpacking. Tension between the terms ping pong and table tennis has a long history in the sport, which I will elaborate on in a moment, but first, why would my interlocutor assume Eliel is a sandpaper player? It is an absurd assumption because in the US there are only a handful of competitive sandpaper players. I suspect my Hall of Famer was thinking about the World Championships of Ping Pong, inaugurated in 2011, which are played with sandpaper paddles. Maybe in the minds of a few, ping pong nowadays refers to sandpaper competitions.
Second, was I really at risk of getting sued? As it turns out, my eccentric Hall of Famer knew his history. I was able to confirm in Tim Boggan’s History of U.S. Table Tennis, vol. 1: 1928-1939 that since 1901, ping pong is a registered trademark, owned in the U.S. by Parker Brothers. Historically, Parker Brothers was a rather territorial owner, or at least more territorial than London’s John Jacques and Sons, owners of the trademark on the rest of the planet. As I know from years of living in the Middle East, territoriality breeds drama, and within the world of table tennis there seems to have been plenty of it in the early 20th century, with the recurring public spectacles reaching their anticlimactic denouement in the mid-1930s. Parker Brothers wanted to maintain a monopoly on the emerging sport. They sought to do so by holding lavish tournaments and well-organized intercity leagues in which players were required to use Parker Brothers equipment, exclusively. These competitions were supported by the national association Parker Brothers founded, the American Ping Pong Association (APPA), as well as local chapters they financed throughout the country. One unruly chapter, New York’s Metropolitan Ping Pong Association, unanimously voted in 1931 to leave APPA and develop their own organization, escaping the stranglehold Parker Brothers had on the American version of the sport. The newly formed New York Table Tennis Association (NYTTA) was supported by the International Table Tennis Federation (ITTF), the international governing body of table tennis, which had been established five years earlier. ITTF advised the NYTTA leadership to seek representation of every US state, not just New York, and initially they did. By 1933 other defecting APPA chapters were emerging in places such as Indiana, Illinois, and Missouri, and in the fall these and other renegade chapters decided to unite to form the United States Table Tennis Association (USTTA).
The early 1930s saw competing US Nationals held by the rival organizations, APPA and NYTTA (eventually USTTA). The challenge for the apostates was money, and it has been so ever since. NYTTA/USTTA took the moral high ground and fought on principle—the right for players to use whatever products they wished—but they could not compete with Parker Brothers financially. APPA held their National tournaments at posh venues such as the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York (1932) and the Palmer House in Chicago (1933), whereas NYTTA held their Nationals at department stores, Bamberger’s and Gimbels respectively. Hollywood icons could be found at APPA events. Indeed, a pro-Parker Brothers article that was reprinted in Reader’s Digest in March of 1934 mentions the many stars affiliated with the Pacific Coast Ping-Pong Association, including Ginger Rogers, Conrad Nagel, Nancy Carroll, and Fay Wray, but then the article takes an overtly anti-Semitic turn: “It would be nice to be able to enumerate an equally imposing list of big shots who enjoy Table Tennis, but this is impossible. Its cohorts, being recruited from the East Side of Manhattan and the South Side of Chicago, are named Bernbaum (sic, Berenbaum), Schiff, Schussheim and Lipshitz (sic, Lipschutz)” (Boggan 2000, p. 29). The author was not inaccurate; the rebellious NYTTA was dominated by urban Jews, especially among the leadership and highest levels of play. As I said, Jews like a good argument.
During these years, players from APPA and NYTTA could enter each other’s tournaments, however, it was not uncommon for members of each association to be placed on opposite sides of the draw. This was particularly evident in APPA events since it was widely acknowledged that the strongest US players were NYTTA members, so APPA organizers sought to have NYTTA players eliminate themselves before the last one standing would face an APPA player in the finals. Not only did each organization crown their own national champion, they each maintained their own national rankings list. Remarkably, there was no overlap in their top ten lists. The relative strength of the NYTTA players is also remarkable, since comparatively, the financial compensation was considerable at APPA events so there must have been temptation to defect. But money doesn’t always win such struggles, especially when the money is in support of a questionable cause.
Like all good despots, APPA fabricated their own history. England is the birthplace of table tennis, but APPA-supported publications claimed that the game was actually born in Salem, Massachusetts, home of Parker Brothers. How’s that for a convenient rewriting of history? Needless to say, the relationship between APPA and the burgeoning USTTA was tense. Carl Zeisberg, editor of USTTA’s monthly magazine, Table Tennis Topics, couldn’t even bring himself to use the term ping pong, but derisively, and with echoes of a bodily function, referred to it as “p.p.” in his editorials. Zeisberg’s editorials were filled with angst and desperate pleas for much needed revenue, which ideally would be secured through advertising in Table Tennis Topics. Unfortunately for the financially struggling fledgling organization, the best advertiser in Topics and other USTTA publications was their reviled competitor, Parker Brothers. By 1935 however, despite the financial consequences, USTTA not only banned advertising from Parker Brothers, but any player representing USTTA could not be sponsored by Parker Brothers, which not surprisingly offered the most lucrative sponsorships in the sport. Sol Schiff, the top men’s player in the country at this time, was suspended from the US Men’s Team and unable to compete in the 1936 World Championships in Prague due to his sponsorship with Parker Brothers. Apparently, he had been (incorrectly) informed by a USTTA official that signing such a deal would be permitted, but USTTA made an example out of Schiff. He tried to invalidate the contract based on his age (he was a teenager), but Parker Brothers did not release him from his commitment.
But Parker Brothers was fighting a losing battle because table tennis had been adopted internationally as the official name of the sport. APPA eventually dissolved, and thus USTTA, despite their financial disadvantage, ultimately won the ugly, but bloodless, Ping Pong-Table Tennis War. But it is interesting to imagine an alternative history in which Parker Brothers successfully dominates and monopolizes the American sport. How might the sport have developed, even constrained by Parker Brothers equipment, with the substantial financial backing Parker Brothers could have offered?
Back in the real world, Hasbro bought Parker Brothers in 1991 and they, evidently, now hold the trademark on the term ping pong. That hold, however, is apparently tenuous. There are many examples of trademarked brand names that have passed into public discourse and become generic; consequently, the trademark rights of the owners are lost. In Mary Douglas’s terms, the brand names are no longer “pure” as the boundaries established by a trademark are blurred. In the legal world this is known as genericide. Aspirin, yo-yo, escalator, trampoline, and one of my daily delights, granola, are among the casualties. From what I can gather, ping pong is on a short list of several dozen brand names, from plexiglas to popsicles, that are in the process of genericide. Hopefully that means the title of my book is on the right side of the law. But if not, and a game manufacturer wants to legally wrangle with a neurotic, middle-aged Jewish anthropologist, they are forewarned that a good argument is part of my professional and religious heritage. Although, if it comes to that, like Zeisberg, I may have to begin referring to the game I love as p.p. Or maybe I can avoid a courtroom showdown altogether and rename my book The Table Tennis Tyke and the Teacher. Although with that title, I might be tempting Eliel to sue me.
Richard Sosis 