First things first. I apologize for the absence of a December blog. Skipping December was not something I had originally planned when I decided to try my hand at monthly blogging. But as any academic will tell you, closing out a semester is hectic business, especially for the disorganized, and of my many shortcomings, disorganization is certainly one of them. Laziness is another. Making excuses is yet another, as long as we are enumerating my failings. A thoughtful friend once told me I should be less self-deprecating—in other words, she criticized me for criticizing myself. Go figure.
If you prefer, rather than enumerating my failings you could say I am simply detailing the character flaws that made it on my New Year’s resolution “personal-improvement-to-do” list. Although, then, sharing falsehoods would also need to be added to my burgeoning list since I don’t make New Year’s resolutions, at least not on January 1. I do my personal accounting while thirsty, hungry, and humbled on Yom Kippur. This advantageously provides a built-in escape clause for my resolutions and allows me to march through life unabashedly guiltfree, despite minimal personal growth. Like Gollum and Sméagol debating, I can always justify my immature negligent-self to my so-called adult-self: I can’t possibly be expected to get off the couch today…This book is a page-turner; nobody could put it down…I only promised a more engaged and less indolent life because I was starving and suffering from caffeine withdrawal…I was utterly delirious when I vowed to change…and so forth. The debates are not as one-sided as I’ve suggested, but my adult-self’s reliance on ad hominem insults didn’t bear repeating. I’m sure you were able to fill in the blanks.
Admittedly, among my talents is an unrelenting ability to conceive imaginative excuses, and importantly, express them with genuine conviction. For years, raising my kids provided me with countless credulous reasons to avoid social commitments (as befits an inveterate introvert) and work obligations (as befits an inveterate sloth). With four kids it was always easy to explain that one of them had a dentist appointment, music lesson, birthday party, or consultation with family services to determine whether they had any legal means of preventing their father from exploiting them to avoid life’s responsibilities. And if those excuses were becoming overused, I had at my disposal a nearly infinite number of ailments my kids could conveniently contract that would not only help me escape from some unwanted responsibility, they had the added bonus of eliciting sympathy. My kids, fully aware of my exploitation and reliance on their existence to navigate my adult life, would regularly ask: “What will you do when we grow up? Will you, then, grow up too?” Well, they have grown up (surprisingly well, given that I was one of their role models) and it is true that fabricating excuses to avoid life’s responsibilities has become more complicated since they left home. But my new dog, unexpectedly and thankfully, has lessened the challenge. And with her, not only is there no risk of a child’s integrity revealing my ploys, she doesn’t appear to be judgmental about my immaturity either. Good doggie.
What does this have to do with not writing a blog in December? I can’t blame this one on my kids or Goldberry, my dog. In truth, at this stage in life I don’t really need excuses for laziness: I can be lazy without any justification whatsoever, with minimal repercussions. That said, when an excuse presents itself, I tend to embrace it like the worn-out stuffed sock monkey of my childhood. And, it so happens, an excuse did present itself. It was offered by a fellow table tennis blogger, Larry Hodges, although in contrast to me, he’s a real blogger. Real in the sense that he has been blogging a long time, he seems to know what he is doing, and most importantly, he has regular readers. You might even say he has a following, which would scare me beyond what even sock monkey could soothe, so my obscurity is fortunate.
When I spoke with Larry about blogging he casually mentioned that he was taking December off and wouldn’t be blogging again until January. He wasn’t offering advice, but this sounded like a wonderful excuse—I mean, idea—since I could easily convince my adult-self that skipping a month would not be due to my inherent preference to spend the winter vacation on the couch wrapped up in good books, but rather my desire to behave like a real blogger. Much of our social learning, anthropologists suggest, involves what is known as a prestige bias, where we copy the behaviors of those with high status. Of course, this bias is exploited by hucksters and hustlers, but, I reasoned, imitating successful folks is natural and normal so I shouldn’t fight it. Sometimes these high-achievers got to where they are in life because they know something, so we can benefit from mimicking them from time to time. At least this is how I convinced my adult-self that I wasn’t shirking my blogging commitment. Perhaps I should add gullibility to my list of shortcomings.
And by the way, I think I deserve some credit for not relying on my anthropological expertise to craft excuses. There is no shortage of excuses that anthropologists have documented across the world’s cultures. Yet, I’ve never blamed my absence at a faculty meeting on witchcraft or sorcery. On various occasions I’ve eaten more than my fair share of my family’s scones, but I’ve never claimed that an ancestral spirit ordered me to merrily munch my kids’ breakfast after they retired to bed. Nor have I ever blamed an illness on a malicious demon, although I may have referred to whoever got me sick as one. That said, many of the real reasons that the people anthropologists study are making excuses seem more legitimate than my own; they simply live more difficult lives and find themselves in more challenging circumstances. For example, Napoleon Chagnon relates how Yanomamo men, when on a trek to raid and attack a neighboring village, often complain of sore feet, stomach issues, or even malarial symptoms, and thus must return home. If my social obligations required raiding villages, I’d not only suffer from all three, but I’d surely have to walk Goldberry as well.
Back to my helpful blogger. Larry is actually a longtime friend from my teen years, but my assessment of his high status in the table tennis world, for the record, is not simply the fondness of an old friend. Aside from being a popular blogger, Larry is America’s most successful table tennis author, a tireless coach, a hard bat singles and doubles US national champion many times over, and a member of the USATT Hall of Fame for these accomplishments and his unwavering lifetime commitment to the sport. We crossed paths at the US Open, which was held in Ontario, California this past mid-December.
I wasn’t competing at the US Open, although I did coach some matches, fortunately guiding my players to victory. I attended the tournament because The Ping Pong Player and the Professor was being sold there by Paddle Palace, so I was available to discuss and promote the book. Eliel, after his final exams, also attended the tournament for a few days. But after a busy semester he was not in playing condition, so he was there to see friends (warm them up and coach them when needed), rather than compete. The publication of The Ping Pong Player and the Professor has possibly turned the table, so to speak, on our respective positions in the table tennis community. At the tournament a relatively new player to the table tennis scene approached Eliel and asked: “Are you the professor’s son?” When Eliel told me this my grin was so large it nearly fell off my face. After a decade of being referred to as “Eliel’s dad,” this was a moment of glorious triumph for me.
The Ping Pong Player and the Professor was sold by Paddle Palace through an act of pure kindness. Prior to the US Open I called Paddle Palace to ask whether they would be interested in selling the book. It was a call that I was uncomfortable making, although it is in fact a number I have dialed countless times before. And “dialed” is more accurate than you might think; many of those calls were undoubtedly placed on the rotary phones of my youth. Located in Portland, Oregon, Paddle Palace is the largest table tennis equipment distributor in the US and when I was growing up it was the distributor. I have fond memories of my father calling them up and ordering my earliest paddles, and when Eliel began to play and I returned to the sport, I continued this family tradition, and ordered equipment for both of us. I was amazed that despite my two-decade absence from the sport, I was still in their computer system. In any event, this time I wasn’t calling as a customer but instead I had my own sales pitch—please sell my book!—and sales is definitely not my comfort zone. Hence, I was anxious and I procrastinated. My negligent-self dominated my internal debates and the flood of excuses supporting this side of my ego seemed limitless. Finally, my adult-self notched at least a temporary victory and I called Paddle Palace before some new excuse shifted the balance of power.
Judy Hoarfrost answered the phone. I, of course, knew exactly who she was. Not only is she the owner of Paddle Palace, but she was the youngest member of the US ping pong diplomacy team, visiting China on that historic visit in 1971. She has also captured many US titles, been a repeated member of the US National team, and was inducted into the USATT Hall of Fame in 1997 (and subsequently the Oregon Sports Hall of Fame). Remarkably, her athletic achievements are not limited to table tennis. As with the rest of the planet, her attention has recently turned toward pickleball and after playing the sport for only two years she captured the Women’s Over-65 Doubles title at the USA Pickleball National Championships in 2022. Maybe most impressively, on top of her distinguished athletic career, she is really nice!
She didn’t know me or Eliel from a hole in the wall. My playing days (the 1980s) and Eliel’s playing days (the 2010s) were hiatus periods in her playing career. Nonetheless, when I told her about The Ping Pong Player and the Professor she readily agreed to sell the book at the Paddle Palace booth at the US Open. She would not be attending, but she said one of her employees would be in charge of selling the book. As it turns out, this employee is another USATT Hall of Famer, Sean O’Neill. As a five-time US Men’s National Champion and two-time Olympian, Sean is among the most accomplished of all US table tennis players in the history of our sport. We are roughly the same age (he is half-a-year older than I am), although given our respective hair color and quantity, you would be forgiven for assuming I was his senior. In any event, when I was growing up, Sean was the best junior player in the country, by far. Aside from being our first Olympian in 1988, he has served as the US Paralympic coach, and been a table tennis commentator on NBC for the past several Olympics, a role he will resume for the 2024 Paris Olympics.
Sean is also a good salesman. He strategically placed a stack of The Ping Pong Player and the Professor by the cash register of the Paddle Palace booth and people actually bought the book! One of the unexpected joys of publishing (and I guess, importantly, selling) The Ping Pong Player and the Professor has been the new connections I’ve made. Some were made at the US Open, but others were born via email since the tournament, including a warm message, after completing the book, from the player who wondered whether Eliel was the professor’s son. I also received an email from an older player who introduced himself as a psychiatrist, which initially made me very nervous. Wonderful, I thought; I’ve publicly revealed my neuroses in the book and now the mental health professionals are knocking on my door. But he was not writing to offer his services. Rather, aside from generously praising the book he wanted to share insights concerning the parallels between psychoanalysis and anthropology, especially their mutual focus on storytelling. I was aware that some anthropologists employed psychoanalytic models in their research, but I was largely ignorant of this work and psychoanalysis in general (watching Woody Allen movies doesn’t really count). We had a fruitful and delightful exchange, and I couldn’t help but marvel at how kind and thoughtful people can be. The exchange also left me regretting the countless times I’ve been inspired by an author, but my diffidence (or more likely, laziness), had prevented me from reaching out to the author to express my gratitude for their stimulating writings. My talent for conceiving excuses has its costs.
In addition to meeting new people, the book has helped me reconnect with old friends, such as our esteemed blogger, Larry Hodges. Larry, I learned from Sean O’Neill, was the first person to purchase a copy of The Ping Pong Player and the Professor at the US Open. Although Larry owns over 350 table tennis books (who knew there were so many?), he didn’t purchase my memoir just to complete his collection. He read the entire book in one evening! And he read it closely. When I saw him the day after his purchase he asked why I didn’t mention the name of a mutual friend since I was clearly referring to one of his matches. I was stunned. “Larry,” I responded, “how did you know that??? There is literally only a one sentence description of that match in the book!” But one sentence was enough, at least for Larry.
Larry also had a related question, and it is a question that other table tennis players have subsequently asked as well: Why did I anonymize many of the players and use pseudonyms in the book? Anonymization is normal and expected in anthropology, and frankly, it never occurred to me that others would find this unusual. In the book’s Notes, I explain that anthropologists anonymize the people they work with to ensure their privacy, and I also relate that I have no desire to be in anyone else’s book, so I didn’t want to assume that anyone wanted to be in mine. In the Notes, I further mention that I used real names of public figures and prominent adult players (such as Danny Seemiller), those I wanted to acknowledge because of their underappreciated contribution to the US table tennis community (such as Mozart), and friends and acquaintances who passed away whose memories I wanted to document (such as Jonathan). When using real names, I sought permission when possible, even among some of the public figures.
Since the publication of The Ping Pong Player and the Professor there are many things I wish I had done differently, but using pseudonyms is not one of them. However, I wish I had not placed the explanation of why I was using pseudonyms—which is two pages long—in the Notes at the end of the book. When I read a book, I’m an avid explorer of the Notes, but I’m apparently even less normal than I thought. I should have figured out a way to put that material more visibly at the beginning of the book. Since the Notes were not included in the audiobook, I discussed anonymization in the Introduction, which the publisher inconveniently misplaced—no excuse offered. Thus, regrettably, the Introduction doesn’t appear on Audible, but if you are interested I posted the “Lost Introduction” on my website.
I should conclude this blog by mentioning that my excuses for delaying a particular social responsibility recently ran out, completely. One of my children is getting married (Yay! A step closer to becoming a granddaddy…) and for at least a year there have been rumblings about meeting the future in-laws. For the record, I had no ill will of any sort toward these future in-laws; they raised a wonderful son who I am thrilled is joining our family, so the only thing I knew about them—they produce nice offspring—was both positive and promising. The issue wasn’t them; it was me. I had an intense fear of screwing it all up. Everything (dating, courtship, engagement, wedding planning, and so forth) has been going so well without my interference, or even input—why risk it now? What good could possibly come out of such a meeting? All I could see was trouble: an unintentional insulting comment, an embarrassing social faux pas, or a stray bodily noise. But nobody else shared my concerns and with the wedding rapidly approaching I had run out of time and excuses. Indeed, my go-to excuse these days—Goldberry—completely backfired as the father of the groom loves dogs and he was at least as excited to meet Goldberry as he was to meet me (he’s a fellow introvert so I suspect he appreciated my anxiety and fears).
So, we set a date and met. We drank tea and ate scones. We talked. We told stories. We laughed. And it was wonderful. Somehow, I didn’t screw things up. They are both fabulous people—in every way imaginable—and I can’t believe how fortunate I am that our families will be connected. Now, I can’t wait to celebrate and dance with them at our children’s wedding. For once, I’m glad I ran out of excuses.
Richard Sosis 