Word: pinging
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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After my initial excitement, I figured that the table tennis elite must actually whack through their paddles pretty quickly, and maybe needed some sort of pit station for repairing their rubber. But not being a ping pong - sorry, table tennis - aficionado, I asked Bob Fox, team leader for USA Table Tennis, for some help, and found out how wrong I was. "They don't worry about the rubber falling off the paddle," he explained. Fox said the pros apply glue to the paddles and use its tackiness to their advantage. "The effect is one of increasing the speed and spin...
...knew glue could do that? It seems that unlike us basement ping pong champions, table tennis athletes can actually use glue to snap the ball across the table in some pretty astounding ways. Think of slathering your palms with jelly or something equally slippery and then putting your hands together - "that's the springy effect that glue on glue provides," said Fox. Since the 1950s, when table tennis players stopped using hard-backed paddles that consisted of rubber on wood, athletes have been using paddles, or bats, that include a layer of sponge between the paddle and the rubber - anywhere...
...beer pong has certainly outgrown its frat-house roots. An early version with Ping-Pong paddles has been largely supplanted by a paddle-free game, which started in Northeastern colleges in the 1980s and was originally called Beirut--in reference to the battle-scarred Lebanese capital...
...college officials, beer pong has become synonymous with binge drinking. Despite current efforts to get the game taken seriously as a sport, the point of most beer-pong games remains to intoxicate your opponent. Last fall, Georgetown University banned beer pong, beer-pong tables and inordinate numbers of Ping-Pong balls in its dorms--even in the rooms of students of legal drinking age. The University of Pennsylvania, Yale University, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and Tufts University have also banned drinking games. "We don't want our students participating in activities that could do excessive harm to themselves...
Take Lang Ping, who has helmed the U.S. women's volleyball team since 2005. Lang also happens to be one of China's best-ever volleyball players, a willowy athlete nicknamed the "Iron Hammer" for having led China to a legendary gold at the 1984 Los Angeles Games. Far from shunning Lang for lending her talents to the American team, crowds of Chinese cheered her arrival in Beijing this week before the games. Even the visiting Americans have been impressed with Lang's enduring popularity. "I think that's such a rare thing, to see Chinese fans support our country...