Word: ponged
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...champion courts recognition; the hustler flees it. Only one sport is so obscure yet so popular that an ace can play both roles simultaneously. The game is Ping Pong; the hustling ace is Marty Reisman. Even in the '50s, when Reisman held the U.S. singles and doubles titles, he was unknown to more than a handful of table tennis freaks. To supplement his income, he played exhibition matches between halves of the Globetrotters' basketball games and conned wealthy amateurs into believing that they could beat him if he gave away 19 points and sat in a chair...
...fill his wallet and his mouth by legitimate means. At his peak, Reisman was the best hard-racket man in the world. Today, at 44, he can be beaten only by players using trick spins off the modern soft-sponge paddle. As the champ says, his kind of Ping Pong is entirely unlike the metronomic rec-room game familiar to most Americans. World-class players can propel the ball at speeds exceeding 100 m.p.h.; facing them across a table is like batting against Nolan Ryan from a distance...
...that decorate their egos like gargoyles on a tower. Richard Bergmann, the late English titlist, once searched in vain for the perfect sphere; he went through three gross of balls before he found one worthy of him. Alex Ehrlich, the Polish prodigy, could discern no life purpose beyond Ping Pong. To this day, when he finds a promising young player he counsels, "Now the first thing you must do is quit school...
When the visiting team puts men on base, the pitcher calmly switches to a ping-pong ball, a nerf ball, or even a medicine or bowling ball, thus halting all chances of a clean base...
Upstairs at the Union (sounds like name for a preppie bar) there's a room full of ping-pong tables, ppool tables and pinball machines ready to eat up quarters and time. Many otherwise rational and intelligent men and women of Harvard have succumbed to the addiction of the shiny steel balls--a manifestation of some repressed sexual desires...