Nation's top ping-pong player shows how it's done at Bellevue club

Lucy Ma barely rises above the table. Her short black hair is clipped in place and she wears a T-shirt, a skirt, bobby socks and tennis shoes. She looks exactly what she is: a 9-year-old. That is until she whips forehands and flicks backhands over the table-tennis net in rapid succession back at her coach, Yiyong Fan, long-regarded as the nation's top player.

Fan, who goes by Yong, does not give idle praise, but he has high hopes for Ma, who only began playing last July. It's clear, as she nails shot after shot, that she has the gift of focus. But she also has had the advantage of learning from a master.

More than 14 million Americans play, but there is a difference between the game we call pingpong and the international sport known as table tennis. The differences manifest themselves in skill and attitude.

The people who come into Yong's Washington Table Tennis Center, part of a Bellevue industrial park, learn technique and muscle memory. They are as young as Ma, as old as 84, and as famous as Bill Gates.

After knocking back about 50 shots in rapid succession to Yong, Ma sips water between gulps of air.

"Sometimes girls keep their energy inside," she says. "But I can get my energy out when I play."

Most of the kids — and several adults — need a more hands-on approach. While facing the "robot," a machine that spits out shots like a pitching machine, Yong will take a beginner's wrist and guides his or her paddle through the proper stroke while murmuring instructions. He did that to Gavriel Plotke, a 48-year-old Microsoft employee.

"I thought I was a pretty good basement warrior, but there were guys at Microsoft who were just significantly better," says Plotke. "I found they all had been coming here. So I came, too. I realized I had bad habits. Yong immediately changed the paddle I used and the way I held it. In fact, he took my arm and directed my paddle while I hit against the robot and I had never hit better, but it was him doing it."

While Ma and other kids worked with Yong at a corner table, Joe Lee played Joe Long at one of the club's seven other tables. Lee was a member of a short-lived professional table-tennis team — the Seattle Sockeyes — in the '70s. Long, who won a tournament or two as a kid, sought to rekindle his stroke while his son, Duncan, took lessons.

Starting out young

Yong, 38, was 7 when he began playing in Shandong, a coastal province of Eastern China. Like Ma, he seemed to have the knack and was selected by the Chinese Academic and Sports Academy to train as a professional player.

By 12, he began attending a boarding school in which half his day was spent playing and learning the finer points of the sport.

By 16, he won the Chinese national junior championship and was promoted to the national team. By 22, he placed third in the China national championships.

While his performances in individual tournaments have earned him top status here in the U.S., he cannot play in a national-championship tournament or represent this country in the Olympics because he is still waiting for citizenship. He said the fact that he's been known as this country's top-ranked player for so long would never happen in table tennis-crazed China.

"You could be the top player in China one year and not even make the top 10 the next," he says. "It is that competitive. The China championship is harder than the world championship because everyone in China is so closely bunched."

Hoping to change sport here

He hoped to help make grass roots change in the course of the sport here in 2005 when he opened his center and began classes and clinics. But progress has been slow, he concedes. Most Americans still see it as a rec-room hoot and kids have so many choices of sports. It is a thing of beauty to see skilled players rally and listen to the hollow metronome of the click-clack-click-clack it produces. Top players can thwack the featherweight ball 80 miles per hour or more and bedevil with sharp spins.

When playing them, Yong often gives free points to his players, and he also always holds back. On a short break between the kid lessons and teaching adults, he rallies with Lee, who slams shot after shot at him. Yong smiles as he steps back after lobbing back each missile. He is 10 feet behind the edge of the table before one of his high-arcing returns misses the table. Lee seemed to hold his own, but afterward he pants, grins and admits what everyone knew: "He was just toying with me."

Richard Seven: 206-464-2241 or rseven@seattletimes.com