EVERYTHING YOU KNOW IS PONG: THE BOOK
We are two passionate collectors of Ping Pong ephemera who have quietly scoured eBay, flea markets, and yard sales to ammass a museum-sized collection of Ping Pong artifacts. This book uses them to tell the important stories only ping pong can tell: tales of geopolitics, deomgraphic shifts, and velour headbands.
Every sport claims to be the world’s game—soccer, basketball, kabaddi. But none can match the global status acquired by modest, ubiquitous ping pong – the most popular yet misunderstood pastime in the world today, a sleeping giant of fast-paced fun. Join us on a journey into the dark corners and distant alleys of this ponging globe, from suburban basements of misspent youths to Bangkok backrooms to New Jersey rec rooms to Beijing stadia to dwarf child champions to elderly enthusiasts to Hollywood hipsters to perky porn stars. This cast of thousands, combined with artifacts from the authors’ ever-growing collection of pingpongalia, reveals the hidden truths of the world behind the world: the secrets of eternal youth, guerrilla warfare, foolproof seduction, fame and adulation—all explained through two paddles, sixty inches of net, and a bouncing, bouncing ball. A world where everything you know is pong.
This beautifully illustrated unabashed loveletter to Ping Pong includes essays from such paddle-weilding luminaries as Nick Hornby, Jonathan Safran Foer, Harry Evans, Will Shorts, Davy Rothbart and Starlee Kine.
