John Butleron the telltale sign of a true Gaeltacht student
When I emerged from the dark basement into the harsh afternoon sunlight of midtown Manhattan I was reeling from the shock of it all. I had just been involved in a pretty brutal encounter in an underground pool hall, a considerable tussle with a guy I thought I knew better. I stumbled down Broadway, sweating like Nixon, my irises struggling to adjust to the daylight. My mind raked over the events of the previous hour, attempting to figure out where it had all gone wrong.
This guy must have done some serious time in prison - either that or a long spell in Irish college. An Irishman doesn't get to be as good at table tennis as he was without doing a long stretch in some institution. I had been to Irish college on one single occasion, as a callow 12-year-old. I was stationed at Inis Oirr for the month of June 1984. This apprenticeship had left me with conversational Irish and a decent backhand. It transpired, however, that I had left the Aran Islands with an overinflated sense of my ability at ping-pong. This guy had near-oriental prowess, and I had to find out where he had earned his stripes.
His ferocity and dexterity had shocked me down in that basement, but once I discovered the provenance of these skills it all made perfect sense. He had spent a year - a year! - at Coláiste na Rinne, the near-mythical table-tennis training camp in Co Waterford, which also doubles as an Irish-language school, apparently.
In table tennis, as in life, it pays to know your enemy, and this was news to me. What had I been thinking, challenging an unknown quantity to a game of table tennis without engaging him in some conversation in Irish beforehand?
Generally speaking, you can tell how good people are at table tennis by how well they speak Irish - unless they were born and bred in Asia, in which case it is generally held to be true that they will be incredibly gifted at table tennis but much weaker at Irish.
You must exercise particular caution if your opponent has been born and bred in the Gaeltacht. It's impossible to tell how good they are at table tennis, but they will kick your ass at speaking Irish.
Just as conservationists bemoan the proliferation of landscaped golf courses across the natural landscape, the ubiquity of pool tables in bars across the country disappoints me. It's all very well to hold the pool table on a Friday night, but, to my mind, table tennis is a far superior game. Having said that, most bars opt for a pool table for a clear enough reason. As you drink, and your senses are impaired, the level of your competence at pool mysteriously rises, for a while. Call it the Hurricane Higgins effect. Your cue action becomes surer and surer, your potting more audacious with every drink.
You start hopping the white ball over obstacles and playing with the cue behind your back, sinking balls while staring out your opponent, then imitating ninja swordplay with your cue, like Tom Cruise in The Color of Money.
Basically, you turn into an idiot because you are beginning to become drunk, and the fact that you remain capable of performing well at pool excites you. If this skill-to-alcohol relationship were to be graphed, the line would ascend to dizzy peaks before suddenly diving into negative figures, as all co-ordination then vanishes suddenly, utterly, for the rest of the night. All that is left is the dumb behaviour.
Table tennis is a far sterner mistress, as it's a much faster game, one in which you have to move more quickly and more often. If you drink any alcohol at all your game deteriorates instantly. Table-tennis tables don't often find their way into bars, because making people feel like idiots is bad for business. You swipe at the ball, punch-drunk, while your opponent hurls obscenities at you in Irish, kissing his temperance pin between shots.
For this reason I am in awe of those who play darts. The fact that some people find drinking compatible with the hurling of miniature arrows at small coloured targets on a far wall is a mystery that I cannot unravel. Recently, I had enjoyed only one drink when a dart I threw landed in the floor, without hitting the board, the casing the board was mounted on or the wall that both were hanging on. Yet everyone knows the classic commentator's line after Jocky Wilson completed another 12-dart finish. The ursine genius drank in the applause of the crowd, raising a pint in acknowledgement. Then he drank the pint in one go. "What a man, what an athlete," the commentator intoned solemnly, praising the incongruity of what was being combined on the oche.
Darts is okay, but it's table tennis for me every time. In fact I seem to attract tables to me, like wasps around melting ice cream. I once spent a great summer holiday in southern France, playing table tennis on a beach in the sunshine. On that holiday the only aspect more enjoyable than the game itself was the trash talk surrounding it. Passers-by would have sworn that we were vacationing boxers, such was the intensity of the trash talk.
Though pool has been celebrated in film on hundreds of occasions - most memorably with Jackie Gleason gliding around the baize in The Hustler- neither darts nor table tennis will ever achieve the same immortality. A film called Balls of Furywill shortly be released in the US, but it promises to do for table tennis what Talledega Nightsdid for Nascar (not much, apparently). That's all right by me. Until then we can treat table tennis with the care that something as precious and unheralded as it richly deserves. Something akin to speaking in Irish.
John Butler blogs at http://lozenge.wordpress.com