Ping-Pong Diplomacy

Ivor Montagu and the Astonishing Story Behind the Game That Changed the World

Nicholas Griffin

Having read it

★★★☆☆

A well-researched and interesting read about the early days of table tennis, its many characters, players and political machinations, but despite its initial chapters, overall narrative and occasional intrigue it, for me, seemed to be stretching itself a bit too much and felt a little like it lost its point.

Still, maybe that’s a metaphor for ping-pong.

A good passage

After the American table tennis team had landed in Beijing and the reports started to flood back, both Nixon and Kissinger were fascinated at the speed with which the fairy dust of table tennis was changing the way Americans thought about Red China. Nixon wrote, ‘I had never expected that the China initiative would come to fruition in the form of a Ping-Pong team.’ Kissinger had other worries. What if the table tennis team ‘screwed up all these back channel plans that we had very carefully been trying to put in place?’
In the days to come, Nixon’s favourite line with visitors to the Oval Office was, ‘Have you learned to play Ping-Pong yet?’ The last time the game had been so keenly noted in Washington was during its first crazed boom and bust in 1902, when ‘justices of the Supreme Court, members of the cabinet . . . play and talk about Ping-Pong as though it were one of the most important affairs in life.’ Now, apparently, it actually was.