There’s a scene in the recent hit movie Marty Supreme in which Marty Mauser (Timothée Chalamet), an American table tennis champion and inveterate liar getting by on the skin of his teeth in post-WWII America, is seeking capital from a wealthy man, hoping to grow the game he loves and his own prestige. At one point, in a rare move for the character, Marty tells the truth: “I know it’s hard to believe, but I’m telling you, this game fills stadiums overseas.” 

In the 70 years since Marty Supreme— a fictional story rooted in reality— is set, the tale of table tennis as a public concern has remained more or less the same. It’s a fabulously deep and entertaining sports product that has been relegated to club enthusiasm and occasional Olympics heat in the United States, but is huge overseas, especially in Asia.

Major League Table Tennis (MLTT), a touring table tennis startup league founded in 2023, is trying to make the sport big in the US, too. (The league bills itself as “AMERICA'S FIRST PROFESSIONAL TABLE TENNIS LEAGUE,” capitalization their own.) The format is very particular. Instead of playing one-on-one for individual glory, players from around the world are sorted into teams. Each team is given a city they are intended to represent, even if none of their players actually live there, and sets of teams go from “home” city to “home” city every weekend, playing in team-based matches. Four teams, including the Portland Paddlers, descended on the Portland Convention Center earlier this month to play a total of six matches over three days. One member of the Paddlers, Nihkil Kumar, appeared as one of Marty’s opponents in Marty Supreme. He says he squared off against Timothée Chalamet between the shooting and beat him soundly, even as he was compelled to lose to him on camera. 

MLTT forgoes a common scoring practice in racquet sports, where games are almost always won when a player crosses a point threshold AND beats their opponent by two points. By contrast, MLTT games end when one player reaches 11 points. This makes it so matches can start and end at fairly routine times. But it also strips the product of the terrible and wonderful psychological pressure that comes when two players cannot seem to ever beat each other. 

But that’s a small complaint, because the table tennis was phenomenal. MLTT is a minor league, now and for the foreseeable future, but it’s managed to contract some really good, entertaining talent. They’re not top players striding atop the World Table Tennis (WTT) rankings, but they’re players from around the world who sit in the top 250 in the World Table Tennis rankings, solid talent who put on a hell of a show for enthusiastic crowds all weekend.

In the first match of the Portland MLTT tournament on Saturday, January 10, Braxton Chang of the Atlanta Blazers (confusing, I know) squared off against David McBeath of the Texas Smash. The two were really going at it, back and forth, back and forth, the ball whipping across the table with terrible force for a lil’ guy filled with air. Both players strained to unearth the sharpest edge of their perception to hit the ball so their opponent would miss the hit. 

They could achieve this in a variety of ways. Table tennis is a very tactical game, in ways that an onlooker can’t always appreciate. Every paddle surface gives players different options for imposing spin on that tiny lil’ ball and sending it to the other side of the table.

Christian Lillieroos, the coach of the Portland Paddlers, says the table tennis ball can travel at speeds of up to 80 miles per hour, spinning at a rate of 9000 rotations per minute, or about 150 rotations every second.  From a distance, the ball’s movements can be hard to appreciate. At one point, I watched from the front row as a ball careened through a freestanding sign, ending up  at my feet. The ball just sat there, spinning in place, for a few seconds until it stopped.  All this spin affects the trajectory of the ball as it skips back and forth across the nine-foot table. 

“You have half a second to react to all of those variables,” Lilleroos said. “So if you don’t have very good vision and the ability to look at the ball properly, you’re not going to be able to return at a high level.” 

The reaction time required to wrangle a ping-pong ball fired off the surface of a high level player’s paddle isn‘t just a matter of seeing and reading the ball, though. You also need to learn how to operate beyond the realm of conventional thought. 

“Thought is a process that takes .4 seconds, so it’s impossible to think,” says Lilleroos, “If you think, you’re gone. You have to learn how to react, how to operate on pure reflexes.”

Sometimes the most obvious way to overwhelm your opponent is with force, and McBeath got an opportunity to just blast the ball across the table, right into Chang’s torso. It looked like it hurt. The crowd, hanging on every bounce of this fluttering, chaotic little plastic shell with a mass of 2.67 – 2.77 grams, let out a collective groan.  But Chang looked at the crowd with a befuddled look on his face.  He was hit by a ping-pong ball. It wasn’t going to blow a hole through his torso. He was fine, it couldn’t hurt him if it tried.

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The contradiction between the ball that would disappear in the presence of a mild wind and the focus that players and spectators put into the ball sits at the center of experiencing high-level table tennis in person. 

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Sports are a neurotic thing. All this emotional weight gets pumped into a ball, an object transformed into a tool of utmost action and importance, right until the moment when some arbitrary line deactivates its meaning.

The contradiction between the ball that would disappear in the presence of a mild wind and the focus that players and spectators put into the ball sits at the center of experiencing high-level table tennis in person. You watch these people flying around, jerking their bodies, depending on that honed instinct to read and react to an object that is very little, very light, and subject to physical whims that a person could not reasonably calculate by themselves on the fly. 

Sometimes, this can make spectating kind of funny. Why did that player jerk all the way to the left to hit a ball, their legs splayed out like a tennis player running down a shot in the baseline corner, while this little toy just ended up going straight down the middle of the table and blooped out behind them? The answer is beyond the eyes of the viewer, and maybe even the player. They thought they saw just the faintest hint of leftward rotation on the ball as it flew towards them, they went for it, they failed in a spectacular way, their entire body left reeling on account of the micromovements of an object that weighs about as much as a mantis. 

McBeath, the British player for the Texas Smash, prides himself on his ability to read the spin on the ball. “I've always found that quite easy to do,” he says. “You have some spin in tennis, but we have ten times the spin or more." 

How do you figure out how to read a ball that spins that much? McBeath laughed a little. 

"Practice. There's science and lots of stuff I'm sure but the majority is just practice. You can have a bit of talent, a bit of coordination, but a lot of practice of understanding where it goes."

A player diving for a basketball on pure, raw competitive instinct seems heroic. A player operating on the same set of values and instincts, diving for a little object they cannot control for long, looks like something else, something strange, a person playing in the presence of mean ghosts. At least, until you watch enough of it that you can understand them. 

Major League Table Tennis will not be returning to Portland until next season, but you can see what they’re getting up to at their website. If you want to learn more about how to play table tennis, some of the players and coaches from MTT are regulars at the Paddle Palace in Tigard, where you can also play and train for a fee.