It's nine o'clock on a Wednesday night and the action at the Nanking Table Tennis Center is starting to peak. Sweating players bounce and dip at the ends of green tables, grunting as they cut the air with their paddles, slapping little orange balls back and forth -- too fast for the eye to follow.
Over in the far corner a crowd is gathering near the club's main table, which sits separated from the others and surrounded by mesh netting. A variety show drones away on a nearby TV set, but nobody pays it much attention. They're more interested in a grudge match that's about to take place between the center's star player, Andy Tzeng, and a challenger from another center across town.
"This is just a friendly match," says Tzeng as he twists and contorts his body, working through a set of pre-match stretches. "But," he adds, "the competition can get heated because the winner gets bragging rights."
Tzeng is speaking about his upcoming match with a cross-town rival, but, taken more generally, his remarks could be viewed as a telling metaphor, especially when one considers that table tennis is Taiwan's most high-profile sport on an international level.
Still, it is the island's political archrival, China, that sits at the top of the world's table tennis pecking order. And just as China casts a long political shadow across the Taiwan Strait, its presence in the sport also casts long shadows across the green tables and nets that they've dominated for the past two decades.
Their strength, however, doesn't keep people like Tzeng from believing that Taiwan will one day break China's stranglehold on table tennis. "We're gaining on them," Tzeng says assuredly. "And one day, we'll beat them."
Taiwan's most recent chance to humble their cross strait rivals came at last week's World Team Table Tennis Championships in Malaysia. People gathered around televisions throughout the island, full of hope and excitement as the "Chinese Taipei" teams blazed into the finals to face China. While their success surprised table tennis pundits and caused nervous rumblings in the mainland, they were still overmatched in the face of the awesome firepower of the Chinese machine, losing 3-1. "Of course China is still the best," says Huang Kuo-yi, a coach for the Chinese Taipei Table Tennis Team. "They have a huge pool of players from which to choose and unlimited resources from the state."
Huang attributes China's dominance to the fact that the state-run program allows players to train non-stop without having to worry about work, family pressure and paying rent -- a problem with which many local athletes struggle. But like Tzeng, Huang believes Taiwan is gaining on China when it comes to the war of the little orange balls. "I think we will beat them soon, possibly at the next Olympics in Sydney," Huang says dreamily. "When it happens, it will be a huge boost for Taiwan, not just the table tennis team, but Taiwan as a country."
This idea that sport competitions can transcend the bounds of the arenas in which they are played and become a thing to which people attach pride, and even in some cases, personal identity, is far from new.
What American could forget the Cold War US-USSR hockey rivalry? Or more recently, the women's soccer World Cup between the US and China. Or a Cuban national team that soundly defeated a Baltimore Orioles baseball team last summer. The fact that the average single player salary on the Orioles squad was higher than that of the entire Cuban team just added to the symbolism of the defeat.
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