Paddlehands Pt. I
My rivalry with the greatest ping-pong player in Bayonne, and possibly American, history.
It was well past midnight the first time my wife caught me on the living room sofa watching YouTube videos of Chinese people playing ping-pong. “What in the world are you doing?” she asked as she rounded the corner in her pajamas, squinting at the blue light emanating from the laptop screen.
“Have I ever told you about Eddie Finck?” I said without looking up to meet her eyes. The sound of plastic balls smacking against hard surfaces filled the room as she gestured no then took a seat on the cushion beside me.
“Your eyes are bloodshot,” she said. “How long have you been up?” I could sense the worry in her voice.
“I couldn’t sleep without finding out what happened to him,” I said, pausing the grainy video of a skinny American teenager playing an old Chinese man in a back alley in Hong Kong. No, this isn’t him. Frustrated, I clicked on another, then another. “I’ve been searching everywhere,” I said. Before long, I could feel Haley’s warm hand caressing my cheek.
“Babe, what’s going on?” she asked.
By that point, I could no longer hold it in. I had to confess the truth I’d kept hidden for so long. To reveal to my wife (and now the world) two decades' worth of torment and humiliation over a loss worse than any I’d suffered before or since. I had to tell her what happened in the Bayonne High School ice rink gymnasium on April 25, 2007.
I exhaled hard, then launched into the story. An hour passed before I came up for air. And when I did, there was Haley, bewildered and skeptical but listening intently as I pointed to the dozens of browser tabs containing old images and newspaper clippings. One article from the Bayonne Community News called my clash against Finck in that year’s BHS Student-Teacher Table Tennis Championship “the most incredible and outlandish display of ping-pong in the Peninsula City’s history.” But once the curtain fell on that fateful day, I could only limp through the last two months of school, hardly able to lift a paddle or speak to anyone besides my best friends, Mickey and Jeremy. And even though I vowed to face my archnemesis again, graduation came and went. Eventually, the gap between us widened, and I could no longer trace my way back to Finck.
Rumors swirled. One Saturday night in college, an old friend in a seedy Bayonne bar noticed how I gazed longingly at the ping-pong table in the back. “I remember you,” he said, glassy-eyed, gripping his Bud Heavy. “You’re the one who took my cousin to the edge.” He claimed to have been there in the gymnasium in April 2007. That Finck had hung up his paddle the same year, satisfied he’d achieved everything he’d ever wanted in the world of sport. “He was ready to move onto a new chapter of his life,” he said.
But to me, it was likelier that an apple tree had sprouted from Roger Federer’s skull than that Finck, the greatest ping-pong player in Bayonne’s history, had retired at 18.
Another rumor seemed more credible: that Finck had been named captain of the US National Table Tennis Team ahead of the 2008 Olympics. But just before taking off for Beijing, he quit on principle after the IOC refused to budge on his specially requested uniform: a sleeveless Karate gi with a holographic bald eagle clutching a paddle with his initials on the back. According to Mickey, who was a better internet investigator than I was in those days, Finck flew to China anyway. In 2010, according to Wikipedia, Edward Finck became the first American to compete in the Chinese Table Tennis Super League.
The Chinese had given him the nickname 毁灭的白手 (“The White Hand of Destruction”). In his expat years, Finck became famous for his vicious firepower, eviscerating smaller, more graceful opponents like a souped-up Ford F-350 trampling a Kia Soul. On an internet forum I discovered pages deep into a Google search, a user with the handle @pongzilla3000 claimed to have inside information about how the Chinese government intervened ahead of the 2012 London Games to naturalize the white destroyer so he could compete under their flag. But before a scandal of epic proportions could shake the IOC to the studs, Finck shattered his wrist in a warm-up match in Nanjing and disappeared. That’s the reason I was on YouTube trying to piece together what happened next.
“Have you tried searching Facebook instead?” Haley asked once I’d finally stopped to catch my breath. “Everyone’s on Facebook.”
“I did,” I told her. “Inconclusive.”
Based on what I could gather from his few irregular updates, Finck was living an anonymous, happy life in the Midwest. But I’ve seen Severance; I know that inside every Ron Swanson lives a Duke Silver, that Batman doesn’t always wear his cape. And I knew Finck’s alter ego better than anyone. I wouldn’t believe he’d actually retired from the sport he once dominated unless the news came straight from the source.
“I wrote him a message last week, but he still hasn’t responded,” I told Haley.
“Let me see what you wrote,” she said, pulling the laptop towards her. She read the message out loud: Hey Finck, I hope you’re doing well, dude. It’s been so long! Would love to catch up some time.”
She looked up at me incredulous. “That’s it?” she said. “This guy ruined your life, right?” I nodded, feeling the shame pour over me like a lukewarm bowl of Campbell’s tomato soup.
“Then stop being a baby and tell him you want a rematch,” she said. (I could always count on Haley to cut to the chase.)
I scoffed, offended at how easily she thought she could resolve my dilemma. “Did you hear anything I just told you? Eddie Finck doesn’t play games. And I haven’t picked up a paddle in years.”
“So,” she said, shrugging her shoulders, as dumbfounded by my response as I was at her suggestion. “It’s ping-pong. How hard can it be?”
That conversation took place over a year ago.
But it took months for me to buck up and finally accept Haley’s advice. According to Facebook, Finck had seen my message, though he hadn’t bothered responding. So I wrote him again, skipping the pleasantries and telling him exactly why I’d slid into his DMs. I was ready to avenge the loss he’d handed me 17 years earlier. To right the wrong and put a nail through our rivalry, once and for all. “I want a rematch,” I wrote. “Singles, best of seven.”
Finck responded in less than thirty seconds: “Time and place” is all he wrote.
That’s how it all started. One day, I’m on the couch brooding about the past, searching for a ghost, and months later, I’m on a plane back to Bayonne with Haley and the kids. We told everyone we were there to spend Christmas with the family. Only those closest to me and Finck knew the real reason for our pilgrimage.
“Are you feeling nervous?” Haley asked, wrangling our youngest child as the airplane taxied inside Newark airport.
“No,” I said, holding another back from headbutting the seat of the passenger in front of me. “I’m ready. Let’s do this.”
Read part two of this four-part story.
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