Paddlehands Pt. IV
The last installment of my epic (and absurd) ping-pong saga.
Read Paddlehands Pt. I about the origins of my rivalry with the greatest ping-pong player in my city’s history. Part II chronicles our early encounters leading up to the biggest tournament of our high school lives. Part III takes you through my preparation for the Match of the Century. Part III (and a Half) is a moment-by-moment retelling of that match.
Seventeen years passed between the day I was defeated by Finck’s right palm in the refashioned Student-Alumni/Teacher tournament and the evening of his curt reply to my Facebook message requesting a rematch. So much had changed. Our social media profiles were a testament to the passing of time. We were husbands now, fathers too, living far away from home in parts of America where ping-pong is just a game, not an all-or-nothing fight to the death. And yet, whenever the weather turned from gloom to bloom, inspiring in me a rare sense of joy and optimism about the future, the stinging feeling returned. The poison dart’s tip was still embedded in my cheek.
Sure, I knew what might happen if Finck and I faced each other again. For whatever he’d become at 34, the Destroyer had twice been weeks from competing in the Olympic Games. On the flip side, I hadn’t handled a paddle for the better part of a decade.
But my failure had loomed over me like a dark cloud for too long. I had to settle my business if I ever wanted to be happy again.
Finck and I established the rules of combat over Facebook Messenger. We planned to fly into Bayonne with our wives and children under the guise of an early Christmas visit to see family. Though, neither woman nor child would be permitted inside the walls of the gymnasium. They could not see the men they loved transformed into mongrels.
We were, however, allowed two witnesses. Of course, I selected my best friends, Mickey and Jeremy—who Paddlehands had also conquered in that tournament nearly two decades ago. He chose Tobayan and Charlie Cao. The bitter foes had begun training together in 2008, iron sharpening iron. Cao, who became an engineer after putting down the paddle for good, was the mastermind behind Finck’s failed bid to lead the Chinese Olympic team in 2012. Finck and I both trusted him to ensure every detail would be just right for the Final Clash of Good vs. Evil.
Amazingly, Mickey had been able to track down our former teacher. Ms. DeMaria had long ago retired from teaching at Bayonne High School but continued training ping-pong prodigies part-time from a rundown beachside bungalow in Port Monmouth. However, no player could hold a candle to her former protégé. Ms. DeMaria had agreed to serve as our arbiter. I hardly recognized her when she pulled into the parking lot outside the Richard Korpi Ice Rink. But it wasn’t time that aged our mentor. It was the weight we all carried into the gymnasium that day.
I left my parents’ house on 19th Street at 9 a.m. and walked the eight blocks to the battle site alone. All I carried with me were a borrowed paddle and my yellow Walkman CD player. I’d found the thing in my parent’s basement, the batteries at full charge and an Underoath CD still inside. For the months between making contact with Finck and the rematch, I trained with a neighbor (and occasional reader of this Substack) who was the only other person who knew how I felt. He, too, had been bested as a high school senior in Memphis. His vanquisher was a Hong Kongese exchange student. At first, Thomas had extended an olive branch to the friendless foreigner, who played solo against the wall at the racquet club where his father played tennis. But the young man, like Finck, had no real need for friends. Thomas never managed to take a point off him. So, when the children were asleep, we trained for hours in his garage, reliving the memories of our greatest failures as athletes and men.
Every step on my way toward the gymnasium was like a step backward in time. I was no longer playing the part of the cooler man I’d recast myself as following that fateful loss to Finck in April 2007. Over those eight blocks, the newer me melted away, and I was once again the chubby loser with bad hair aching to escape Bayonne and become somebody better anywhere else in the world.
When I got to the steps outside the ice rink, I was early. So I sat down and stared out at the choppy waters of the Newark Bay. As I waited, I wondered if it had all been a delusion. Was I really about to play ping-pong against a grown man I dragged back to our hometown from a thousand miles away because of a loss I’d suffered in a meaningless high school tournament?
Then Mickey rolled up on his bicycle. Jeremy came next, followed by Cao. I also hadn’t seen him in 17 years, though we stayed friends on Facebook. Tobayan had driven in from The City and was in poor spirits. He rolled his eyes and shook his head when I asked what was up.
It was the first time I’d seen him since we ran into each other on the street outside Walgreens when we were still in college. He was sour then, too—probably about how Mickey and I had turned him into one of Yanzek Hestal’s fiercest enemies1 in Ms. Giovinazzo’s creative writing class. When Ms. DeMaria came over, we hugged briefly. Standing around, waiting for Finck to show, we reminisced about the many good days we’d spent after school in Ping-Pong Club. We were happy, and we were sad, too, for how time had separated us from the past, before we had families to care for and responsibilities to tend to. A time when we could just be kids.
“This is silly,” I whispered to no one in particular as we entered the gym.
“It’s not silly; it’s stupid, is what it is,” Tobayan griped.
“I think it’ll be fun,” Cao said. He and Jeremy had been talking about mathematical formulas while Mickey chatted up Ms. DeMaria. Everyone but Tobayan had smiles on their faces. And I felt that weird sensation you get when you’re stuck in traffic and have to decide whether to stick it out or take the next exit and head home. It wasn’t the jitters. It wasn’t dread. But it wasn’t relief either.
“Anyone heard from Eddie?” Ms. DeMaria asked.
“Not since we made the plan,” I said, keeping my cool. “But, we can just play around for fun until he gets here. It’s just good to be together again.”
Mickey, Jeremy, and I had planned, win-or-lose, to eat lunch at Tung-Hing—our favorite Chinese takeout spot a block away. The MSG would either keep the adrenaline pumping after my victory or drown out the sorrow of another failure. And since old friends who live apart from each other have the habit of talking for hours, rekindling memories they share with no one else, our families would not suspect a thing if the hangout lasted into the afternoon.
“They moved everything,” Ms. DeMaria said in frustration as she looked in the old closet where she’d stored the ping-pong tables before retiring in 2011. The gym hadn’t changed much, though everything else around it had. Bayonne was a new city, with a Walmart, chain restaurants, and condos built along Highway 440, which once split the city from the Military Ocean Terminal and factories that had been long abandoned. But the change was superficial. The surface had been pressure-washed, but the bones were the same.
“Good thing I kept a secret stash,” DeMaria said.
She called Tobayan over and handed him a rusted key from her pocket. The former club president dashed away, with our mentor walking slowly behind him. We looked over to see where he was going. The facility was upgraded in 2018, and the ice rink reconstructed. But the adjacent rooms where ping-pong took place and upstairs, where we’d competed in chess competitions as middle schoolers, were left untouched. In a dark corner beside the bathroom, where the smell of Shinypants’ Axe Body Spray still hung in the air, there was a closet with a sign labeled NO ENTRY. Tobayan slid in the key and opened the door. He called Cao inside. Jeremy followed behind.
I could hear them grunting. Then they pulled out a table.
“This was the same one you played on,” whispered Ms. DeMaria, smiling from behind me. But I had no time to get sentimental because, as my friends and former foes rolled the table toward the gym, the ice-rink doors slammed open.
Paddlehands had arrived.
Since we were so much older now and I knew that besides his family, Finck had built a good white-collar career, made a new name for himself in the Midwestern cornfields, I assumed the dude had mellowed. In his family pictures on Facebook, he even smiled, something I’d only ever witnessed after his opponents gathered themselves in tears after 21-nil butt-whoopings.
My archnemesis sauntered into the room, wearing the same black leather jacket and tinted aviator sunglasses as senior year. On his right hand, I detected brass knuckles.
“Did you punch the door, Eddie?!” Ms. DeMaria said sternly, returning to her teacherly self.
“No, Mrs. D., I kicked it,” he replied, pulling back his jacket to reveal his paddle, which glistened as brightly as ever. He flicked the top with his index finger. The holster had been upgraded; the paddle swung on his hip like a pistol, three times before he stopped it. “Let’s rock n’ roll,” he snarled.
“You guys remember how this works,” Ms. DeMaria said as Finck and I lined up on opposite ends of the table.
“Let’s get this over with,” Finck said. “I’ve got a Yoo-hoo and a slice of Pompei’s with my name on it. I promised my kids I’d be back in 10 minutes.”
Truly, nothing had changed. Finck was the same fearsome competitor he’d always been. And this time, I had no hákarl2 to help me. Mr. Bryngeirrson was unreachable; apparently, he’d taken leave from BHS through Christmas break so that he could return to Iceland and procure his shark meat first-hand.
Finck wore a wrap around his right wrist from where he’d injured it all those years before. He pulled off his jacket to reveal a cut-off t-shirt. Inside his left bicep were tattooed the Chinese symbols for “The White Hand of Destruction” (Cao later translated the symbols for me so I could verify their accuracy). On the other was an American flag with a bald eagle clutching a ping-pong paddle.
“Play to 11s or what?” Ms. DeMaria said. In 2021, the rules of the game had officially switched over to the scoring system she’d used for doubles play: best-of-three, first player to 11, must win by two.
“It’ll go quicker if we play to 21,” Finck said. “I don’t want my pizza to get cold.”
“Rally for serve?” I asked Ms. DeMaria. Typically, in ping-pong, as in other racquet sports, the competitors warm each other up before rallying to determine who’ll kick off proceedings until the switch of serve on the third point.
Our mentor looked to Finck, who sneered. “If you need to warm up to wage war, then you’ve already lost,” he said. “Give him the ball.”
Ms. DeMaria tossed it my way. As she did, Mickey and Jeremy came up behind me, patting my back, spouting all kinds of encouragement like, “You can do this,” and, “Aim for his heart,” and “Dude, this is literally insane.” Paddlehands’ cronies, seeing this show of brotherly affection, moved to do the same, but he shooed them away. He rubbed his wrist, removed the brass knuckles, and tossed them to Tobayan. The callouses on the inside of his palm were raw and scabbed over. Despite Finck’s bravado, I knew I hadn’t been the only one preparing for this final test of masculinity.
I bounced the ball once, then twice, feeling its weight in my hand. The sound echoed until Jeremy began clapping to encourage us. The others joined in, clapping lightly, as if they were about to behold a friendly encounter between old rivals. But I’m sure that deep inside, they knew there would be blood. The only question was, whose would spill first?
“Go on now,” Finck ordered, readying himself for my serve. I gripped the ball and sent a prayer up toward heaven.
Lord, please guide my paddle to victory. May my enemy’s wrist go limp. May his paddle shatter along with his will. Give me the strength to bring you glory. If for no other reason than to tell an epic story. In Jesus’s name, Amen.
“God isn’t going to help you today, loser,” Finck howled. “LET’S PONG!”
I gritted my teeth and sent the first serve his way…
All I can remember are glimpses like flashes from a battle scene shot by Ridley Scott. In these glimpses is the choreography of our paddles swinging and our bodily fluids flying. We swing, move, reposition, block, attack, defend, swerve, dive. There are bursts of shouting, joy, and outrage, and the whispers of our friends standing beside the table watching the guillotine blade move up and down on the rope, wondering on whose neck it will finally fall.
He’s doing it.
No, no, Eddie’s coming back.
Ah, what a forehand!
Noooo, it just clipped the table!
Did that hit the net? No second serve!
What was that? Incredible!
Oh my goodness.
Hang on! Hang on!
THINK OF YOUR FAMILIES!
THINK OF YOUR CHILDREN!
The voices mixed with the sounds of swishing, grunting, falling, and rising until they became a horror-movie melody. The soundtrack was flood water bursting through concrete dams, consuming everything in its path. Finck and I bobbed up and down, gasping for breath, reaching for a tree limb that might bring us to safety.
In the pandemonium, his wrist wrap came undone and hung until Tobayan clipped it, revealing blood vessels that had burst and bruised over. My head throbbed. Ms. DeMaria’s voice rang inside the walls of my mind. “9-7, Eddie!” “12-11 Brian goes up!” “18-18, all tied!”
“Brian’s serving for the match at 20-19” were the words that shocked me back into focus. It wasn’t the hákarl that had carried me here before! The shark meat was merely a placebo Mr. Bryngeirsson had used to force me to believe I could do the thing no one had done before.
I held the white ball in my hands and kissed it to the rubber of my paddle. Paddlehands heaved from across the table. We were both nearly out of breath. “You’re going down, Finck,” Mickey shouted. I took in one last gulp of air, shifted to my right, and let it rip.
“Good game, Finck,” I said, still breathless. And, to my surprise, rather than spit in my face or crush my hand with his own or pull the brass knuckles from Tobayan’s pocket and beat me across the face with his fist, he took it.
“Good game, Brian,” he muttered, shaking it.
Ms. DeMaria walked over to us from the center of the table and eyed us both for a few seconds. Looking from one to the other, the pride she felt for us, her former pupils, who had traveled so far and brought her back after so long, was palpable. She bit her bottom lip, tears welling in her eyes. And then she pulled us into herself.
“That is the most incredible thing I’ve ever seen,” Cao said.
“Whoa,” is all Jeremy could articulate. “Just whoa.”
Finck and I gathered our things. Tobayan and Mickey flipped the table back up and wheeled it to the secret storage closet. Would that table ever see light again? Or would it remain there, decomposing, until other prodigal sons forced their mentor to pull it out for one more match?
Ms. DeMaria flicked the lights off in the gym. Cao bounced up and down, unable to keep the smile off his face, talking to both Paddlehands and me, for he had never been partial. All Cao wanted was to see good ping-pong.
“So let’s head over to Tung-Hing?” Jeremy asked Mickey and me as we separated from the group. Tobayan was already off to his Tesla. Cao said his goodbyes, too. He had to get back to New Brunswick. Ms. DeMaria also got in her car and headed back to Port Monmouth, where another prodigy was waiting.
We hung out on the steps for a while. Finck, who’d gone to the bathroom to rebandage his wrist, emerged and looked around. Mickey gave him a nod. “Guess your wife’s gonna need to heat up your pizza?” he said.
Finck nodded. “Yeah, yeah, I guess,” he said.
I was quiet, looking on at my rival. There we were: two dads who’d traveled to the past then were boomeranged back to the present. In a few days, we’d have jobs to get back to. Mortgages to pay. Emails to sort through, diapers to buy, pictures to draw with our kids. Wives we’d retell this to in bed before clicking off the lamp on our nighttables.
“Unless you want to come get Chinese with us?” Jeremy asked.
The invitation was a jolt, for me and Mickey. Whattttt. We’d never shared a table with Paddlehands before. What kind of man breaks bread with his enemies?
“Dude, he’s got Pompei’s,” Mickey said.
Finck opened his mouth to respond but hesitated.
“Well, I mean,” he said, stuttering as he fiddled with his aviators. “I could just have it later. I would be down for Tung-Hing, if I wouldn’t be intruding.”
My best friends and I looked at each other, mutually understanding what to do.
“Yeah, Finck,” I said. “Come on, let’s eat.
My mortal enemy, now just a meager human in my eyes, grinned. We walked the two or three blocks over to the place where I’d eaten hundreds of pounds of General Tso’s, sesame, and sweet and sour chicken over my lifetime, all the while chit-chatting as the façade came off.
For the next hours, Finck told me how he’d gotten his culinary degree at Hudson County Community and planned to become a chef. The rumor about his quitting the U.S. Olympic team had been blown out of proportion. He had met a girl in Nebraska and moved away for her. He quit the restaurant business before moving to China for one last shot at glory. After hurting his wrist, he returned to the Midwest for good and started working at a call center.
This is one of my favorite stories. The call center had a ping-pong table in the break room. Word had gotten around that Finck once played competitively. His team lead, who’d ponged around a bit in high school, decided to challenge him. Little did he know, he’d reawoken the dormant alter ego. Paddlehands beat him 21-0 in five minutes. For the next four years, supervisors would switch Finck’s phone to training mode and take him into the break room to challenge him. They made bets and threatened demotions.
“One guy told me he was going to play me until he won,” Finck said while biting into an egg roll. “I beat him 50 or 60-plus times.”
But there was a reason he’d retired the Paddlehands alter ago. After rising to a senior director position, based more on successful ping-pong wagers than actual job performance, he quit and went to work for a supermarket chain until he got tired of that, too. Finck wanted to be a dad. He wanted to coach his kid’s tee-ball and soccer teams. They didn’t know he was once the greatest ping-pong player alive, and he didn’t care if they knew it. They had more fun playing Hungry Hungry Hippos or Mario Kart on their Nintendo Switch. The man I knew as Paddlehands they knew simply as dad.
This all happened in December 2023, more than a year ago, and I still crack myself up remembering it. The improbability, the impossibility, the reality that childhood dreams and fantasies can come true. That sometimes the worst things we carry with us, like the embarrassment of being slapped by a ping-pong ball when you’re 17, are better than never having played at all.
Because if it weren’t for ping-pong—a sport I never took seriously before or since I was 17 and 18 years old in Bayonne—I wouldn’t have this story to tell you.
Oh, and by the way, it doesn’t end here. I haven’t told you everything. Because I’m taking the Paddlehands saga and turning it into my next book. I hope to have it ready and available for you to read and listen to this December.
Stay tuned!
Before you leave, support my work by upgrading to a paid subscription for as little as $4.17/month ($50/year), buying me a coffee, or ordering a copy of my first story collection, Big Head on the Block. You can also listen to my stories on YouTube and Spotify.
Tobayan was known among our crew as “Toasterhead” because of the steam that rose from his crew cut after sixth-period gym class. We had physics together with Mr. Collins during seventh period. In the winter months, Mickey and I would warm our hands above Tobayan’s dome whenever could.
Since I realize many of you may not be intimately acquainted with Icelandic cuisine, I suggest watching this short documentary from Insider Food about the process of preparing and eating the toxic delicacy.