One Competition, One Table

Ping-pong isn’t our exclusive competition. My first cousin and I are always combative… perhaps excessively combative. It could be as little as whom could eat quicker or just plain consume more… who could consume food slower or in smaller amounts. It did not matter. If there was a means one mortal could best the other in anything, we’d compete.

Regrettably, the tiny abode my wife and I bought does not have a ton of space for the various ways my cousin and I like to compete. After much calculation, my wife and I finally set on a billiard table with a table tennis conversion top. Fundamentally this affords us the ability to play either pool or table tennis on one table in the same space.

Thus now my cousin and my notorious rivalry proceeds. Of course, he constantly kvetches that it is not the true thing. Even though he normally trumps me in pocket billiards, every single instance we set the table tennis conversion top on the billiard table, it seems his game errs.

To put it plainly, I think it is because I’m just plain the superior ping pong player. But unfortunately, he makes too numerous rationalizations. The height is not correct. The proportions are incorrect. The list proceeds on. So I got out the measuring tape. The proportions and height are spot on to the official table tennis proportions. Then he claimed the table caused the incorrect bounce; that somehow the pool table below affected the speed and height of the ball bounce.

So we investigated the official bounce measurement (yes, there’s an official bounce measurement). It is for each 30 centimeters of drop, there ought to be a 23 centimeters bounce. We tested the bounce in over a dozen locations on the conversion top. In every place the ball bounced virtually perfectly straight up and almost exactly 23 centimeters high. So you see, table tennis conversion tops do a perfectly good job replicating a strong game of ping pong. And my cousin has no excuses. I am simply the greater ping pong player.

Phils Musings