Ping Pong Tourney

I'm not sure exactly why, but the newest CoCo office location has a ping pong table. (It also has a theater and a bar.)  Inevitably, someone decided that we should have a ping pong tournament.  I signed up immediately.  I have many fond memories of ping pong.

My family had a table when I was growing up.  It was probably bought at a garage sale, but it was good enough for us.  We played a lot of games on that table.  Because I was the youngest, I lost a lot of games on that table.

There was an annual ping pong tournament at the annual Easter party in the neighborhood. I remember the ping pong table set up in the side yard and the poster with all the brackets.  Again, as one of the youngest players, I doubt I made it very far.  But I always enjoyed playing.

My childhood ping pong table is probably warping slowly in my Mom's garage.  My honey's family's ping pong table was still in the basement being used for storage when we left North Carolina last week. I wish I had room in my house to bring one of them here.

So you can see why I was excited to get the opportunity to play the tabletop sport again.  Add to that my natural competitiveness and I was more than a little psyched to finally play my first set of games.  Best two out of three games moves on, loser gets one more chance in the loser's bracket.

After weeks of not being able to meet up with my opponent and watching the scores of other games go up on the Challonge website, we finally played yesterday.  I wanted to win, but more importantly I wanted to not lose badly. That was my primary goal.

We started out gently, but the play soon got competitive.  I managed to hold on to an early lead to win the first game 21-18.  My opponent and I were fairly well matched, and he succeeded in beating me by the same score, 21-18 for the second game. By this time, I realized that I had met my aim of not losing badly.

So we started the last game even.  Playing ping pong was more of a workout than I remembered and by that time I was sweating. Instead of being tired, I got looser and more relaxed and was happy to win the final game 21-13. Victory was sweet!

From my uninspired commentary, it's clear that I have no aspirations to being any kind of sportswriter. However, I do look forward to going as far as I can in this "important business meeting".  (That's the title of the CoCo ping pong tourney!)