Barney J. Reed, who believes himself to be the only full-time professional table tennis player in America, owns a 1995 Geo Prizm, a California medical marijuana card, and a deep-seated distrust of Ping-Pong's ruling oligarchy. I learned about the latter on the first day of the 2012 North American Olympic trials, when Reed came across a flaw in the surface of his table, a ragged scratch that appeared to have been done over with Wite-Out; as soon as he knew it was there, he was utterly distracted by its presence, and once he was distracted, he could not contain his sense of moral outrage. He stopped play, and for several minutes the proceedings reached a stalemate, with Reed standing up against the injustice being perpetrated upon him and the officials refusing to accede to his demands.
"It's your job!" he said. "Don't walk away! You've got to fix the table! Listen, it's not my fault, and it's not your fault. But we've got a simple solution — change the table."
But they did not change the table, and insisted they would not change the table until after the match, which Reed promptly lost to 20-year-old Canadian Andre Ho. The format of competitive table tennis is best-of-seven, with each game played to 11, and at the time of his discovery Reed trailed three games to one, so it wasn't hard to discern the element of gamesmanship inherent in Reed's filibuster. "At that point, he needed something," admitted his father, who is named Barney Reed as well (middle initial: D) and is his son's coach. But it was also indicative of Reed's ongoing agitation with the sport's American caretakers, who he feels haven't done enough to procure sponsorship and support, nor to elevate a game that is still regarded in this country as a casual pastime practiced in half-finished basements.
"This is the Olympic trials, and they said they were going to give us the most perfect conditions they can give us," Reed told me. "And somebody overlooked the fact that there's a big imperfection in the table."
I tried to ask him if there were rules for an occurrence like this, and whether the officials might simply be abiding by those rules, but to Reed, a 33-year-old with an unkempt sweep of brown hair and the mischievous good looks of Russell Crowe, those questions were almost beside the point. "A stupid rule is a stupid rule," he said.
Such is the interminable struggle of Barney Reed's adult life. A column in the local newspaper that day noted his longtime reputation as the "bad boy of Ping-Pong," and he has regularly been portrayed as a McEnroe-esque scold, which feels a little inaccurate, since Reed is viewed by most of his peers as a stand-up guy when he is not feeling shafted by the system. He is a compelling character in a sport filled with stone faces, and he has spent his entire adult life scratching out a living, taking extended journeys to Europe and the Far East, competing at second-rate tournaments held in dimly lit Dominican venues, and winning stakes matches using his own sandal as a paddle. His father, a Ping-Pong teacher and ex-board member of USA Table Tennis, raised him in the game — at the age of 6, he was playing in tournaments — and Reed long ago made the choice to bypass college in order to play Ping-Pong. Over the years he's had occasional brushes with celebrity, playing on television against Conan O'Brien and in Las Vegas against Tone-Loc and evangelizing to people like me about the day when the sport would finally be able to leverage its grassroots popularity into big-time sponsorship deals. "I mean, the national beer-pong champion makes 50 grand," he says. "But our sport right now has no light at the top."
And so Reed lives from week to week, in an apartment near San Jose, and plays in about 25 events a year. He drives the car he won for playing an exhibition at a dealership 17 years ago, and his share of the rent is $400; he lives with his girlfriend, who qualified for the Olympics as a table tennis player in 2000 and now works in a dental office. When I asked Reed if his girlfriend still plays competitively, he admitted that there wasn't much more to accomplish in Ping-Pong once you'd made the Olympics, which is the one thing he has never done. Every time he comes close, something unfortunate befalls him — twice, he's failed drug tests, once in 2002 for a performance enhancer,1 which briefly made him a late-night punchline and led to a two-year suspension, and once in 2008 for marijuana, though he contends that the medical marijuana card should have exempted him. He said he'd never played on this particular brand of table before, and that his serves, which rely on heavy spin, were "digging" instead of "sliding," and his father told me, "It's like he's being held back."
Before he left the gym, Reed took several pictures of the scratched table with his iPhone, though there didn't appear to be any sort of appeals process, so what he planned to do with this evidence I don't know. I don't think he knew, either, but he couldn't help himself.
"It's kind of ironic," he said, "that this shit always happens to me."
by Michael Weinreb, Grantland | Read more:
AP Photo/Gerry Broome
