Ping-Pong Ace Wanted Seoul, Settles for Sydney

When 6-foot, 230-pound Ron Whitlock walks into a gym, clad in sweats and his athletic bag slung over his shoulder, people assume he is a wrestler, a boxer or a weightlifter.

“People say to me, ‘I thought you’d be a boxer,’ or something like that. I say, ‘No, but imagine what I can do to a Ping-Pong ball,’ ” said the 43-year-old detective in charge of officer training for the Orange Police Department.

What Whitlock has done to a Ping-Pong ball has earned him 39 table tennis medals in annual state, national and international Police Olympics throughout his 13-year career with the department.

His most recent competition, the annual National Police Olympics in Las Vegas two weeks ago, netted him four gold medals, giving him a berth in the International Police Olympics, which will be held in next month in Sydney, Australia.

Whitlock said that if it weren’t for table tennis, he might never have earned his bachelor’s degree in criminal justice.

He first picked up a table tennis paddle at age 22 while attending Southern Illinois University in Carbondale. He was playing billiards when he noticed a couple of guys “really whomping” a Ping-Pong ball across the table.

“I saw them smack that ball,” Whitlock recalled, demonstrating with a flick of his wrist. “It was nothing like when you play with your father or your grandmother downstairs by the heater kind-of-thing.”

He asked one of those students to teach him, and soon he was playing in the college’s annual table tennis tournaments at the beginning of the fall term.

One summer, Whitlock said, he decided not to return to school.

“I had a girlfriend who dumped me, and you know how that goes,” he said, laughing.”So I was going to drop out.”

On the other hand, he really wanted to play in the annual tournament, and that meant registering for the fall term. He did so, thinking he could drop out after the games.

“Well, I went, and I met a new girl, so I stayed.”

Whitlock followed his new girlfriend to California. But when she returned to Illinois, Whitlock decided to stay and get his degree at Cal State University, Long Beach, where he continued to play table tennis.

He joined the Orange Police Department in 1976 and since then has participated in the Police Olympics every year.

Last year, he even competed with a severed Achilles’ tendon. “I was in a wheelchair, so I only won a silver,” he said.

“He is something of a miracle man,” said Terry Timmins, a table tennis instructor at Orange Coast College, where Whitlock practices. “He was operated on, and three months after that, he was back on the court. . . . He brought in a chair with casters on it, and he could play almost as good as he could standing up.”

Although injury didn’t keep Whitlock from the Police Olympics, the timing of his tendon injury last year prevented him from competing in the 1988 Olympic trials. While he is disappointed that he won’t be on the U.S. team, he is proud that his sport has become a medal sport in the 1988 Summer Olympics.

This year also marks a first for the Police Olympics, with the international competition being held outside the United States.

One of Whitlock’s biggest competitors will be an Australian woman “who almost took a gold from me in Texas a couple of years ago.”

A token of that friendly competition--a stuffed koala bear--is perched in a plant in the corner of Whitlock’s office. This year, he said, he’ll bring her a gift--a stuffed California raisin, “but after the match is over, of course.”

Whitlock, who lives in Orange with his wife and four children, said he views going to Australia as making up for a missed opportunity in college.

He could have gone to the 1971 World Table Tennis Championships in Nagoya, Japan, as a member of the U.S. Table Tennis Team. However, his professors would not allow him to reschedule his final exams.

“They said, ‘For table tennis? Are you kidding?’ ” Whitlock recalled.

Whitlock said that worse than not being able to go to Japan was missing out on a historic visit to the People’s Republic of China, whose leaders invited the U.S. team to their country after the competition in Japan. The trip heralded the opening of Communist China to Western visitors.

“Then I see my friends on the cover of Time magazine in front of the Great Wall of China,” he said, shaking his head. “Here it is, the first time the U.S. is going beyond the Bamboo Curtain, and it’s all my friends on the U.S. Table Tennis Team.”

But Whitlock prefers not to look back. His sights are set on Sydney.

And is he considering the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona, Spain?

“Yep, you bet.”