A Good Paddling

Jay Dweck traveled from Westchester, N.Y., to Laguna Hills to compete in a table tennis tournament this weekend. What Dweck discovered is that 3,000 miles is a long way to go to get beaten by someone twice his age.

Dweck is 42.

Such are the stories at the Meiklejohn National Seniors Table Tennis Tournament at Leisure World, where anyone who mentions pingpong better be talking about panda bears or risk getting whacked with a paddle.

The tournament, which is about as far from the polite game played in a church rec room as one can get, continues in Clubhouse 5 through Sunday.

George Brathwaite just disposed of his first opponent, 21-16, 21-8, and is sweating like a boxer. And some poor soul on Table 6 is rolling on the floor after having tried to run down the ball.

And Harry Bloom won another title here, for competitors over 80, discounting it as nothing more than a blip.

“It’s a good blip,” Bloom said, “but it’s a blip in comparison.”

Bloom is 85, nearly a 20-year resident of Leisure World. He has won three national open over-75 titles, three over-80 titles and one doubles title. Those championships are more than blips.

Bloom helped organize the first tournament 11 years ago, when fewer than 100 people participated. It has since grown into the nation’s premier seniors-only event, featuring 168 entrants from around the country--only 15 of which are from Leisure World’s 400-member club--competing for more than $12,000 in prize money.

Only three table tennis events are considered more prestigious in the United States: the U.S. Open, the U.S. National and the U.S. Team championship.

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Bloom is proud to say he has never been coached. He played a bit in his youth, but had not played in 50 years before retiring to Leisure World in 1973.

He practices about two hours a day, three times a week.

“That’s about as much as I can practice--I need a full day’s rest in between,” he said.

What Bloom lacks in stamina, he makes up for in competitive spirit.

“I think I’m still the best player in Leisure World,” he said, even though he is not the club champion.

His excuse? “I’ve got arthritis in the fingers,” Bloom said. “I can’t grip the paddle properly.”

That’s not a problem for Brathwaite, 60, a seniors champion seven times in the 1980s and four times this decade.

Brathwaite is the eighth-seeded player in the Senior Elite round robin, the tournament’s most prestigious event, with competitors limited to those with computer ratings (similar to chess) of 1,900 points or more.

“The seniors is a very competitive division,” Brathwaite said. “The U.S. champion [Ying Hua Cheng] is a senior.”

Cheng will turn 40 this year and, according to the U.S. Assn. of Table Tennis, is eligible for this, his first seniors tournament.

Like Cheng, Brathwaite is a visiting celebrity at Leisure World. Now working as a clerk at the United Nations, he was a member of the U.S. team that received an invitation to visit China in 1971, when it was competing at the World Championships in Japan.

It was that team’s trip that opened a dialogue between President Nixon and the Chinese government. A photograph of Brathwaite standing on the Great Wall is in the Encyclopedia Britannica.

“We didn’t look at it in a political context until we were in Hong Kong, where we were ushered through back doors to keep us away from the media,” Brathwaite said. “Then it dawned on us that we were pioneers. Whatever we do or say could reflect positively or negatively on the U.S.”

Brathwaite won two of his three exhibition matches against the Chinese--the most successful of the five men and four women U.S. players--and also won a match last year in New York, where they celebrated the 25th anniversary of China’s return visit to America.

“[Henry] Kissinger said last year at the anniversary that when they first heard a pingpong team would represent the U.S., they just had no idea,” Brathwaite said. “We weren’t politicians.”

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Brathwaite had a rough day at Leisure World on Friday, winning only one of his three matches. He led, 20-18, in the third game before losing to the top-seeded player in his group, Rey Domingo. Brathwaite lost to Nick Mintsiveris “for the first time in three years.”

Romo Chernoff, 85, is wearing a belt buckle with an Army medallion encircled by a silver horse shoe. It looks like he won it at a rodeo, but his short pants and Speedo headband say differently.

Chernoff is the octogenarian who sent Dweck to the sidelines, head in hands, where he mixed among the 100 or spectators.

Chernoff could be better, he says, “but I just don’t have the killer instinct. . . . I just enjoy the game.”

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Chernoff is able to compete against the relatively youthful likes of Dweck and Sam Flores, 43, of El Centro, because players compete against opponents based on table tennis ratings, not ages.

Flores, hoping to win his first trophy in five tournaments, did have the killer instinct and defeated Chernoff. But it’s tough when one senior player actually plays a senior citizen.

“You feel like you should treat them with the respect and admiration they deserve in society,” Flores said. “You’re intimidated. You back off. My game is side-to-side, and he’s obviously lost a step.

“I played against a gentleman in a wheelchair once. It’s psychological. It’s like playing an 11-year-old--who has beaten me twice.”