Pips Happened

Pips, I’ve expressed my aversion to the non-inversion. I’m thinking long ago in a far away place where paddles were not of the hand made variety, a factory existed. Late one evening at the end of the line the quality assurance engineer fell asleep for hours and a collar slipped on the mechanism that rotated the rubber onto the blade. Thousands of these pimple protruding paddles emerged. What was the company to do? The marketing department got together and convinced buyers that this Pipsi generation would drive traditional players mad, and it worked!

The great City of Chicago. What a fantastic idea following the turn of the millennium, the year 2000. Three hundred plus ping pong tables scattered around the city for the general public to randomly engage in a little competition. Besides in  parks and museums, you could find tables downtown and around the city in building lobbies, banks, and even at the Board of Trade where an 1800 level player I knew told me he and a friend had quite the crowd gathered around them. I had worked downtown until the early eighties and then worked further out into the city and suburbs. One of my accounts, a bank on Milwaukee Ave. had one of these tables. I kept my paddle in my car, but never was an opponent to be found the few times I was there.

30,000 paddles were specially produced and were available for ‘checkout’ at the various locations. That’s roughly 100 paddles a table. They must have anticipated a little ‘slippage’ eh. The paddles were supplied by an Indiana company with the rights to the name ‘ping pong’, and none other than the ‘cutting edge’ company Sears with the exclusive rights to sell the Ping Pong brand, sweet deal. Sears, at that time was no longer based in the city, but in Hoffman Estates. Yep, with a little foresight they could have been Amazon. 

Anyway, I only saw the paddles many years past the promotion after some friends slipped a pair of these oversized Necco Wafers my way. There was a hard type surface on one side complete with advertising and Richard M Daley imprinted on it…(not Ma Lin, that’s for sure!) There were short hard pips on the other. If you could get your ‘D-‘ game out of these you’d be happy.  Pips on a paddle, that’s ketchup on a hot dog,

 

Kobra