50 Years Ago, the World Was Pulled Back from the Brink of World War III by Ping Pong
Anonymous. Shutterstock Images.There have been conflicting reports over the past few days over whether or not the U.S. would lead a contingent of nations boycotting the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing, over Chinese human rights abuses. Reports that seem to have culminated in the State Department declaring there will be no boycott. But stay tuned. That may be subject to change.
Obviously this is not the first time there's been a near collision at the intersection of Politics Street and Sports Avenue. Mixing the two is as old as athletic competition itself. Just ask the guy who ran 26.2 miles from Marathon to Athens in 490 BC to deliver the news the Greeks had won a decisive battle. On second thought, don't bother. He dropped dead on the spot.
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But the history of mixing politics and sports in the last 100 years is a long and stories one. With abject failures, like Hitler in 1936 being given a platform to promote his view of Aryan supremacy, to great successes like Jesse Owens repeatedly kicking ol' Schickelgruber right in his testicle, winning medal after medal. There's been unfathomable tragedy, like the Israeli athletes being murdered in Munich '72. Triumphs like the Miracle on Ice, which helped inspire a disheartened nation. There have been scenes of chaos and violence, like international soccer riots. And moments where the triumph of the human spirit were put on display for the all the world to see, like the "Invictus" 1995 World Rugby Cup team.
And at their very, very best, international sports can do what international relations never seem to be able to accomplish: Bring about peace. Think Rocky Balboa ending the Cold War by winning the hearts and minds of the Soviet people on Christmas Day in Moscow. And one such example of that - only not at all written and directed by Sylvester Stallone but really real, happened 50 years ago this week. April of 1971, when hostilities between two opposing nuclear superpowers were ended thanks to the Sport of Kings, Ping Pong.
AP - They were an unlikely group of trailblazing diplomats, including the 15-year-old who knew only that China was a big country filled with communists — and really good pingpong players.
Tossed into the middle of a potential thawing in U.S. relations with China, though, Judy Bochenski and her American table tennis teammates helped deliver one of the great diplomatic coups of their time. Their hastily arranged trip for exhibitions in three Chinese cities played a role in parting the Red Curtain and opening the way to a new world order that included China. …
It was April 1971 and the Americans were in Japan, competing in the world table tennis championships they had no chance of winning. The Americans were such minor players in a minor sport in their country that they had to pay their own way to Japan to compete. …
Instead of going home, Bochenski and her teammates suddenly found themselves on a weeklong excursion through a mysterious country mostly hidden from Westerners since just after World War II.
“A big surprise and a shock,” the now 65-year-old said of her reaction to the invitation. “I knew China was a communist country, but I didn’t know that much about what was going on politically at the time.” … [This]last-minute invitation to the table tennis team was the first solid evidence the Nixon administration had that China was in fact interested in relations.
It worked so well that President Richard Nixon would get on Air Force One the next year to make a state visit to China that enthralled the world. …
“We’re playing for much higher stakes with the Russian — and this thing is sending them right up the wall, the Ping Pong team,” Nixon says to Secretary of State Henry Kissinger a week later in transcripts of Oval Office recordings provided by the Nixon Presidential Library. “And we also are playing for high stakes with the Chinese. It makes good — it’s very good copy here for us to appear to be the people that are, have opened up the Chinese thing.”
Let me just interject here with my own editorializing. Say what you will about Nixon, and Lord knows his record is blemished and the last 50 years have not been kind to him. But if you pull way, way back and look at something like this through the lens of huge, Earth-changing events, you get the sense that history in the distant future will be kind to him.
I mean, here we were, with the US and their allies facing down both Chinese and Soviet communism, each side pointing enough nukes at each other to incinerate the whole solar system, fighting out a brutal proxy war in Vietnam just a generation removed from a brutal proxy war in Korea. And he saw an opening to thaw the hostilities with a game you play in your garage.
And it worked. Cultural exhanges took place. Talks were begun. Tensions eased. The fact that we're not a population of about 10 million, living underground living off of root vegetables as pale, tumorous mole people to avoid the radioactive soup that was once our atmosphere might be all thanks to the fact that Dick Nixon envisioned common ground between two bitter enemies. And that common ground was a 274 cm X 152.5 cm green fiberboard rectangle most of us today only associate with triangles of Red Solo cups. It's like if World War I was avoided because Kaiser Wilhelm and Poincare' of France decided to settle their differences over a Foosball table instead of Belgium.
One important point though. According to Sports Illustrated, all that goodwill building, international relationing, and nuclear war avoidance almost didn't happen because Chinese Premiere Mao Tse Tung was really, really into the 'scrips:
At first, officials rejected the idea of an American visit. … If that was the end of the story, there would be no Ping-Pong Diplomacy.
A day later, though, Mao took some briefing papers with him to bed. After taking his usual sleeping pills, he came upon press accounts of the encounters between [Chinese team member] Zhuang and [Team USA member] Cowan. According to Wu Xujun, Mao's nurse, upon seeing photos of the two exchanging gifts, he was moved to exclaim, "My Lord, Zhuang!" He told Wu that the American team should indeed be invited.
One hurdle remained: Mao had ordered Wu to disregard any directive he issued after he had taken sleeping pills. Seeing her hesitation, he insisted that his instructions should nonetheless be carried out. After Wu pressed him again to reassure her that he had really changed his mind, Mao kept himself awake until Wu returned with word that she had telephoned the foreign ministry with his order to formally invite the U.S. team.
And so there you go. A little history lesson to go with all that debating about whether it's right for other countries to send their ski jumpers and figure skaters to Beijing given the state of diplomatic relations. Thanks to a game no one ever thinks about until their hanging in their friends' basement, one of the most strident anti-Communist political figures in American history and one of the world's most influential Communist revolutionaries who ever lived found a way to sit down and hammer out peace agreements. I'm not saying that means we should or shouldn't send Team USA to China. But it should give us all more respect for the power of a goofy game you can master with a beer in your hand. We might all owe our lives to Ping Pong Diplomacy working 50 years ago this week. Happy anniversary. Thanks for saving the world.