I was a teenage table tennis champion - it was intense

Coach, who had exacting standards, liked me. I trained for a year: press-ups, sit-ups and sprint drills; multiball, where hundreds of balls fly at you; individual practice and scrimmaging (which is practice matches). Over the summer after I had turned ten some Swedish teens arrived for bootcamp. This was six hours a day at Coach’s, including sprints on her neighbourhood hills and a mandatory post-lunch nap. I managed to keep up with the teens. Then I played in the US Open, receiving a rating of 250. Table tennis ratings are like those in chess: they range up to 1,000 for beginners, then upwards from roughly 1,400 for an intermediate tournament player. You gain and lose points depending on performance in matches as well as your opponent’s ability. My single win was over a seven-year-old, who I thrashed for two sets and who then crawled under the table halfway through the third.

I continued training and competing. My rating jumped to 600, then 1,200, surpassing my mother’s. By the age of 12 I had ranked No 3 nationally for girls under 13. (Not as impressive as it sounds: in 2024 there were a mere 14,000 registered players in America, compared with a quarter of a million in France.) Every week I was training three times at Coach’s and twice at the St Louis Table Tennis Club, a delightful coterie of immigrants and kind older men who humoured me off court and fought me tooth and nail on.

Coach then talked of my qualifying for the national cadet team. With higher stakes in mind I started getting the “yips”, a sudden loss of skill that can strike athletes under stress. I suffered some stinging losses — in the girls’ under-12 final at the US Open I got my ass kicked. But overall things were still good. I still loved table tennis. I was fast and strong, and when I hit the ball right it felt like the perfect note ringing my body, the clean click of a knife on wood.

Then I hit puberty and my body began to change. One evening, as I was folding tables at the club, my wrist started to twinge. It was tendinitis. I took six weeks off. My dad was disgruntled — the point of table tennis, I was starting to learn through conversations overheard and direct, was to be an accolade for college applications, not to damage my body.

• In my ping pong days, I dreamt of being like Timothée Chalamet

As I waited to get better my weekends were spent at Washington University, where my dad earned his MBA, in carpeted study rooms for contest practice tests for maths. I also did practice tests on weeknights after homework, sometimes staying up till midnight or one.

When my wrist healed I returned to training. But things felt different. I was different too. I’d been up late studying, and to cope I started bingeing on Costco chocolate from our pantry. This made me gain weight, which seemingly every adult on the planet, including other parents at tournaments, commented on. (“Who are you playing? The fat one?” I remember one opponent’s dad saying.)

I started hating my body and at 13 developed crippling anorexia. I don’t remember playing table tennis during that period, though I must have. I just remember being so hungry. This ended in April of 2012, after my mother drove me to a flute competition and cried at Starbucks when I wouldn’t eat a slice of lemon cake.

My time with Coach stuttered to a close, and the next school year was lost to binge-eating, a crazy course load and scratching my arm with protractors, the sharpest implement I could tolerate. I was a year ahead in maths, drinking two Starbucks double shots a day. I was a mess.

I didn’t have many friends but I started to grow close to a couple of young guys at the table tennis club, where I’d kept on playing, mostly because I wanted to see them. Crushes took me out of my life, the point of which, I was starting to feel, was now to get into a top university. I kept travelling to tournaments with the guys, though my rating had stalled between 1,700 and 1,800. Still good, but not good enough for how many hours and dollars we’d poured into the sport. At one tournament I met a girl from New Jersey, Leslie; we texted a lot and she invited me to train at her club over the summer.

• Forget padel — the hottest table this summer is at the ping-pong net

In the spring I was reported to a school counsellor for the protractor scratches. Nothing happened. One April afternoon (it’s 2013 now) I emptied a bottle of allergy meds into my mouth and then spat them out, because the bitter coating made it seem f***ing stupid.

For no apparent reason I recovered over the summer, which I spent as a lab intern decapitating fruit flies, watching Game of Thrones while the lab machine scanned slides, and eating burritos for lunch. I went to Leslie’s club and had a great time. In July I won bronze at the undersubscribed US Amateur Athletic Union Junior Olympics. Nice line for the résumé. My last tournament on record was that October in Illinois. I played pretty well.

Then it was over.

I’m OK now. I went to Harvard, majoring in history and minoring in applied maths. I have a good relationship with my parents. And I still play table tennis, enjoying that full-body ringing feeling I remember so well. The difference is now, if I play badly, which is most of the time, I can just put down the racket and return to the rest of my life.

I wrote my debut novel, Underspin, about a table tennis prodigy who remains somewhat opaque and mysterious to the reader, and to me too. But I imagine he often felt like I did — a feeling I also recognised watching Marty Supreme, simmering beneath Marty’s ego — that sometimes you are less than a dog, unable to do the simplest tricks needed to earn your keep. But also how the unlikeliest friends and people can be the ones who keep you alive.

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