CARY -- Golf has Augusta. Table tennis has Cary, which has become one of America's prime spots for the competitive version of the time-honored family rec room game.
Starting today, Cary will host the country's biggest round-robin table tennis tournament, the home-grown 2010 Butterfly Cary Cup. For the next four days, hundreds of players will whack small, celluloid balls in the Bond Park Community Center, playing game after game for a portion of $12,000 in prize money.
The sport's stronghold in Cary is indicative of a renewed interest in the sport, buoyed by its relative inexpense, faddish hipness among celebrities and major appearances in the 2007 feature-length film "Balls of Fury," and the 2008 Olympics in Beijing. Olympic competition in the capital of China echoed the boost the game got from the "Ping-Pong Diplomacy" matches between American and Chinese teams in 1971 that marked former President Richard M. Nixon's overtures to the communist country.
One of the top local players scheduled to play in this year's Butterfly Cup is Cary resident Gregg Robertshaw, 53, who laments the lack of attention paid to competitive table tennis in the United States, compared with interest in Europe and Asia.
"In this country, not many people make a living at table tennis," Robertshaw said. "Our kids see guys making millions playing basketball, baseball or hockey. ... Not table tennis."
Cary is riding the table tennis revival. There has been a 62 percent increase in drop-in play at community centers in the past five years, according to recreation manager Dwayne Jones.
That number tracks both regional and national trend lines. Participation in table tennis leaped 8 percent from 2007 to 2008, making for more than 17 million table tennis players in the United States, according to a report from the Sporting Goods Manufacturers Association. More than 18 percent of those participants are from the Southeast - the biggest concentration in the country.
Membership in USA Table Tennis, the sport's national organizing body, has increased 12 percent since 2005. The association has more than 9,000 ranked members who play competitively.
"The economy has driven people to more family-oriented things," said Michael Cavanuagh, USATT's executive director. "This sport is inexpensive, and it is intrinsically family-oriented."
Cary officials were cool to idea
Mike Babuin, 52, runs the Cary Table Tennis Association and sits on the USATT board of directors. He started the town's championship cup nine years ago.
It wasn't easy to persuade town officials, said Babuin, who works on Cary's engineering staff.
"It took a lot of negotiation and discussion," he said. "It probably had the same initial allure as tiddlywinks."
It's not as if the United States only recently started playing, though. The country's history with the paddle sport dates to the 1920s, when it first became a wildly popular pastime.
Despite its renewed hipness and historical significance, table tennis is regarded as recreation rather than sport.
Babuin's Cary association is a nonprofit, hosting monthly tournaments and open play at community centers three times a week.
"In Germany, you can go in any city and find 10 table tennis clubs and each one is packed to the gills. In China, every block on every city street, you've got a table tennis club," Babuin said. "Here, we're at the ... mercy of city recreation centers and church halls."
The local favorites
Robertshaw and about 20 other players sweated it out last week, sharing four tables in a cramped recreation room at the Herbert C. Young Community Center in Cary. Most of them were tuning up for the coming competition.
The only player in the room better than Robertshaw was Sandeep Sharma, 32, whom Robertshaw says may be the best table tennis player in the state.
Sharma and Robertshaw, though not professionals, train very hard to maintain their elite status.
They have full-time jobs in Research Triangle Park but manage to practice together as many as six nights a week, hitting thousands of high-speed shots in three-hour sessions.
Robertshaw won the inaugural Cary Cup in 2002. But he says younger players, such as Sharma, are overtaking him.
"He's so much stronger and faster," Robertshaw said. "But playing him has made my game much better."
