You don't often see a man from North Carolina excel in table tennis, move to Florida, go to Romania to train for one last hurrah and then return to his home state to try and win a spot on the U.S. Olympic team.
In fact, I'd wager you have never heard of such a thing. That's exactly what Brian Pace is doing, though, starting today in Cary's Bond Park Community Center at the U.S. Olympic trials for table tennis.
Pace, 39, has been one of the better players in America almost ever since he first started playing table tennis at age 13 in Wilson at a Boys & Girls Club.
Table tennis - serious players prefer that name to "Ping Pong" - has taken him all over the world. He has carved out a living in the sport as a coach, player and maker of instructional training videos.
What he has never done, however, is make the U.S. Olympic team. The 2012 Summer Olympics will begin in late July in London
Make no mistake. Pace could beat you or me. He would kill us.
Recreational players who have only played Ping Pong in the basement have no idea how fast the ball travels in competitive table tennis, or how good the best players' reflexes really are.
Yet because the sport is so common and so accessible, he finds that beginners challenge him with some regularity.
"They say, 'We should play sometime,' " Pace said. "Yet they would never go tell Mike Tyson, 'Hey, let's go mess around in the ring some.' "
Pace doesn't lack for confidence, but he understands it will be extremely difficult to make the Olympic team.
He has been mostly retired as a player since 2004 - he got married and now works as a table tennis coach in Fort Lauderdale.
He is trying to make a comeback as a player, which is why he has twice gone to Romania in the past few months to train in an unforgiving, difficult environment.
"Think Rocky Balboa in one of those movies where he goes somewhere isolated to get ready to fight some Russian guy," Pace said. "That's what I did. I didn't speak the language and I didn't have anything to do except train, eat and sleep."
Still, making the Olympic team will be hard, and Pace could be eliminated today.
The men's and women's draw in Cary will feature a 12-person round-robin tournament as the main event - the event ends Sunday (www.cary2012.com for details and ticket information).
But 10 of those 12 spots in the main draw are already spoken for by players who have accumulated enough points in other tournaments.
Thirty-two players will compete for the other two men's spots in an Olympic qualifier tournament today. Pace is in the qualifying tournament and would have to win five straight matches to even get into the main draw.
"Brian is entirely capable of doing that, though," said Sean O'Neill, a former U.S. Olympian who serves as a spokesman for the sport and, occasionally, as Pace's coach. "He's got that sort of talent."
As a coach, Pace teaches adults and kids. One of his more interesting pupils is Dallas Mavericks coach Rick Carlisle, whom Pace said sometimes will fit in a lesson when the Mavericks come to Miami to play the Heat.
Because of that connection, Pace has been in the Heat locker room as Carlisle's guest.
"He's a good intermediate player," Pace said of Carlisle, "and he's a fanatic about the sport."
Pace flew from Romania to Raleigh this week, arriving a little early for the tournament so he could visit with his family and friends in the Wilson area and stay at his mom's house to get some home-cooked meals.
"I don't know how I'll do," Pace said. "There are so many good players in the qualifying tournament that getting one of those last two spots in the main draw will be a crapshoot. I'll have to be at my very best. But I think it is possible."
