Spin Doctors

By Brian Cazeneuve for Sports Illustrated Magazine

1992 gold medalist Jan-Ove Waldner and his Swedish teammates have all the angles covered in table tennis

A good table tennis player will put a different spin on just about anything. But even Jan-Ove Waldner, Sweden's only gold medalist from the 1992 Barcelona Games, seems to get tongue-tied when explaining his country's rise to Ping-Pong preeminence. "We don't often compromise our thoughts," Waldner says. "It is not so easy to frighten a Swede."

Waldner's strokes are a combination of the best techniques from other players.

Frighten? What's so scary about table tennis? He's not careering down an icy slope in that other sport Swedes handle with Olympian aplomb. No, life and limb seem secure when your weapon is a pimple-covered paddle, its projectile a sphere of feather-light celluloid. So why the talk about fright?

Simply that table tennis is a game of nerves, compressed into a nine-by-five-foot forum of arcs, angles and rapid-fire geometric calculations. Your opponent whacks it right, you guessed left and you're toast. Of course, you aren't really guessing - that takes time. It's more like an intuitive reckoning of pace, pattern and spin made in the bat of a paddle. "When the game is 19-all and your life changes with the edge of the table, it is good to be cool," says Peter Karlsson, Waldner's Olympic teammate and a former world doubles champion. "It's good to be Swedish."

Before last year's comeuppance in Tianjin, where they were whipped by the host Chinese, the Swedish men had captured three straight team titles in the biennial world championships.

In 1989 and '91 Waldner and Jörgen Persson each took a turn beating the other in the men's singles final. For nearly a decade, a country of 8.7 million inhabitants regularly thrashed a nation of 200 million table tennis players. Polite, distant, inoffensive and prepared to parry your next move before you know what it is, the Swedes practically bore their opponents into submission.

Yet the Swedish style defies uniformity. It is an amalgam of techniques and training methods taught as rote in various corners of the world. "Table tennis was perfect for us," says Stellan Bengtsson, who in 1971 became Sweden's first world singles champion. "We were starving for knowledge and willing to vary our game so we are never taken by surprise."

In 1971 Bengtsson was an 18-year-old hero after becoming Sweden's first world singles champion.

The Swedes built a hybrid identity by inviting foreign coaches to hold camps and even run their national team for months at a time. In 1954 Poland's Alex Ehrlich, a three-time silver medalist in the world championships, introduced military fitness drills. His backward hops down long staircases were a boon to better footwork. That same year Japan's Ichiro Ogimura smashed his way to the world title after ignoring an edict from Japanese team officials to employ a more defensive style. Years later, with his ideas rejected at home, Ogimura took a four-month tour as Swedish national coach, for which he earned four dollars a day. He began workouts with gymnastics exercises and six-mile runs, then he insisted his players whack 300 crosscourt backhands without missing. After a pulse check, he called for 500 topspin forehands.

"His words still ring in my mind," says Bengtsson. "We wouldn't be where we are today if he hadn't totally changed our game." It was a perfect match. The Swedes gave Ogimura a forum. He gave them a chance to adapt certain parts of the Asian game.

As the Swedes shot up in the world rankings, the players hungered to create new techniques or imitate other players' innovations. If a German player changed the face of his paddle, Swedes soon took out the glue and fiddled with theirs. In time the diversity of the Swedes' shotmaking made the players impossible to scout. Press 1 for a Japanese looping forehand, 2 for a Chinese backspin backhand, 3 for a Hungarian short block.

As many Swedish players still do today, Bengtsson dropped out of school and traveled abroad to learn the game. He won the world title at 18, returned home to Falkenberg and was feted from a pedestal in the city square by gawking Swedish teenagers as though he were a pop idol. Today he coaches the local club there and regularly strolls the square unbothered. "It was packed," he says, pointing to the spot where he stood 25 years ago. "Six or seven thousand people in a town that has maybe 10,000. That was before Björn Borg, before Ingemar Stenmark. It was fantastic but rough. Everything I did was judged by that.

People expected so much. Today if you don't make a sensation, they ignore you." Waldner, who opens his bid to repeat as Olympic singles gold medalist tomorrow at the Georgia World Congress Center, is a sensation. With hypnotic command of the game, he has become the sport's mad genius, living for shots that skim the table's edge. "No one can compare what he can do with the ball," says Bengtsson. "He's like Pelé, Michael Jordan, Wayne Gretzky. It's like he has a prior understanding of what will happen. But understanding him...."

The Swedes have a word for Waldner's on-court anticipation: bollsinne, a sixth sense for the way the ball bounces. Waldner had it when he was six and walked into the Sporvagan club in Stockholm with his eight-year-old brother, Kjell-Ake. Jan-Ove stood head-high to the table and took windmill swings at balls he barely saw. He learned then to play over his head. "They only saw the paddle," Jan-Ove recalls. "I liked the fact that they couldn't see me."

Rigorous training methods were at the root of the Swedes' rise to the top in table tennis.

Waldner played his first Swedish League match at 11. Three years later he was mimicking the strokes of the world's elite players, priming to beat them at their own game. At 16 he took first prize in the German Grand Prix and won a Porsche he is still unlicensed to drive. Now 30 and a decade removed from failing his "driving theory" test by one point, he has staunchly refused to take a retest. It's a crankiness carried over from his days as a pouting schoolboy. When visiting Turkish students outscored him on Swedish language tests, Waldner left the ninth grade and never went back. Why bother? He had already played in China three times and would soon have his face emblazoned on a postage stamp. Who needed classrooms? "People wrote about me in the papers, so teachers left me alone," Waldner says. "I was quite shy in school. I couldn't compete so well there, so I left."

It was always a question of competition for Waldner. "When he sees no chance to win the game - or lose the game - his motivation collapses," says Glenn Osth, the Swedish national coach from 1987 to '90. "If we play miniature golf and he makes 8 on the 1st hole, he doesn't play the 2nd. Why does he lose to weaker opponents? There is no passion unless he lets them in the match. He wants the thrill of 19-all. He craves to win, and he needs the element of risk like a drug."

When he can't feed his addiction at the table, Waldner opts for bars, nightclubs and horse tracks, wagering liberally and often courting disaster. He sports an inch-long scar on his left cheek from a near-fatal barroom scrap in Hong Kong eight years ago. "It could have been his life," says Swedish national coach Soren Ahlen. "I'm concerned how he fills his desires when there is no table tennis."

Waldner will lay wager on trivialities. He once earned a free lunch by guessing which of two flies would abdicate a café table first. He co-owns a horse named Peach Valley with fellow Swedish sports heroes Tomas Brolin, a forward for the AC Parma soccer team, and Mats Sundin of the NHL's Toronto Maple Leafs. A bachelor, Waldner is a notorious womanizer, and Swedish dailies have exhausted their newsprint trying to catalog his liaisons. Yet he estimates his lengthiest relationship at three weeks and blames his schedule - 250 days a year on the road - for the lack of a steady girlfriend rather than the addictive risk inherent with new flirtation.

Waldner's annual income hovers at 2 million crowns ($300,000), but he estimates that only 10 other Swedish players - including three women - can afford to live off the sport's bounties alone. Only Waldner, Persson and former Swedish national team member Mikael Appelgren have contracts with Donic, a German-based equipment company; as a result, the three had paid a skimpier 15% artists' tax for foreign income, until this year, when that rate was raised to meet the going 50% rate for domestic income. Six of this year's seven-member Swedish Olympic team left school by 16 to become full-time players. "If you play table tennis, you have to suffer your youth," says Bengtsson. "You need the time to commit the shots to instinct."

Ahlen frets that the once-predictable Chinese have become uncompromising innovators. At the '95 world championships the Swedes were awakened by 3 a.m. phone calls, and power failures blacked out the arena during two Swedish practice sessions.

When he first visited China, Waldner became immersed in Chinese service technique and made it his trademark: If a foe's concentration wasn't absorbed by his meter-high toss, Waldner learned to hold his service hand limp as a wet mop, making a mystery of both contact point and degree of spin. "This weapon even China cannot fight," Ahlen says. "Mention one player and Waldner can play exactly like him in practice. His strokes are a combination of the best from other players. But you cannot compare his serve to anything. He hits with topspin, backspin, side spin or no spin and always into the corner you just looked away from. You want to play him?"

One day last August, Jean-Michel Saive did. The former world No. 1 had made the trek from his native Belgium to glean from the Swedes as Bengtsson once did from the Chinese. Twenty Swedish crowns (about three dollars) sat atop a bench nearby, but the bounty's size was trivial. As always for Waldner, the joy of the kill was in the hunt, and his lead slipped from 19-14 to game point at 20-19. With a spin doctor's chicanery, he curled a short ball to Saive's backhand. Saive eyed an opening and whacked a crosscourt dart to Waldner's backhand. Veering far to his left, Waldner flicked a volley that escaped Saive's paddle by the width of the ball.

"Naaaaaah!" shouted Saive, shaking his head. "When he's good, he reads your mind. When he's really good, he reads the ball's mind. It's impressive."

Impressive? It's frightening.