Badda-Ping! The Whacky World of Olympic Table Tennis

By Peter Carlson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, March 20, 2004

Jasna Reed, star player for the United States Olympic table tennis team, would like to clear up a couple of things about the romantic lives of big-time Ping-Pong players.

First of all, she says, she is the ex-wife of only one of her teammates, not two. She never actually married Barney Reed. She merely took his last name back in the days when they were dating.

Second, life on the Olympic table tennis team is not really like Peyton Place.

"It's Melrose Place," she says, laughing.

You may think of Ping-Pong as a goofy game that bored adolescents play in suburban basements until they lose the ball under the radiator. But talk to Reed and her teammates and you learn that table tennis is an intense sport with all the earmarks of big-time athletics -- steroid scandals, colorful characters, Byzantine romances and groupies. Also, there's a lot of glue sniffing.

"We're all a little mental," Reed says. "Look at old movies. Where do they play table tennis in movies?" she asks.

She pauses. "In jails and mental hospitals," she answers, laughing.

Reed, 33, is in town to compete in the Olympic Doubles Trials this weekend at Emery Recreation Center on Georgia Avenue NW. A veteran of three Olympics, Reed will play in a fourth in Athens in August, having already won a spot on the U.S. team as a singles player.

As her teammates whacked orange balls across tables with as much speed as a Nolan Ryan fastball and as much spin as a Washington political consultant, Reed explained her sport.

"It's really in the head," she said. "It's a mental game."

Reed should know. She may be the only person on Earth who has played in three Olympics for two different teams under three different names. It's a long story.

In the 1988 Olympics, she played for her native Yugoslavia under her maiden name, Jasna Fazlic, and she won a bronze medal in the doubles.

In the 1992 Olympics, she again played for Yugoslavia, but this time under the name Jasna Lupulesku, because she had married her teammate, Ilija "Lupi" Lupulesku. She did not win a medal. "I played bad," she said.

In 1996, she didn't play in the Olympics. Yugoslavia had split apart and so had she and Lupi. "You know the Balkans," she says, "we just like to fight." She played for a while in Japan, then immigrated to the United States, where she earned a degree in political science at Michigan's Oakland University. (Now on hiatus from being a geography teacher, she still lives in Oak Brook, Mich.)

In the 2000 Olympics, she played for the United States as Jasna Reed. And that's where the story gets complicated.

"By then Lupi and I were divorced, and I thought I'd go back to my maiden name, but people kept pronouncing it phallic," she says, smiling.

She figured she wanted a nice, simple, American-sounding name. At the time, she was dating Barney Reed, another top U.S. table tennis player, and he suggested she go to court and change her name to Reed. So she did.

Immediately, everybody in the world of table tennis thought they were married. But they weren't. And then they broke up, which made her new name irritating to both of them. Which is why she is thinking of changing her name again.

If she changes it before August, she could play in her fourth Olympics under her fourth name, which has to be some kind of world record.

But she can't decide what name to use. In 2001, in an interview with USA Table Tennis magazine, she said, "Maybe we can let all Table Tennis magazine readers make up some names and vote for them."

The readers of Table Tennis magazine failed to come up with a name. But there is one obvious possibility: Her doubles partner's name is Whitney Ping. If Reed changed her name to Pong, they would be a Ping-Pong team of Ping and Pong.

Jasna Reed doesn't think much of that idea. But Barney Reed loves it. He's eager for her to change her name so people no longer think they're married.

Just to make matters more complicated, Barney's doubles partner is Razvan Cretu, who is another ex-boyfriend of Jasna. And Lupi, her ex-husband, is also a member of the U.S. team. And Barney is dating Michelle Do, another member of the team.

"I'm known as the bad boy of table tennis," Barney Reed says.

He looks the part. At 26, he's got a mischievous grin and a hairdo that looks like a crew cut gone to seed.

"It's the electric-socket look or the Chia Pet look, depending on the day," he says. "Today it's the electric-socket look."

Reed earned his "bad boy" reputation back in 2002, when he tested positive for steroid use and was suspended for two years.

Steroids? In Ping-Pong?

Reed says he took androstenedione, a supplement that converts to a steroid in the body, to help gain weight and had no idea it was banned for Olympic athletes. "I bought it at a health food store," he says. "I didn't go to Mexico and buy something and inject it into my [expletive]."

The event was a mixed blessing for Reed. He was suspended, but he became the most famous Ping-Pong player in America, mocked in a Jay Leno monologue and profiled in Sports Illustrated.

"I can beat most Americans with my shoe," Reed told Sports Illustrated by phone from Taiwan, where he spent his exile in training. "It's not a joke. I've beaten many people with a sandal."

Now, Reed is back, fighting for a spot on the Olympic doubles team and laying his brand of Barney blarney on anybody who'll listen. He brags about Ping-Pong groupies -- "the same as any other kind of groupies," he says -- and he touts the glories of his sport like a carnival barker.

"Table tennis is like martial arts combined with chess," he says. "This is the most exciting sport out there."

Despite Reed's suspension, the worst drug problem in table tennis is not steroids, it's glue.

Before every match, table tennis players strip the padding off their paddles, then glue it back on. This makes the ball bounce off the paddle faster. But the glue is similar to the model airplane cement that some teenagers use to get high. This caused the International Table Tennis Foundation to ban some of the most popular glues, although the ban will not take effect until 2007.

"Most of the people in the U.S. use illegal glues," says Jasna Reed. She points to one of her teammates. "Smell her glue and you die right away," she says, laughing.

Right now, Reed is gluing her own paddle. She takes out a can of glue, spreads the goo on the padding with a brush, then puts it on the naked wooden paddle and presses it down with her forearm. She repeats the process with the other side of the paddle, then takes out scissors and trims off excess rubber.

She does it all very carefully because if her glue isn't right, it plays with her mind. And table tennis is a mind game.

"If my glue isn't the way I want it, I start thinking about it," she says. "And that messes you up totally. You start losing your concentration. You have to be totally focused. This game, it's really in the head."

Of course, it's also in your body. "After two or three days [at a tournament], every single part of my body hurts," she says.

She finishes gluing her paddle. "I have to practice," she says, and she walks out to a table with her partner, Ping.

They begin to volley, rapping the ball back and forth faster and faster, harder and harder, until it sounds like a metronome on amphetamines.

A few minutes later, the match begins and Reed and Ping easily beat two highly ranked local high school stars -- Katherine Wu, 18, from Potomac and Barbara Wei, 15, from Gaithersburg -- in four straight games.

After the match, Reed walks to the sideline, sweating and breathing hard.

"People think you play table tennis in your basement while you're eating a sandwich, but I think it's one of the hardest sports to succeed in," she says. "People compare it to tennis, but it's more like boxing than tennis. Tennis is, like, boring to me. It's not fast enough."