Ping-Pong Ascends Trend Ladder, Susan Sarandon Gets Paddled

It's hilarious when celebrities adopt some new sport-activity trend. It's truly a curious affliction. Patrick Dempsey races cars, and Jack Gyllenhall races bikes. It's no longer enough to own a Malibu spread teetering on the Pacific plus a fine armada of automobiles outside, not to mention a searingly hot significant other, and then a successful career (respectable or not). It seems they have this Bud Fox moment looking out over the skyline of their life -- "Who am I?" Well, most recently that internal voice answers, "I'm a Ping-Pong player."

The latest hard-core adapters are Susan Sarandon and Ed Norton. Sarandon, who picked up the game from her son, gets her paddle on with regular folk from cracky bullet-ridden housing projects (great liberal cred, you know). Norton gets lessons in China. “I started finding out that there was this subculture of Ping-Pong and all these people that you wouldn’t expect are serious about it,” Sarandon told the New York Times. “I just worked with Ed Norton, and he’s so committed that he trained in China while he was shooting a film there.”

Now the British game is a burgeoning underground society in Gotham, thriving in the evening hours by taking over empty clubs, apartments, art galleries, and drafty laundry rooms. Across town, some pool halls are dedicating space for tables. A trio of filmmakers recently opened a sprawling Ping-Pong social club on Park Avenue that draws Owen Wilson, Salman Rushdie, 50 Cent, the Beastie Boys, and Jimmy Buffett. West Village jazz club Fat Cat even added three tables and plans for ten more. Jazz and ping pong just seems a weird combo, unless synchronized to Coltrane and Miles. But most subcultures, cool or not, are fun and fleeting. This latest I imagine as Fight Club for passive lonely hearts and trend-hunting celebs. Fifteen minutes and counting.


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