Opening Volley

Or as Tannehill puts it, "After China, everything seemed to be useless." Then he poses a rhetorical question that could serve as Cowan's epitaph. "How could you do better than world peace?"

BY THE early '60s, China's table tennis players lorded over their sport the way Kenyan marathoners dominate theirs today. Zhuang Zedong was best of them all, winning world singles titles in 1961, '63 and '65. But in 1966 Mao launched the Cultural Revolution. In a massive and bloodthirsty turning of the tables, students and peasants took vengeance on teachers and intellectuals. As China withdrew into a madness of its own making, millions were killed, jailed or exiled to the countryside, to be reeducated in the ways of Mao's Little Red Book.

When China skipped the worlds in 1967 and '69, members of the clannish table tennis community tried to find out if the champion with the easy smile and a forehand drive that former U.S. titlist Dick Miles called "the most perfectly executed stroke in the game" had survived. "Dead or Alive?" wondered a caption beneath a photo of Zhuang that ran alongside an SI report from the 1969 worlds. In fact Zhuang and other members of the team had been jailed, charged with allying themselves with Mao's rival, Liu Shaochi—ironic, given that Zhuang had once said, "I owe my entire table tennis success to the study of Mao Zedong's philosophy." At that, he was lucky: Three other Chinese table tennis greats committed suicide during the late 1960s, including Rong Guotuan, who in '59 had become the first Chinese to win a world title in any sport.

Zhuang's role in Ping-Pong Diplomacy catapulted him back into favor. When the Chinese team returned the U.S. team's visit in 1972, Zhuang, by then a deputy in the National People's Congress, served as delegation head. He performed card tricks during airplane flights—making "the meticulously planned appear spontaneous," to use Kissinger's phrase. He shared wisdom infused with as much Zen as Mao. ("Though Ping-Pong is a highly competitive sport, there is no real victory or defeat. There is always both. Just as there is no life without death, there is no death without life. The whole world is unified like this.") Upon returning to Beijing, Zhuang settled into a job as Minister of Physical Culture and Sports.

Yet the heady years of the early 1970s turned out to be only a pause before the chaos returned. Attacked in 1976 for being too close to Mao's widow and the discredited Gang of Four, Zhuang lost his ministerial position and had to find work as a street sweeper. Then he was denounced publicly for, among other things, "wearing a Swiss-made watch" and tossed once again into jail. In '77 he reportedly used a belt to try to hang himself in his cell. The sudden way China's political winds would shift—the back-and-forth rally of what and who is in and out of favor—only underscores what a risk Zhuang took on that bus in Japan.

The reward on that risk has been bountiful. Within a year the People's Republic would join the U.N., and the SALT talks would open a path to U.S.-Soviet détente. Meanwhile, sports continued to play a central role in opening up China. Beijing received IOC recognition in 1979 and sent a full delegation to the 1984 Olympics, taking some of the sting out of the Soviet Union's boycott of the Los Angeles Games. When Deng Xiaoping took over, he introduced market reforms with a declaration that "it doesn't matter if the cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice." The IOC awarded the 2008 Olympics to Beijing in '01. "The legacy is that we haven't bombed each other," says Tannehill. "Without the make-love-not-war idea that Glenn [espoused], we might not be here."

UPON LEARNING of Cowan's death, Zhuang wanted to know how Americans had reacted. In fact no news outlet beyond the table tennis world carried an obituary. When Zhuang dies, he pointed out, everyone in China will know. The irony of it: In the individualistic society that mints and worships celebrities, Cowan is forgotten; in collectivist China—where to be one in a million is to live among a thousand more just like you—Zhuang is fully rehabilitated and heralded as a man who forever changed his country's course. Ever the diplomat, Zhuang in 2006 hosted several American players and officials, as well as Fran Cowan, on a 35th-anniversary return visit to China. At dinner the last evening the group sang a karaoke version of Let It Be in Glenn's honor.

"I only know how to play Ping-Pong, how to hit the ball from this side of the table to the other," Zhuang said last September before an audience at Southern Cal. Then he got just right the sentiment at the heart of Let It Be: "Sometimes the ball drops. Sometimes it goes out-of-bounds."

It's the kind of existential musing that might as easily have come from Glenn Cowan, who discovered the hard way that if the world leaves you off-kilter, you can't just put in a new floor. But with someone else, a person to supply a Pong to your Ping, that world might be brought into something closer to equilibrium.