Eye on shiny prize

Ilija Lupulesku, silver medalist in doubles table tennis at the 1988 Olympics for Yugoslavia, trains in obscurity as he waits for his chance to go for U.S. gold next month

July 25, 2004|By Skip Myslenski, Tribune staff reporter.

The four-time Olympian slips unnoticed into the small gym at Kennicott Park. He is alone, carrying his own bag, unattended by a bodyguard, a private trainer or a fawning posse, and his appearance does nothing to alter the activities going on in this Chicago Park District facility on this Saturday afternoon.

It was not always this way for the 36-year-old Ilija Lupulesku. Back in the late 1980s, when he and Zoran Primorac were one of the best table tennis doubles teams in the world, he was nothing short of a national hero in his native Yugoslavia. They won the silver medal at the 1988 Olympics in Seoul, won countless tournaments in the years that followed, were favored to win the gold medal at the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona until civil war ravaged their country and made it impossible for Lupulesku, a Serb, to play with his old friend, who is a Croatian.

FOR THE RECORD - Additional material published July 27, 2004.
Photographs accompanying a story on table tennis player Ilija Lupulesku in some Sunday editions were misidentified. The photos were not of Lupulesku, but of another player, Alexander Karakasevic.

Back then, he remembers, "If you win something, every day for a month you're in the newspaper or on TV. . . . I was, and still am, very popular there. If I go to Belgrade, a big city . . . my generation and older, everybody knows me. Even here (in Chicago's large Serbian community), people who are more than 20 years in Chicago, they've heard about me and know me. I was very popular at the time."

But now even his neighbors on Foster Avenue don't know of his glorious past or that Lupulesku, now a U.S. citizen, qualified last February to represent this country at the Olympics in Athens, where he will play doubles with Mark Hazinski of Mishawaka, Ind. He will participate in his fifth Olympics, a remarkable accomplishment for any athlete, yet he has come to practice for them here in a most unlikely setting, this nondescript gym on the corner of 44th Street and Lake Park.

Back in Yugoslavia, back when he was a star, he had a trainer, a physical therapist and a practice facility fit for a world-class athlete. But here he has come to a most-public place filled with a half-dozen Ping-Pong tables and players ranging from his teammates on Chicago's Team Killerspin to a teenage girl able to hit nothing but soft pops.

Hers is the game best known in this country, that one played in the basement amid stacks of dirty laundry. But Lupulesku walks to a far table, drops his bag, pulls out his paddle and begins playing a far different game. It is filled with loops and spins and smashes that can top 100 m.p.h., is dependent on speed and anticipation and the reactions of a cat burglar.

"There's a big difference," he says when asked to compare the two games.

"That guy from the basement, let's say he has played for 20 years in the basement. Then let's say we have one kid who plays every day for four years and has a coach. That guy who plays for 20 years, this kid will give him five points (in a game to 11) and beat him. The basement player, this is what they call Ping-Pong. Professional, we call it table tennis. There's a big difference."

"It's the difference between Indy and the Soap Box Derby," Killerspin owner Robert Blackwell Jr., says. "It's really the fastest human sport because of the reaction time."

Foggy history

Table tennis does not have a James Naismith, the acknowledged inventor of basketball, or a history agreed upon by all. But back in the 1880s, while on duty in India and South Africa, it is said that British army officers rounded off champagne corks and used the tops of cigar boxes to whack them over a row of books set up in the middle of a table.

That was the sport's start, and versions of this game, called either "wiff whaff" or "gossima," were developed in England during the 1890s, which was the same time that Parker Brothers manufactured the first table tennis set. The name Ping-Pong, according to some historians, was coined by Englishman James Gibb, who apparently felt it represented the sound the ball made when it hit the paddle and then the table.

But it was another Englishman, sporting-goods manufacturer John Jacques, who registered "Ping Pong" as a trade name in 1901 and then sold its U.S. rights to Parker Brothers.

That company protected that trademark fiercely, even forming its own tour in the 1930s, so other manufacturers started using the generic term "table tennis." The International Table Tennis Federation was founded in 1926, its first world championship was in London in 1927 and, in 1935, the forerunner to USA Table Tennis (the national governing body in this country) was formed.

Yet the game has remained little more than a recreational pastime in this country, the world's best players emerging at first from Hungary and other parts of Central Europe. China and Korea have emerged more recently as powers, yet table tennis was long a respected sport when Lupulesku was growing up in the small Yugoslavian town of Uzdin.

Curiosity breeds champion

Still, as a boy, Lupulesku dreamed first of soccer glory, and when he first picked up a paddle at the age of 9, he was driven more by curiosity than by any aspirations.