From Brooklyn to North Korea: How table tennis kept Wally Green out of jail and 'saved his life'

Can table tennis save lives?

Former international pro Wally Green would tell you it saved his.

The American has led a colourful life and career, from the projects of Brooklyn to sports halls in Germany, Japan, and North Korea – all thanks to table tennis.

From a childhood headed down the wrong path with gangs, guns, and violence, to playing in front of 5,000 North Koreans in Pyongyang, "the ping pong thing that I didn't like kind of saved my life," Green recently told the BBC World Service's Sportshour podcast.

He added in a New York Times interview: "No joke, if it wasn't for table tennis, I'd be dead or in jail by now."

But how did a sport which Green fell into completely by accident, and which he had had no interest in, change the course of the 42-year-old's life?

An escape from home

Green was never into table tennis, or ping-pong as he still refers to the sport. While sport was an escape from an abusive home life growing up – "I grew up in the projects, we were a very poor family," he told the BBC; "My mum and my dad divorced when I was one and then my mum remarried an abuser" – it looked like the young Wally would do what many of his peers ended up doing, falling down a rabbit hole of gang violence.

Basketball, volleyball, and tennis were all sports he played to pass the time, but this sport that appeared to be the domain of his Asian counterparts was of no interest to Green, who is Black American.

"This sport came to me by total mistake," he recalled to the BBC. "I was in gangs, guns, a lot of violence at a young age so I had anger management issues. I was planning on shooting pool and I got a little upset that I lost.

"So I see some kids playing ping pong, and I was trying to be a bully, so I went over there and I said: 'I want to play.' This kid gave me the racket and I was trying to hit him with the ball just to be mean, but the ball went on the table and the kid was like, 'great shot, do you play? There’s a ping pong club.' The athlete in me wanted to see if it was really for real and I went down to his place he told me about and there were people playing!"

At that club, Green would relate to the New York Times, he found immigrants from the Caribbean practising. "I didn't know Black kids played ping pong," he said.

Green ended up immersing himself in improving, as he sought to keep away from his abusive stepfather as much as he could. "Playing sports and school would take a lot of my time," he remembered to Sportshour. "You went in the early morning at six, you go to practice, and then you stay later at school to practice and then by the time you come home you're kind of tired and you're very numb to all the craziness that’s going on in your home.

"It was just me escaping, just not trying to be there and that's how the ping pong thing that I didn't like kind of saved my life."

From $20 playing partner to international pro

At the club, a man offered to pay him $20 to be a playing partner, and did not flinch even after a gun fell out of his backpack. That man went on to suggest Green move to Germany, a European powerhouse in the sport, to further his education in table tennis.

"I was really really good at basketball, [but] basketball never took me outside of the city [much] less outside of the country," Green said. "I played volleyball. Never took me anywhere. Played tennis, never took me anywhere. And now I play ping pong and I'm travelling to all these countries in the world."

In 2001, Green played his first International Table Tennis Federation event as a global pro – the German Open. He lost both his round-robin games in straight games.

That repeated itself at the 2003 Croatian Open, 2003 Japan Open, 2004 Croatian Open, and on and on it went. He did not win a game in a singles match in an ITTF event until the 2005 US Open, when he lost in his preliminary-round clash 4-1.

But the defeats didn't matter. He was going all over the world, being followed by camera crews, and had a sponsorship from Rockstar, the video game company.

He spent months between tournaments training in Asia, including in Japan where he met his wife. All the while, he would enter more ITTF Pro Tour (now World Table Tennis) events, yet never tasting any sort of success.

"This is the sport of love – you want to win so bad, but you're there because you love it," he explained to the New York Times. "You love ping pong."

A first triumph finally came in the preliminary round of the 2009 Korea Open, when he beat Jonathan Bizaku of Congo 4-0 in a round-robin match.

By now back in New York, Green dabbled in music — he released a table-tennis-centric hip-hop song in 2013 called "A Game Nobody Knows (Ping Pong Song)" – and played a part in promoting new table tennis social clubs. He would play a few Pro Tour events each year, not all, and then in 2015 a tournament caught his eye.

An American in Pyongyang

"I was like what can I do that's greater than me," Green recalled in his BBC interview. "And I saw North Korea, Pyongyang, and I was like: 'That's it. That's it right there.' It clicked. In 1971, [under] President Nixon, America established relations with China through what? Ping-pong. Ping-pong diplomacy.

"Everything just clicked in my head right there. I had no plan. Zero plans, really no plan. I just wanted to do it but I didn't know what I was going to do."

Green was the only American athlete at the Pyongyang Open that year, and found himself placed in a round-robin group with a Chinese player and two North Koreans. "I wanted the North Koreans to realise that Americans aren't their enemies," he would explain to the New York Times.

He stood out to the 5,000-strong North Korean crowd for two reasons. Not only was he American, he was a Black American. "You can feel the eyes of everyone looking at you because you're very different," he said. "It's the most eerie, like really strange, feeling.

"My opponent makes a great point and they clap but it's not like a normal clap – it's like a clap as if this was the Olympics and he was the underdog. Then he made another point and it got louder and louder and with every point he made it got insanely loud, like this is the final game, the final point of the Olympics. This is the preliminary round!"

Green lost all three of his round-robin matches in straight games – as he had done in many other tournaments – but left a lasting impact.

After losing, he recalled, "I looked up and I just smiled and as I looked at everyone, people started smiling back. And after he wins, we go to shake hands, right? He didn't want to shake my hand and I grab him by his hand, pulled him in and gave him the biggest bear hug in the world and the craziest thing was the crowd cheering."

Green retired from competitive international play after 2016. His final record in ITTF events? One match won in singles, two in doubles, across a career spanning from 2001 to 2016.

These days, he runs pick-up table tennis games, casually, in a park in Manhattan in addition to his regular appearances at the table tennis social clubs in New York City, both playing and coaching. Green is also an inspirational speaker.

Table tennis gave him so much – and saved his life.