Paddle up: A back-and-forth on ping pong

For three weeks, I’ll examine a staple bar game that is played locally. I’ll talk to some Sarasotans to get outside opinions, and I might even inject some of my own. To be clear, the debate is not which game is the most fun. It’s which game works best in a bar setting. After the three weeks are done, an online poll will give readers a chance to vote for their favorite. Two weeks ago: Billiards. Last week: Cornhole.

The TV show “Friends” has been a part of my life since birth. I grew up with two older sisters who watched the show religiously, both new episodes and reruns. It helped shape my sense of humor (I’m a Chandler, and also, sorry), and most important for the purposes of this column, it introduced me to pingpong.

Season nine, episode 23. Monica and Mike duel on the plastic court for hours while Chandler and Phoebe sit in horror at how seriously their significant others take the game. I thought it was exaggerated until I got to college, then I marveled at the scene’s realism (and I still laugh out loud on every watch).

Pingpong is great because of how easy it seems. There’s a reason it was the basis of one of the first video games ever. Hitting a small ball back and forth shouldn’t be much of a challenge in theory, so when people get into it, they really get into it. No other bar sport can match the game’s intensity. If a large group of friends is looking to start a tournament of some kind with money and, more important, bragging rights on the line, there’s no better game.

Adventurous lads and lasses can play with a drink in hand, but the spill factor is much higher here than in last week’s game, cornhole. Still, it can be done. In my experience, it’s also a game that for some unknown reason people are better at the more they drink.

(It’s also possible that a person’s skills diminish after two kamikaze shots and a vodka tonic, and the person only thinks they’re getting better because they are more easily impressed with themselves in that altered state of consciousness. The world may never know).

When I arrived at Sarasota’s Mandeville Beer Garden on June 28, Ben Wylie and Hector Rodriguez were in the midst of a particularly spirited contest, playing under the bar’s outdoor strings of lights.

A few minutes later, Rodriguez pauses the game. He sets fire to a cigarette and places it between his lips, takes a drag, then places it in his left hand’s clutches for safe keeping. He picks up his paddle with his right, and the game resumes.

As the two friends battle for supremacy, I asked Wylie if he has a strategy he attempts to implement.

“Not really,” he said. “I just focus on the ball and my beer.”

Rodriguez offered similar thoughts, saying he simply tries to make contact with the “stupid” ball, albeit with a more explicit word in place of “stupid.”

“I can’t even do that!” he yells as he whiffs on returning a Wylie floater.

All three of us laughed.

The game ends with Wylie taking home the proverbial crown. He and Rodriguez shook hands on a game well played, or at least played.

“More bars should have paddles,” Wylie said. “It’s something physical.”

Pingpong does distinguish itself in that way. It’s truly a bar sport, not a bar game (it’s in the Olympics, you know). Adrenaline junkies may find more of a home there than in pool or darts.

At Mandeville, there is no prize for being good at pingpong. No incentive meant to keep you at the bar for hours, always buying one more drink that you don’t need but, hey, it’s been a long week and you deserve another craft beer.

No, at Mandeville the table simply exists, and people use it because pingpong is a good time.

A public service announcement, though: Don’t be the Monica and Mike of your friend group, for everyone’s sake.