Last weekend's big golf match, the one featuring four famous forty-somethings chasing their balls around some expensive Florida real estate, did a lot more than raise $20 million for COVID-19 relief and pull in tremendous ratings across a wounded nation starving for televised competition.
It established that no matter how many Super Bowls he wins, Tom Brady doesn't necessarily know which pants to wear (he split 'em) and it further established, pending any yet-to-be-announced investigations, that golf balls cannot be deflated.
Most urgently, it proved through the wagers it attracted that a significant portion of the USA really, really, really needs something to bet on, before it's too late.
Some Vegas casinos plan to open Thursday, but that will lower the tension just a smidge for some well-positioned bettors in Nevada. Hockey this past week announced a format for starting its playoffs, though critical details such as when and where were omitted from the digitalized description of Gary Bettman's Fantasy League in a Tuesday explainer from the commissioner's rec room. All leagues are fantasy leagues for the moment, and people saying they know when that will change are themselves fantasists.
In the meantime, we're here to talk table tennis because that's what people are betting on. I wish I were making that up.
During the second week in May, two of the top five leagues measured by action at BetRivers.com in Pittsburgh were table tennis leagues, one in Russia and one in Ukraine. When betting was measured by sports rather than by leagues, table tennis was No. 1 ahead of UFC/MMA action, darts, ice hockey, baseball and regular tennis, which, as Seinfeld has instructed, is really table tennis except the players are standing on the table.
Then last weekend, two table tennis leagues were among the top four leagues attracting bettors, bumped from the top spot by the Tiger/Peyton/Phil/Brady proposition.
To even attempt to understand why anyone would bet on Russian table tennis, I sought out noted gambling expert Matt Stetz, chief operating officer for Rush Street Gaming, which runs the online gambling operations associated with Rivers Casino in Pittsburgh and others in Philadelphia, New Jersey, Indiana and Colorado.
He first assured me that a gambling world turned upside down by the coronavirus will soon be right-side-up again.
"First of all, it had to do with the shut down of all the major sports," Stetz said, "but the past few weekends, we had three UFC events, then NASCAR came back, and then with the golf match I saw a definite shift back to U.S. sports. Over 40% of the handle was on golf last Sunday."
That was reassuring for reasons I'm not sure I understand about myself, but anything that puts even an artificial cap on the popularity of pingpong somehow comforts me. It's just that when I think about it, the game makes very little sense.
Reputedly invented by British military types stationed in India, it's said to have begun with a couple of Victorian era blokes lining up some books in the middle of a table and then knocking a ball back and forth over said books with paddles that looked suspiciously like ... other books.
Everyone can stop pretending that alcohol was not involved. Also: boredom.
Coincidentally, when I started actually played pingpong, my first thought was always, "I wish I had a book to read." In one game, my opponent suddenly blurted out, "That's it; you win."
"I win?" I said. "I haven't even moved! Seriously, my feet are in the same spots they were when this started."
Later, I would try this same technique at racquetball but with less success. Some people tend to sour on pingpong in short order. It's not uncommon for families to play the game for two weeks and quickly discover that a flat 5-by-9 foot table with a net in the middle is great for stacking laundry and/or junk. Some people wind up leaning their table against the back fence to help keep a wanderlusting Airedale on the premises, though no one I know.
Mind you, there is an International Table Tennis Federation and it's been an Olympic sport since 1988, but in terms of wagering, Americans are just as disposed during the pandemic to bet on stock indexes, "Top Chef," Madden simulations, sumo wrestling and even the temperature rather than try to handicap a table tennis match half a world away.
Who is going to sit down and work out where to lay the money based on whether the backspin on Kirill Abramov's redoubtable chop will be enough to thwart Demik Ying's treacherous loop drive?
The answer to that is, happily, hardly anyone.
"So many games now have in-game betting," said Stetz, "and it's enhanced by the live streaming of those games. When you watch and bet at the same time, people really took a liking to those table tennis games because they're extremely well suited to it. Each point lasts three-to-five seconds, then there's a pause. Tennis is good for that too, but table tennis is a little faster. You watch it for a little bit, then bet on the next game or even the next point.
"American baseball is perfect for in-game betting; you bet on the next pitch, the next at bat, the next inning. Perfect."
Perfectly ironic perhaps. If there were American baseball right now, I probably wouldn't have written this column.
