PROMOTION OF TABLE TENNIS BY WAYS OF PING-PONG DIPLOMACY AND COLLEGE WOMEN SCHOLARSHIP Unlike bad histories, good histories should be repeated. I am referring to the Ping-Pong Diplomacy 50 years ago. In 1971, it caused a surge in table tennis popularity in America. And I seized the opportunity to organize an intramural tournament at Columbia University. I wound up playing the final against Alice Greene, an Olympian and a beautiful girl. After defeating her, her dad Hal Greene suggested that we make it a double elimination, to accommodate the unexpected presence of a large crowd of spectators, who showed up for this surprising "battle of the sexes". I accepted, but somehow lost my previous desire to win, for obvious reasons. I lost the first re-match and then from 20-17, I lost the second, deciding one, also. And sure enough, table tennis made its first headline in the school newspaper with a half-page picture of Alice's perfect forehand on the front page! So, with the excitement of communist ping-pong players coming to visit the White House and to play in the United Nations, along with our own lovely new ping-pong champion, Alice Greene, we went to the Dean of Intramural Affairs and the physical education department simultaneously, and got, respectively, the entire 4th floor of the student union as the home of our newly formed ping-pong club and six tables to go with it. We were now able to organize the "First Ivy-League Intercollegiate Table Tennis Championship", that included power houses, MIT and RPI. And we upset MIT to make another news in the college ping-pong community. After this coup, ping-pong was here to stay in American colleges, that, to this date, has expanded to 200 colleges. Well, the 50th anniversary of Ping-pong Diplomacy is here again. And America's new leader in table tennis is now a woman, Virginia Sung. With blessing from the Gender Equity Division of the NCAA, we are only one step away from setting up the most effective mean for advancing American table tennis. That is the "NCAA Table Tennis Scholarship for Women". The recent winning of the 2019 U.S. Open's Women's Single by Lily Zhang, who had to break through the clean sweep of all other titles by the Japanese team, could be thought as firing the first shot of a bright future of American women table tennis. And it is just like my own win of the 75+ age group has added impetus to my writing this proposal. It would also be worthwhile to mention that my win would be just another win, if not for the fact that I won it with my newly developed style of ping-pong, that I named Pongfu, or ping-pong kungfu. I designed it as a stabbing fencing style, as opposed to today's knife cutting style of shake-hand players and the short-range sparring styles of the penholders. My long-term hope is that it would be more suitable for the physically weaker but mentally quicker women. A good friend, Eva Jeler, a German national coach, has encouraged me on by calling it "the third way of playing ping-pong". Virginia Sung has given an initial nod when I first mentioned the Ping-Pong Diplomacy plan to her during the U.S. Open. She then suggested me to write a formal proposal on it. So, here it is: In order to make the next Ping-pong Diplomacy news- worthy, mainly for the eyes of college deans, we need to switch our previous counterpart, China, to North Korea. So, I need to contact the ping-pong community in North Korea to see if they are interested. As things stand, their government now has the policy of forbidding American tourists to visit North Korea. Therefore, we might need to follow footsteps of our leader Donald Trump and make the U.S. Olympics Team also be exempted to step on North Korea soil. The idea is to get the U.S. team to be invited to visit North Korea right after the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. Based on that, we could re-invite the North Korea Team to come to both the 2020 U.S. Open and the 2021 World Championship, which, coincidentally and for the first time in history, will be held in America's Houston, Texas. Once we secured an invitation from North Korea, we should also start make arrangement for American colleges to extend invitations to the North Korean team in their U.S. tour. This will serve as a prelude to proposing the table-tennis scholarships for women to the college deans. It is hoped that such scholarships would motivate the high school to initiate ping-pong programs, which should trickle down to junior high and elementary schools. All these would also energize the ping-pong parents, who are typically also academically minded. Making ping- pong an integral part of the academics is how the Asian countries have been able to produce the best players in the world. However, our American colleges turn out to have the best facilities to do that. Note that I did not touch the scholarships for men. That's because there are too much competitions for male talents in other professional sports. In my view, if tennis can make to the No.1 sport for women in America, table tennis should have an even better chance. And I do know something about tennis. Due to my daughter's lack of quickness, I resorted to let her play tennis and invented a new tennis style for her. It's a two-handed style on all three sides - forehand, backhand and the serve, and it all happened, a generation before Monica Seles proved the superiority of the two-handed style. Anyway, my daughter ended up being awarded the "Player of the Year" twice in North California and went on to help University of California, Davis, win the, NCAA-II World Championship. However, since my sport is table tennis, I tried to use my tennis experience to help promote table tennis. This was when I saw so many college girls tried so hard to make into the schools' varsity tennis team but failed to make it, I decided to write to a dozen or so coaches of women tennis in the various colleges, to see if they would let ping-pong piggyback on their well-organized tennis programs. Our ping-pong teams would take all the girls they didn't want. This was way back in the late 1980's, but there were still some takers to my proposals. One coach from Hawaii remarked: "This is revolutionish!". This time around, let's see if table tennis could stand on its own merit. Our goal is to reverse the ratio of men players to that of women, from 10 to 1, to 1 to 10 in America. This might just allow women to reach parity with men on the courts. Such an accomplishment, like the "Battle of The Sexes" between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs, which overnight changed women tennis players' image in term of athleticism and thus has meteorically raised the prize moneys and TV rating of women tennis players. Our coed ping-pong should do better. So much so, table tennis will replace tennis as the No.1 sport for women in America.