Today, Portland's love of table tennis means a Major League team and a rich history in ping-pong diplomacy

At one Major League table tennis tournament earlier this month, software salesman Sung Choi cheered with joy.

It has all the excitement of any sport, he said. It's fast. There's athleticism. There is excitement. People like to watch it.

Choi is an avid ping pong player. He hopes that having a Major League team in the city, the Portland Paddlers, part of Major League Table Tennis, will convince others of the joys of the game.

There are a lot of sports out there, he said. But I think when people see it, they'll get hooked.

Two dozen of the world's best table tennis players were in attendance Portland State University's Viking Pavilion earlier this month for the second season opener of the professional league. Four of the eight competition teams participated: the Florida Crocsthe Bay Area blasters, the Princeton Revolution and the Rowers.

It's great to see, Choi said.

Players jumped back and forth and hit the ball with professional speed and accuracy. The Portland Paddlers won the weekend and are now top of the Western Conference. Coach of paddlers Christian Lillieroos said Oregonians need to understand that it is important that the league has chosen to start the second season in the Rose City.

According to the owners and commissioners of Major League Table Tennis, Portland had the best crowd, Lillieroos said. They wanted to start in Portland to get a good start.

Two-time Olympic table tennis player Sean O'Neill lives in Tigard and is an NBC commentator. He thinks fans embraced the league in its first season for one big reason: Portland's top player Jiwei Xia.

They were on a 12-game losing streak and he got the ball rolling, O'Neill said. He defeated one of the Nigerian Olympians and from there they went on a nine-match winning streak.

Jiwei Xia, who is originally from China but has lived in Portland for eight years, coaches table tennis for a living. He thinks there were other reasons why the crowd went so wild.

“I had 12 pickleball friends who came to cheer me on,” he said.

Lillieroos said table tennis makes sense in Oregon.

I think audiences in Portland are more open to international things. And table tennis is a very big sport internationally, he said.

We also feel like Portland is weird. Or Oregon is weird. So maybe table tennis is a weird sport and that's why people like it.

Portland's link to table tennis goes back much further than the Keep Portland weird ethos.

Lillieroos believes the city's passion for the game began in 1971 and the so-called era ping-pong diplomacy.

By 1971, the United States had not had diplomatic relations with China for more than twenty years, largely due to the Korean War and the Chinese Cultural Revolution. But at a table tennis championship in Japan, an American player missed his bus and ended up on the Chinese bus. It could have been an international incident from the Cold War. But players made friends and organized a series of international competitions.

We didn't know what was going on in China, said Judy Hoarfrost, the owner of Paddle Palace table tennis club in Tigard. She was 15 when she played those matches. She said two players turned down the trip because it was so unclear what might happen.

The (Chinese) were a great mystery to us. We wondered: are they going to play well? What did they do during these missing years? she said. We had heard that they had been in jail or sweeping the streets.

She said the language difference made it very difficult to actually talk to other players. But the exchange was embraced by the public and is partly responsible for the warming of diplomatic relations between China and the West.

Hoarfrost, a member of the U.S. Table Tennis Hall of Fame, thinks Portland's love of table tennis goes even deeper than ping-pong diplomacy. Her father ran what she said was the nation's first full-time table tennis club at the Old Elks Temple in downtown Portland, the original Paddle Palace.

The ping pong tables were in this beautiful grand ballroom with chandeliers and carved angels in the ceiling, she said.

Company is still called Hoarfrosts Paddle Palaceand it is a distributor for major table tennis brands. The company also makes wooden paddles in Oregon and glue to stick to the rubber surfaces so players can spin the ball.

During the Major League tournament earlier this month, it was clear that the local fans were excited. Less clear was whether professional table tennis can survive in the United States. O'Neill believes opportunities have improved with the arrival of the Major League, as it offers young players a way to potentially make money in the sport.

After you graduate from high school or college, you think, What should I do now? Major League Table Tennis will be the platform on which they can play as a team. They can play with world-class players, O'Neill said.

Top European players can earn $250,000 a year from sponsorship. But average players bring home about $40,000 a year, more if they're willing to coach.