McClatchy Washington Bureau

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BEIJING — Table tennis player Jun Gao was born in Baoding and schooled in Beijing. In 2002, a decade after she won a silver medal for China in women's doubles, she moved to Singapore.

She is as American as duck broth and zhajiang noodles, but if Jun Gao returns to a medals podium, Bob Fox will need three hankerchiefs to to get through the ceremony.

Fox is the de-facto national coach of USA table tennis, but since the four Chinese representing the American delegation here have been training to excel at table tennis since they were children — and Fox didn't take up the game until he was a law school student at Duke &mdash he prefers to call himself a "team leader."

In any case, Fox is proud of the progress the program has made since the sport was introduced to the Olympics in 1988. His only problem with Jun Gao is that there aren't a million preschool-aged girls hoping to become the next Jun Gao.

"American kids don't grow up playing this sport. American kids grow up throwing baseballs and practicing jump shots," Fox said Wednesday in a hallway at the Peking University Gymnasium, not far from where a sold-out crowd of 7,600 gathered to watch games on four tables. "In China, from the first day kids look at a television or go to a rec center, they see the correct strokes, and the way players should move their feet."

Although table tennis is presumed to have been invented in England as a dinner-table version of lawn tennis - think a few ales were involved in that brainstorm? - it made its way to the U.S., where it became a basement recreation known as ping-pong, and to China, where, combining elements of dexterity and strategy, it became the national pastime.

Some 10-million Chinese are serious table tennis players, which explains the stream from rec centers to sports academies to awards podiums.

It also explains why Gao, 39, is competing for the United States. The 1992 silver medalist became expendable to China's national team once she contemplated marriage to an American and settling down in Gaithersburg, Md..

The Chinese sports machine is not a complex operation: You're either in or out. And if you're not in all the way, you're way out.

Gao married in 1993 and, nine years later, was divorced, moving from Maryland to Singapore. The relocation provided her with a training base for a professional career that extends through Asia and into Europe.

All along, she's been working toward the tables inside Peking University Gymnasium.

"I've waited four years to play in Beijing," said Gao, whose two victories here Wednesday advanced her to the fourth round on Thursday.

"I'm an Olympian in my home town," she added. "This is the part the makes me feel most excited. A lot of people are cheering for me because I'm Chinese."

Bob Fox would prefer hearing cheers based on American victories, but he's also a realist who hears the roar of a 7,600 table tennis fans and thinks: Cool sound.

"I'd played ping-pong in the basement for years," said Fox, a Michigan native who graduated from the University of Minnesota before beginning law school at Duke.

"I hated my first year of law school so much," said Fox, "I played four hours a day in the dorms, and I got really good, for having no idea what I was doing. I played in the finals of the intramural tournament at Duke, and I faced the North Carolina state champion. Lost 21-2, and then 21-3. I was totally mutilated."

It wasn't until Fox saw a legitimate tournament that he realized his self-made success at table tennis put him in a perpetual state of ineptitude.

He stopped and stared at the aerodynamically efficient strokes, at the nuanced footwork, and realized he'd fallen in love with a sport about which he knew .... nothing

"I started the next week at a club, playing in a league," said Fox. "I began taking lessons, and started going to training camps. I finally got to the top four in the country over the age of 50, about the time my body started to say, 'you're not going to make it much more.' "

Not that table tennis discriminates about who shows up at its door.

"At the U.S. Olympic Festivals we used to run," said Fox," we had 55-year olds taking on 15-year olds. I've seen players without arms, players without legs.

"We even had a 95-over age category in our national championship," said Fox. "A whole set of old guys. I hope to make it there myself."