There’s a new hot sport in Hollywood, but you won’t find the Beckhams attached to it — table tennis.
Known casually as Ping-Pong, celebs ranging from Susan Sarandon to Ed Norton have admitted their allegiance to the game. It hasn’t been so in fashion since “Forrest Gump” in 1994.
“I started finding out that there was this subculture of Ping-Pong and all these people that you wouldn’t expect are serious about it,” Susan told the New York Times’ Style section. “I just worked with Ed Norton, and he’s so committed that he trained in China while he was shooting a film there.”
According to the Times, the sport has also attracted such stars as Matthew Broderick, 50 Cent, the Beastie Boys and Jimmy Buffet.
There’s even a new magazine, Celebrity Ping-Pong, whose second issue is set to include interviews with popular table tennis-playing authors such as Salman Rushdie and Jonathan Safran Foer.
Part of the appeal of the game, Susan said, is its quickness — a nice break from long days on the set.
“The matches aren’t that long, so they get very emotional very fast and then they’re over,” she explained. “You can come and go as you please and still feel satisfied.”
And the trend could be a case of “life imitating art” — Christopher Walken starred in the table tennis comedy, “Balls of Fury,” in 2007.
