A Ping-Pong ball, nearly as light as a penny, rescued Wally Green. It sent him to China, Japan and North Korea. It took him to a nightclub in Hong Kong where, amid a whoosh of theater smoke and razzle-dazzle lights, a pool table was plucked from the floor and suspended in midair to make way for an exhibition Ping-Pong match.
A Ping-Pong ball transported Green from public housing projects in Brooklyn and dropped him in Midtown Manhattan. In a rec hall on 50th St., as a high school student contemptuous of the sport — was it even a sport, he used to think, this interplay between brittle ball and paddle?