Talking all things table tennis

More than a decade ago, I was at Dutch Settlement Elementary, NS, for an author visit. At lunchtime, to my surprise, students poured into the gym, quickly and expertly set up table tennis tables, and began playing. Curious, I asked where they’d learned to play. Mr. Fisher, the principal, was the answer.

I went looking for Mr. Fisher and learned that he had been running school- and community-based table tennis programs for decades. Oh, and he was also an internationally acclaimed official who umpired at the 1992 Barcelona Olympics and evaluated umpires for the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing. Table tennis has taken him around the world: Paris, Rio, Melbourne, Stockholm and more. But he remains committed to the game at the local level. The Musquodoboit Valley Table Tennis Club is still going strong, 45 years after he started it. This year, he’s been nominated for induction into the Nova Scotia Sport Hall of Fame.

Joe Fisher is now retired, after a career as a math teacher and elementary, junior high, and high school principal. He still lives on 100 acres in the Musquodoboit Valley with Sheila, his wife of 43 years, who has also managed a couple of table tennis teams herself. (Their marriage has “worked out so far; we’ll probably finish it,” she says.) When I spoke with Joe in August, he greeted me wearing a Table Tennis Canada shirt. For the next few hours, we talked about his career as a teacher and as a table tennis player, coach, and official—and about his commitment to fairness that binds the two.

The interview has been edited and condensed from a longer conversation. 

Well, I started out in a not-very-stable household until I was probably six. And then we moved to Fuller Terrace in Halifax and then Mulgrave Park, and then I did my high school career from Uniacke Square. So my childhood was in the city, in the North End, in some of the more impoverished areas of town.

I started playing table tennis at the Halifax Police Boys Club at age 11. They would offer all kinds of different activities: leathercraft, modelcraft, woodcraft. They would get people from the Navy to show us how to do fibreglass, they would take us out to sporting events—it was a way to take kids off the street and give them something to do. We were poor, and we didn’t do anything really bad, but this was a place for us to go and hang out. They had a band program in which I tried to learn how to play clarinet. That was a failure.

I had tried other sports. I played basketball, I played baseball as a little kid, but I didn’t like it much. I curled. I gambled—that’s not a sport, though, playing poker—played darts, played snooker, played pool. But I found table tennis was a sport where you could be an individual, and the only person you have to blame is yourself. You could practise and train and you could move up.

Asked if he has any memorabilia, Fisher replies, "I have oodles. My wife has been collecting for 43 years."

In 1971, a team from China—they weren’t even the national team, they were from one of the provinces—came to Prince Andrew High in Dartmouth. They were so far above anything that we’d seen in Canada at that time. They put on a show. It was staged, but we didn’t know it at the time. This was the first time we’d ever seen balls being hit from 20 feet behind the table, and a guy jumping into the crowd and hitting the ball back. They could do all these things and never miss the ball. I was so enthused about what they did and how they did it. It made me want to continue playing.

It didn’t take me very long to reach the top 10 in the province. But I knew I wasn’t going to go any further. So then officiating came along, and I really liked it. And I took to coaching because I wanted to share my knowledge of table tennis with everybody else.

After I got my teaching degree, I got a job at Rockingham Elementary, but I was let go after one year, 1975, because of cutbacks. Well, Halifax County were hiring left, right, and centre. I chose to go to Musquodoboit Rural High, because it was close to Halifax, but far enough away. I started there in 1976, and that’s where I got my first table tennis tables.

The teachers at the school already played ping pong, and then I come along, this young 21-year-old, and I play a much better game than any of them. And there was one teacher who was undefeated for the past four years. No kid could beat him. When I got there, he went down to defeat so easy. And the kids were, “Wow!” So that was one of my ins, because then the kids wanted to learn. I had to acquire better equipment, better racquets, better tables. That’s how it got started in the school. My teams from Musquodoboit have done quite well over the years. We’ve captured many different titles and championships, both male and female, in every category.

I recognized my limitations very early as a coach. I was going to be an OK coach, but I would never be a top elite coach. But I like coaching, I love working with young people, so I continue to do that today through the club. I’ve never given up the grassroots level.

[Back then] Musquodoboit Rural High was all white, Anglo-Saxon and either Catholic or Protestant. That’s it. Now, here I am bringing in table tennis tournaments, at least two a year, open to the general public and having people of Chinese origin, Pakistani, Indian, Russian, German, English. It was an eye-opener for the kids, because they were never exposed to anybody else from a different background. So, it was a way to bring culture into the system through sport.

 

International competition

In 1997, I took a four-person team to Belgium to participate in the International School Sport Table Tennis Championships. We had two kids who had never been on an airplane. They’d never met a Jewish person before! So here we are playing the Israeli team, and I have a negative comment from one of my players. He must have been influenced at home regarding Jewish people. And, you know, he was chastised, but he also needed to be educated. It was an opportunity for us to educate players about cultures around the world.

One day, we were playing the Israeli team, and the caretaker told one of my players he couldn’t come into the gym because he had black-soled sneakers. Now, the caretaker is boss when it comes to his floors. When the boy was not allowed into the gym to play, he was disappointed. Then—I find this a little bit emotional—one of the Israeli players came to him and offered him his running shoes so that he could play another member of the Israeli team. I couldn’t believe it. Through sport, we’re the same. I think it broke the cycle of bigotry for this boy. It was a life-changing moment for him and an awakening for me.

I went to the Olympics in ’92. (Sheila interjects: “I got a hardwood floor in the basement, a new barn and a swimming pool out of that, because he was gone three weeks.”) We’re umpiring, and the schedule’s quite slack. We only had to do maybe one or two matches a day. I was selected to do a semi-final women’s singles match, with the winner going to go for gold. It was China and Korea. Each team brought in 200-300 fans, and they have these choreographed cheering sections and a director who stands up and gives them signals. And all of a sudden they’re chanting in Chinese and then in Korean and the stadium’s going wild. The noise level was loud! That was a highlight for me, doing the Olympics.

I think what draws me to officiating is the fairness you have to bring to the game, because there are people that take advantage of others. The umpire’s there in order to ensure that both players are treated fairly. Even in a high-powered tournament, whether it’s the Olympics, world championships, Commonwealth or Pan-Americans, there are players that will take advantage of situations. If you and I are playing and I win the point and I go, “Yeah!” raising my fist to your face, well, I’m actually intimidating you. That’s poor sportsmanship, so therefore we would address that.

And when it comes to school, I always say let me be judged by my most disenfranchised student. That’s who I want to judge me. It’s to the advantage of the community and the school to have teachers or principals from the area that know the kids, know the family, and sometimes you have to be a little more lenient or do things a little differently, because you know the circumstances those children are coming from. You have to be fair and you have to be judicious.

 

Ping pong vs table tennis

Ping pong is something you do as a recreation in a basement, and table tennis raises it up a level. It’s a sport and it’s a competition. When I first started out, kids would say, “Oh, we’re going to play ping pong.” I’d say, “No, no, no. We are playing table tennis.”

That changed over the years. Now they say, “You’d better not call the sport ping pong to Mr. Fisher, because he gets really upset.” I’ve never denied that. The new kids now know to call it table tennis, and I don’t have to correct them. I think it’s come down from the generations because now I’m probably teaching some grandchildren of people I started out with.

Table tennis is a lifelong sport. It’s not like hockey or football, where you fizzle out or get injured. How many 65-year-olds do you see playing football or even hockey? I looked at table tennis and said, this is a way to keep healthy and fit, it’s a sport I want to share with everybody else. And that’s what I did.”