Top Spin Review
By David Kempler
Take "Top" for a spin
When I was a tween-ager (Is that a word?), I was a great ping pong player. Okay, not great, but pretty good. My family used to go to a hotel for a couple of weeks a summer. Once a week, there was a ping pong tournament with three divisions. One for the men, one for the women, and one for the kids. My mother, father, and yours truly usually won our respective divisions. We didn't own a ping pong table and we never played anywhere else, so I'm not sure why we were any good. It was fun.
Ping pong, or table tennis if you prefer, has always been considered more of a game than a sport, but in 1988, it became a sport in the Summer Olympic Games. Since then China has had a stranglehold on collecting medals. That's because it is a way of life there, with ping pong tables everywhere.
"Top Spin", a documentary directed by Sara Newens and Mina T. Son, follows three young American ping pong players in their quest to qualify for the American Olympic team. Lily, at 15, is the youngest of the three. She is a little bit timid and perhaps not tough enough for the grind that they all must endure. Don't laugh. These kids practice constantly and when they are not practicing, they are in the gym, working out. At the end of every day, they are exhausted and sore.
Ariel is Lily's longtime rival and Ariel almost always beats her head-to-head. She is more confident, poised and driven than Lily, but their matches are always extremely close affairs. Technically, they are at the same level, but Ariel has the edge mentally.
The third youngster we follow is 17 year-old Michael. He's a big fun-loving kid who is dedicated by our standards, but compared to how they train in China he seems like a part-timer. It's a cultural difference between how China and the United States deals with young athletes. Michael is supremely talented, though, and he might have enough to pull off his goal of being an Olympian.
Besides the tension of watching to see how the hopefuls will do, the best part of "Top Spin" is the action and the magnificent photography that captures how amazingly talented everyone is. There are a couple of dragging moments, but they don't last very long. Mostly, it's a lot of fun interspersed with some tense moments. Take this one for a spin.
