A positive spin
Milpitas High student is 1st U.S. athlete born in the 2000s to qualify for Olympic Games
Kanak Jha doesn’t mind social pingpong. He was willing to volley a bit on Thursday with a reporter who is a decent garage player for 10 shots. But on the 11th, Jha put so much slice and speed on the ball that you could snap your wrist trying to return it.
The ball hit the floor and spun like a top. The smiling player who administered it is barely 16 years old, 5-foot-6 and 130 pounds. He is also both the U.S. men’s singles champion and the U.S. men’s youth champion in table tennis, and the first American athlete born in the 2000s to qualify for the Olympic Games.
“I don’t think that will matter when I get there,” said Jha, a rising junior at Milpitas High School. “Whoever I play against at the Olympics won’t care how old I am.”
Jha was at Spin with the rest of the U.S. team as part of a barnstorming tour on the road to Rio. Actress Susan Sarandon’s new club in SoMa was a good place to start because half the team of six comes from the other end of the Peninsula — Jha, Jiaqi Zheng, 28, also of Milpitas, and her doubles partner Lily Zhang, 20, of Palo Alto. It would be a majority, but Jha’s older sister Prachi, 19, did not make the team.
“There is a critical mass of clubs in the Bay Area that doesn’t exist anywhere else in the country,” said Gordon
Kaye, CEO of USA Table Tennis, based in Colorado Springs. “In Milpitas, there are four really high-level clubs within five miles of each other.”
Still, it always starts in a garage, as it did with Jha, playing his older sister. From there, he advanced to the Indian Community Center, and on to the Palo Alto Table Tennis Club. By the time he was 10 and at William Burnett Elementary School, Jha knew that even the table tennis hotbed of Milpitas was too small for his ambition.
“He’s always been very talented in any sport that involves a ball,” said Prachi. One of those sports was soccer, his first love. “I quit around 10 years old,” Jha said, “and ever since then, it’s been full-time table tennis.”
His father, Arun Jha, is in software at Oracle and had the wherewithal to send Jha out on the road. At age 11, he made the junior national team and won the bronze medal at a junior tournament in Austria. He won gold the following year.
At 14, Jha became the youngest qualifier in the history of the world championships. At 15, about to start his sophomore year at Milpitas High School, he moved to Halmstad, Sweden, where the days are short and the hours available for indoor table tennis are long. Six or seven hours a day, to be exact, under the best coaching in the world.
His older sister was already training there, so they got an apartment together across the street from the training facility. Jha was allowed to complete his sophomore year at Milpitas online, in between three-hour table tennis sessions each morning and afternoon. He follows those up with reflex drills and agility drills.
“The level is much more competitive” there, he said. “I improved significantly.”
The test after all of this sacrifice came at the North American Olympic Qualifying Tournament held in Ontario, Canada, in April.
Jha needed to reach the finals of the tournament to make the Olympics, and he lost his first two matches, each four games to three. In the semifinals, he took on PierreLuc Theriault of Canada.
As opposed to backyard pingpong, which is played to 21 points, tournament table tennis is played to 11. First player to take four games wins. The semifinals went to the seventh and deciding game, where Jha fell behind 5-0.
“There could be 500 people rooting against him and he doesn’t care — he tunes out everything,” said his dad. “He’s extremely cool under pressure, and that separates him from a lot of other athletes.” His opponent Theriault, for one. Jha rallied to score 11 straight points and won the match.
Then he beat his teammate Timothy Wang, 24, four games to none in the final, which means Jha gets to play both singles and the team event in the Olympics.
Jha may be the North American champion, but he is ranked No. 272 in the world, and he wears that humility well.
Spin fancies itself a “PingPong social club,” though a lot of players are insulted if you call it that. The term seems to reduce their sport to an activity played by kids at summer camp, or drinkers with a plastic cup of beer on the table waiting to be chugged when the opponent drops in a shot.
Jha can go either way. “Some people don’t like calling it pingpong,” he said, “but I don’t care. I call it whatever comes out of my mouth.”
Thursday’s event was called “Friends with Paddles.” Any member of the public could walk in and approach a player in a USA warm-up jacket and ask for a match.
“You can’t jump in the pool with Michael Phelps,” said Kaye, “but pingpong, you can jump on a table and have fun, and these guys will play with anybody.”
Jha was open and willing and blushed slightly when asked to sign his autograph on a paddle case. When he turned on the juice while rallying with a novice, it was not to establish superiority but to demonstrate what is involved in the game at the highest level.
“Backspin, topspin, sidespin, side underspin,” he said, “and it’s not just the spin, it’s how much spin you put on the ball.”
His goal for this Olympics, he says, is to make it out of the qualifying round. But in four years, he expects to be on the podium. Asked if he is looking forward to marching into the Olympic Stadium for the Opening Ceremony, he said he might not march in at all.
“The (table tennis) tournament starts the next day,” he said. “I might have to rest for my match.”
Jha uses what’s called a handshake grip, which is the same as the traditional Western grip used by tennis players. He’s never played tennis, though. Never played “beer pong” either, though he is often asked that question.
“I’m not 21 yet,” is his answer.