From Zaria to Britain: When Table Tennis Goes Looking for the Memories of Black Men Over 50

On the Table Tennis England website, a short announcement was posted like a sticky note left on a sports-hall corridor wall. The heritage project "Across the Table That Takes Me Back Home" is looking for Black men over 50 — men who once held a bat in Zaria, in Nigeria, in the Caribbean, or in some British youth club — to tell the story of their table tennis. They only need to send a few sentences by email. If they still keep an old photograph, an old bat, or anything that ever touched a plastic ball, they can bring it along. The organisers promise to ask permission before quoting or publishing.

What made me stop at that notice was not its scale. It is small. It is quiet. It sits at the edge of every bulletin I read each morning. But it asks exactly the question an entire sports industry has forgotten: which table did you once play on?

Context: a project outside every ranking

Over 50s Black Men Forum (O5BM) is a community organisation where Black men over 50 meet, talk and play table tennis. Table Tennis England — the national governing body for table tennis in England — carried this call-out on its community channel. The project is tied to Black History Month and points towards an application to the National Lottery Heritage Fund. The named contact is Enitan Kane.

I read it twice to be sure I had not missed a single player's name. There is none. No one from the world's top ranks, no match, no set, no score. This is a community announcement. It exists on the other side of the mirror I usually look into: where results are no longer the only measure.

For a sportswriter, an absence of data is usually a death sentence. This time, the emptiness itself is the message. Table tennis, at its deepest layer, was never born in an arena with stands. It was born on a makeshift table in a corner of a yard, from the sound of a wooden bat striking a plastic ball, from a line of people waiting their turn. The empty stadium of 2026 taught me that noise is not the same as cheering — and here, the silence of a project without spectators is the same.

Core: the material history of a sport

The questions the project asks reveal its ambition. "What did you use for a table and bat?" — a question that sounds utterly everyday, yet touches exactly the part of history that no statistics table ever records. In Zaria, northern Nigeria, the table may have been a joined plank. In the Caribbean, people recall paying to use a table. In Britain, some rediscovered table tennis in youth clubs after crossing half the world.

This is the diffusion history of the sport rather than its history of victory. Table tennis entered these communities not through academies, but through schools, churches, associations and Commonwealth networks — where an old table was passed hand to hand like a relic. That is why the project asks not "who did you beat" but "where did you play".

There is one detail I want to keep. The call-out asks for memories in words, and also for artefacts: photographs, equipment, other items. When a project begins collecting artefacts, it steps into museum territory. O5BM does not merely want to record voices; it wants to reconstruct a physical space — where people can see a wooden bat, a plank table, and understand that table tennis was once played with the humblest of things. That is an ambition no ranking will ever reach.

I have spent hours in front of data tables of distance covered and sprint counts in basketball and football, telling myself numbers do not lie. Then I realised something: running without purpose also produces beautiful numbers. A player can cover twelve kilometres in a match without once touching its rhythm. Statistics measure movement, but they do not measure meaning. Based on my own experience of tracking matches, I have learned to distrust metrics packaged too neatly. O5BM's project does the opposite: it seeks meaning first, and lets the numbers come later, if at all.

In a summer when the transfer market turns every rumour into a headline, a national governing body making room for stories with no transfer value is a conscious choice. I follow transfer bulletins daily, and I know their pull. But I also know what remains once the window closes: very little. What remains is usually what no one priced — an afternoon in a community hall, a sixty-year-old man holding a bat for the first time in thirty years.

The contrary view: when heritage becomes a budget line

There is one thing I do not want to romanticise. This project depends on a grant application not yet approved. The National Lottery Heritage Fund is Britain's heritage-funding body, and O5BM naming the fund before a decision is a media gamble. If the application succeeds, the project lives. If not, the calls for memories hang in the air, and the people who sent photographs, bats and recollections wait in silence.

This is the blind spot of most community projects: they are built from other people's memories but sustained by an institution's money. Contributors give away something that cannot be returned, while the funding can vanish after a single meeting. I have seen the same thing at home: a grassroots tournament with real resonance, funded for a few seasons, then quietly gone when the sponsor changed strategy. Those left behind are the ones who believed.

But I also see a positive signal in the smallest detail: a commitment to ask permission before quoting or publishing. In an age when ordinary people's testimony is mined as raw material, asking consent before putting a personal story into public view is an ethical standard worth noting. It shows the project understands that a fifty-year-old man's memory is not free material.

I wonder whether such a project could exist in Vietnam. We have countless people who once played table tennis in schoolyards, in cultural houses, on outdoor concrete tables. Yet we rarely ask what they played with. Our sports history is still written top-down — from medals backwards — while most of the story lies below, where no one records it. A project like O5BM's would force us to bend down, and perhaps that is why it is hard to launch: it produces no stars, only memory.

What remains after the table

There is a line I keep in my notebook: "A forgotten article and a match without spectators — both wait for a reader to return." I thought of it while reading O5BM's notice. The memories of Black men over 50 in Britain are an archive waiting for someone to open the door. If no one opens it, it will stay there, not disappearing, but never told.

Table tennis has a property few sports possess: it does not need spectators to exist. Two people, one table, one ball — the game is self-sufficient. Precisely for that reason, it is a sport of individual memory more than collective memory. You remember the person you played, not the stands. You remember the feel of the ball striking the bat, not the roar. When I write for no one, I learn to love the game without applause — and I think these men have known that far longer than I have.

At 31, I no longer believe in comebacks; I believe in continuation. O5BM's project is a small proof of that continuation: a sport that does not try to make its past grandiose, but only tries to hold it long enough for those who come after to read it. That is how a sport outlives the people who play it.

The larger question the project leaves behind is not Britain's alone. It belongs to every sporting culture chasing sellable numbers: if we record only what can be measured, how much of the human part of this sport will vanish with the people who played it? A makeshift table in Zaria may never produce a medal. But it produced a player. And that player, fifty years on, still remembers.