Mark Matthews Lifetime Achievement Award Winner – Courtesy of Scott Gordon

Good evening, my name is Scott Gordon.  Our Mark Matthews Lifetime Achievement Award recipient for 2024 is Patty Martinez Wasserman.  In attendance here, I see a room full of champions – many of you have known Patty a lot longer than I have – I’m just an average club player, and a fan.   Some of you have competed against Patty for national titles, or been doubles champions with her, or were with her during ping pong diplomacy, or traveled to world championships with her – by all rights you should be up here instead of me.  But Patty asked me to give this speech on her behalf, and it is the greatest honor of my humble table tennis life.

This is a story of the strange and unexpected trajectories our lives take.

I doubt many of you need me to tell you of Patty’s overwhelming stature as a titan of American table tennis.  Three times U.S. singles champion (1965, ‘67, and ‘69); her numerous singles, doubles, mixed doubles titles; CNE champion; several times member of the U.S. national team; her record of becoming national champion at age 13, defeating a 9-time U.S. singles champion in the final after being down 20-15 in the final game.  Patty – the last player to use a hard rubber paddle to win a U.S. open singles title – maybe even the last in any country.

I didn’t know any of this when I first saw Patty play.  It was at a very strong west coast event, around 1980, five years after she had retired from play.  I wasn’t one of the strong players, but I knew who many of them were.  As the women’s open event was about to start, I was watching the top players warming up with their fast cross-court forehands and backhands.  And there in that group was someone who I didn’t recognize, and who appeared decidedly out of place. She played with what looked to me like a big rec paddle and warmed up by standing upright and blocking. I thought she was a beginner, and that she had entered the wrong event.  Well, that beginner proceeded to wipe out the entire field – easily.  Watching her play so brilliantly, pounding attacking shots in every direction, with her own style and an old-fashioned hard rubber paddle, made absolutely no sense to me.  Her style violated every rule that our coach was teaching us.  But it planted a seed in my mind, and made me rethink what playing table tennis was all about.

Later, I would learn that Patty’s style of play was not only unique in the sponge world, it was unique in the hard rubber world.  She doesn’t really have classic hardbat strokes – her follow-through looks more like Jonyer’s concave loop stroke, and she never chops.  I like to think that learning to play at such a young age, with such a meteoric rise to championship strength, that a big chunk of her brain is made up of dedicated ping pong neurons, enabling her to instinctively adapt, and hit the ball in ways that even she herself cannot fully explain.

Anyhow, after this brief demolishing of our elite players, Patty retired from play again, this time seemingly for good.  Meanwhile my on-again, off-again table tennis life plodded along for another 15 years before that seed would finally sprout, and I became immersed in the hardbat subculture. Many of us, including of course Marty Reisman, would work hard on growing hardbat and sandpaper events, here and around the world, efforts that were fueled to a great extent by the impact of my seeing Patty’s play which I carried with me all of those years.

I’m sure that all of you top players have heard the mantra: you never know who you might influence out on the court.  Well, this goes to show, you never know who you might have already influenced!  For years, Patty had no idea the part she had played in inspiring our grassroots movement.  But to clarify, this isn’t really a story about hardbat, at least not directly.  So, let’s go back to Patty’s trajectory, and see what that influence led to.

Naturally, as hardbat events were expanding, I wondered where is Patty?  So in the late 1990s, I chased down her phone number and I called her.  She explained that as much as she would enjoy playing, her life situation made it impossible.  I called again every few years, and then in 2008, she told me that her life situation had changed.  That was when I really became a pest.  It took a couple more years, but in 2010, under the guise of having her look at some old table tennis films, she came over to my home.  She didn’t even own a paddle anymore, but she knew exactly the specifications by which Bernie Hock had made hers – maybe she can help me with it [Hock 3ply red 4.5oz?] – I loaned her something similar, and she hit for about an hour with my wife Ji and I.  Immediately Patty was whacking those forehands, exactly as I remembered from 30 years ago.

I got her to come out to the local club, and of course it didn’t take long for Patty to start getting really good again.  During that first year, I got to practice with her a lot.  She enjoyed playing against me because I had become a chopper, and as many of you know, she loves pummeling choppers.  The best training partner I will ever have.

Sadly for me, she ended up moving to southern California.  But it was great for her, and for table tennis, since, as you all know, she has been tearing up the court ever since.  She almost certainly has won more medals these past 10 years than any other American.  At the U.S. Open last year, she won the O70, O60, O50, and O40 events.  She has been to two World Veterans, and won a silver medal in Spain.  She is the only woman to have won national singles titles in all three surfaces: open, hardbat, and sandpaper.

Trajectories.  As most of you know, Patty would go on to marry the late, great table tennis player, coach, and philanthropist Si Wasserman.  Si’s impact on the development of U.S. table tennis was recognized in 2015 with his lifetime achievement award.  For many years Si had been working with Danny Seemiller on the Junior Classic in South Bend, making sure it would help our top young prospects fund their travel and training expenses by providing substantial prize money.  Patty was to become a partner in this effort.

Now, in addition to Patty being one of our greatest champions, she is assuredly our greatest junior player ever.  Her first result was winning the San Diego women’s open (a major event at the time), beating a U.S. team member in the final – Patty was 9.  Her record as the youngest ever national singles champion at age 13 (that’s 13 and just two months, so barely 13), in 1965, is unlikely to ever be broken.  She is even confident that it would have been at age 12 if the Open had been held according to its usual schedule that year, but it had been delayed.

So Si’s work was something that hit close to home with Patty.  She remembered her father sometimes taking a second job when a major tournament was approaching, so that there would be enough money to fund her travel. She knew that for many of our young prospects, money could be a deciding factor, and before long the Junior Classic was called the Si and Patty Wasserman Junior Championship.

As time passed, Patty became concerned that with the tournament always in South Bend, not all of our juniors would have equal opportunity to win this important prize money.  So she worked to change it into a moving event, and since that time it has been held in New Jersey, southern California, and now Texas.  So, our greatest junior player of all time (Patty) is now instrumental in forging our next generation of U.S. team members – what could be more fitting?

As if that isn’t enough, Patty, fully charmed by the hardbat renaissance that she unwittingly seeded, also donates regularly to the hardbat and sandpaper prizes at the U.S. Nationals.

Patty is convinced that my pestering her all those years is the reason we are here today.  That I put her on this trajectory, rekindling the life she was meant for.  Indeed, I can attest that 45 years ago if someone had told me, the shocked 1200 basement player watching that west coast tournament, that I would be giving a speech to a roomful of champions for Patty’s lifetime achievement award, I would have thought they were stark raving mad.

But watching Patty play, her utter joy at the table, and her relentless passion for seeing that our juniors have the opportunities to reach their very best, as she did, I know that she would have made her way back on her own, with or without me.  Remember those table tennis neurons?  They wouldn’t have been denied for long.  Maybe I nudged her in, a few months earlier than she might have otherwise, but this is surely in her DNA.

All of us here are the beneficiaries of these twists and turns in Patty’s table tennis life.  In conclusion, thank you Patty for so dramatically changing the trajectory of my life, for letting me be a fly on the wall all these years as your greatest fan, and for giving me my greatest table tennis honor of presenting you with the 2024 Mark Matthews Lifetime Achievement Award.