“Even now,” Zhuang recalled 35 years later, “I can’t forget the naive smile on face.”īut there was nothing naive about Zhuang’s gesture. In his book, “Ping-Pong Diplomacy,” Nicholas Griffin writes that China’s greatest table tennis player, Zhuang Zedong, got up, walked forward, shook Cowan’s hand and gave him a lavish gift, a silk-screen picture of a Chinese mountain scene. Cowan gave a different version: “I was invited actually to board the Chinese bus with the team, which shocked me of course.” The Chinese say Cowan accidentally “stumbled up the steps” of their bus. A young American player, Glenn Cowan, needs a ride. The setting: the world table tennis championships in Nagoya, Japan.
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