The Golden Child

The players appear, and the match begins. The issue is decided within a few minutes. Xiao's best shot, his quick backhand that he hits while the ball is still rising, is flawless. His shots hit deep in the corners, confounding Aziz, whose potent forehand is suddenly a beat late and errant. Xiao wins the first seven points of the match and takes the first game, 11-1.

The onlookers remain subdued as the steamrolling resumes in the second game. The backhand is the weaker of Aziz's two sides, and Xiao exploits it.

"Come on -- you're missing that ball," Aziz screams at himself.

In about 20 minutes, the players are shaking hands. Xiao has won in a three-game trouncing. Order has been restored, at least temporarily.

Xiao picks up his $55 winner's share and packs his gear. He attributes the early loss to a simple lapse of concentration in a meaningless club match. The big matches, he says, are ahead of him, particularly a major tournament, in Baltimore, that will feature high-ranking players from around the world, including those from two Chinese universities. "I'll be ready for that," he says.

But he knows that others, hearing about that loss to an unheralded player, will wonder whether he is doing nearly enough to prepare for the Olympic Trials, particularly veteran table tennis observers who have been urging him to leave college for a while, so he can do nothing but train. Friends regularly remind him how great it would be to go through the rest of his life saying that he had gone to the Beijing Olympics in 2008.

But he wonders how much time he can set aside for that level of training, given his academic responsibilities. How can he do it? And at what cost?

PERHAPS THE MOST IMPORTANT LINK IN XIAO'S OLYMPIC DREAM IS CHENG YINGHUA, the man who once had the same dream for himself. A familiar name within the cloistered world of American table tennis, Cheng is best known for his decade-long stint as a member of the celebrated Chinese national table tennis team. Ranked in his best days among the world's top 30 players, his career has included triumphs against several of the sport's luminaries, including its Zeus, Sweden's Jan-Ove Waldner, often referred to as the Michael Jordan of the sport. The upset victories surprised some observers, though not Cheng. "My training was good, sometimes better than some players'," he says matter-of-factly. "It should be. It was in China."

But all his accomplishments masked a personal disappointment: Cheng never ascended to the top ranks of China's table tennis program; instead, he was passed over during his prime in favor of stars regarded by Chinese coaches as having games better suited for defeating an array of international playing styles. He never competed in an Olympics for China. Reduced to being largely a glorified sparring partner on the national team, and tasked with imitating the playing styles of foreign opponents likely to face the Chinese champions, Cheng became expert at mimicking the strokes and serves of formidable European foes -- including the magical Waldner.

"Cheng may have been the greatest player never to win a world championship . . ." says Larry Hodges, the editor of USA Table Tennis Magazine and a part-time coach at the Maryland Table Tennis Center. "He was beating the best players in the world, but he wasn't allowed to play enough major tournaments to achieve a high world ranking."

Cheng expresses no bitterness over his career in China. "Many good players played [there], but then I come here, and everything is good," he says. He prides himself on an easy acceptance of things, a stoic calm. "It isn't good to be mad; nothing to be mad about," he says. "And nothing good can happen in anything if you are mad."

By the late '80s, with the Chinese government's permission, Cheng immigrated to the United States. Over the next two decades, he would gain American citizenship, win four national singles championships and, in 2000, capture what had eluded him in China, a spot on an Olympic team. Competing for the United States in singles and doubles, he was defeated in the competition's opening rounds. But back home in his adopted Maryland, his Ping-Pong lessons had grown in popularity at the club he co-founded. Aided by a burgeoning roster of students at the Maryland Table Tennis Center, in Gaithersburg, and by his frequent table tennis camps, his income dwarfed anything he ever made in China, putting him solidly in America's upper-middle class, like the Xiaos. "America is good for business," the 48-year-old Cheng says today. "Good chances here."