Ping-Pong

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXIII, Issue 40, 5 October 1905, Page 17

Ping-Pong

Dickens 'has saiid somewhere that ' the harder a bad hobby is ridden the better, for the sooner it is ridden td 'death.' The Maori up Rofrorua way have been riding the billiard hobby ' a s-p'erone battuto '—plying whip aii'd sipur like madmen — till it became an all-aJbsorbing gamine- cra/e. Awl now we arc told that the big ' "brown men hai\e broken loose from the fascination of billiards — which Jvane y voided "to the ' Force majeure ' of a more co impelling charm, as the common or garden variety ot h.eadache surrenders to Ihe more imperious will of neuralgia or ft'ic-douloureirx. The new craze is one that has already been through the system of the Pakcha— to wit, ping-pon I^. But for the moment it appears to have emptied and closed the billiard saloons. It got its death-stioke in America m the year of grace 1902, when sundry New York surgeons announced that it produced a painful inflammatory condition of the anklejoint, to winch the newspapers promptly gave this apt alliterative appellation, 'the Ping-Pong Pang. v