We’d like to congratulate the Tottenham Youth Club in England for (probably) taking our advice and preventing violence with ping pong.
When the Vancouver Canucks fans rioted after their team lost the 2011 Stanley Cup finals, we suggested the city should have offered ping pong to the people after the game to keep them too busy to riot. Well the Tottenham Youth Club decided they could prevent teen violence with ping pong.
Said club volunteer Donna Dheridan:
We’d tried everything: a “bar” serving Fanta, First Aid classes, even a community theatre play about chlamydia. Nothing seemed to engage them and I felt we were headed inexorably towards another summer of violence, at least soon as the weather improved. Then the ping pong table arrived. Suddenly crews from other post codes with a longstanding history of “beef” were coming over, bringing their own bats in little zip-up cases.
Gangs solving problems with table tennis may be the new ping pong diplomacy. As one of the kids put it, “When I’m playing ping pong, it’s like I forget about all my problems. I’m in another place, like a ping-pong planet. Round here, young people feel like they’ve been abandoned by the rest of society, a problem I addressed in my own small way last year by stealing 200 AA batteries from Rymans then setting fire to it. But now I’ve stopped listening to grime and my role models are ping pong players like China’s Liqin Wang and the German Timo Boll.”
That’s a pretty cool story and this is definitely a new benefit of the world’s most popular sport.
Via The Daily Mash
