Infinite Loop

"I'd just split up with my girlfriend but I adored her a I do not any more a however it had been first love and that I had been devastated. I just thought 'I know what I will do. I'll return to China and I will play table tennis'. I called the travel agent and booked a ticket for three days' time." His second trip to China turned into the journey out of hell. But today he reckons it was his rite of passage from boy to man. Bayley tells the story with relish - https://github.com/pingpongsport/bestpingpong/wiki/Best-Ping-Pong-Paddles-&-How-To-Choose-Them - there is mischief written all over his face. He's wiry, fast, such as a featherweight boxer.

"I went for a month and a half into some table tennis academy someplace near Beijing. It was a nightmare. I arrived there and had the address written down in English. I moved into a cab driver. Apparently, it was four hours away by train and he just laughed at me." Bayley is into his stride. "I remember ringing my dad and saying 'I have a problem. I need to come home'. I had been crying. He said 'No, you have to stick out there, attempt to interpret the phrases'. It took me two days to get into the dining table tennis centre."

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By now he is laughing at the memory card. "They're scary times, since you are walking through Beijing in the middle of the night. I was so relieved when I finally got there. "When I came back, not being spoken English for almost two months, it had changed me. I played for seven hours a day against the Chinese -- able-bodied gamers -- so they had been pushing me all the time. "I did not use my mobile phone. This time changed me as a person. Sometimes I hated it since there was no one to speak to, you start to go a bit doolally in those horrible box chambers. But it made me stronger"

Bayley wasn't always powerful. His early life was a much rougher journey, but it has made him the character he is today. Born with athrogryphosis, a congenital condition where muscle tissue develops as a scar tissue, his arms and legs were changed, his hands twisted inwards. His toes were splinted from birth and at three months old he failed his first operation best ping pong table. A lot more reconstruction operations were to follow. Today his right hand is shaped as though it's holding a racquet, and his hands are blue and black, bruised from enjoying six hours a day. He explained: "My mom Chrissie prepared me well. People used to look at me and say, 'Why doesn't he straighten his hands out?' . When we had been in primary school, when you draw round your hand, everybody does it and I have the mickey taken out of me. But mum always said 'you're A-different and it is good to be different' and I believed her because she was my mom.

"I just came back in the greatest bullies with 'yeah I'm a bit of a cripple but it's great to be different,' and there was nothing they could say. "They would say 'sorry' and then look out for me personally. People respected me for coming through those issues. A good deal of folks helped me out in school and that I owe a lot to them." Afterward there were more issues. He developed cancer at the age of seven. He had been diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma and began a course of chemotherapy at Great Ormond Street Hospital. It was while regaining that he started playing on the dining table tennis table his grandma had bought him. He is speaking China again. It is where most of his opponents in his class seven occasion come from. "When I moved to China, it was like Rocky going to Russia. I had been world No-1, but I'm No-2 at the moment. I dropped down because we have not played too many tournaments and we're trying to summit in London."

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Physically, he reckons, the individual being can always adapt. "Once I was young I found it hard and it really hurt but today I train six hours a day. It's amazing what a body can do. "I can't play both-handed, it is just one. My left hand would be a better hand. I can not open the right one. Nonetheless, it's my playing hand." And London? "Amazing. I'm already blown away by it. We've got some fantastic young players ping pong playing robot. China has two million players. But we can take them on. Tell all to come and see me at the Excel Centre. I don't only want to play table tennis. I want to give back something to the game. And I wish to entertain people." With Bayley, there's absolutely not any threat of that not happening.

 

Hello DanT5, could you please let us know what version of Mac OS you're currently running?