Table Tennis

With all the grace of a teenage athlete, Nancy Kellner glides in front of her partner and drills a backhand winner deep into the right corner of the tennis table, catching her flat-footed rival off guard. "Nice shot, Nancy," her impressed opponent conceded Saturday, collecting the bright orange ball after it ricocheted off a back wall and tossing it over the net for the next serve.

Chinese top seeds Wang Nan and Li Ju won gold in women's table tennis, sweeping aside compatriots Sun Jin and Yang Yin, 21-18, 21-11, 21-11, in the final. In a tense bronze-medal match, Kim Moo-kyo and Ryu Ji-hye of South Korea defeated Hungarians Csilla Batorfi and Krisztina Toth, 21-18, 21-19, 22-24, 19-21, 21-19. The South Koreans looked unstoppable after winning the first two games but the Hungarians fought back to take them to a deciding game.

Mahir Cagri, the Ping-Pong-playing Turkish Internet superstar whose "I Want to Kiss You!" home page became a Web sensation last fall, is not the only swinger ready to promote his prowess at the game. A recent spread in Vogue revealed a Ping-Pong table on Spike Jonze and Sofia Coppola's deck. "At first, they also used it as their dining room table," says their interior designer, Brad Dunning, "but they moved it outside."

Leisure World Laguna Woods will host a senior table tennis tournament June 2-4, where more than 180 participants, ages 40 and older, are expected to compete for $14,000 in cash prizes in the 11th Meiklejohn National. The tournament, which will take place in Leisure World's Clubhouse Five, features 26 events. Among the top players in the four-star, USA Table Tennis-sanctioned event will be Chen Ying Hua, a former member of China's national team. For more information, call (714) 832-4388.

Milk. It sounds so . . . wholesome. And in some respects, it is. This Thursday-night promotion at Fais Do-Do contains all the ingredients of a really cool basement rec room: an all-ages crowd, food, drinks, a video projection screen and pingpong tables. Still, there's the feeling that this Milk is some kind of elixir. Step through the front door of Fais Do-Do, and you are in a Technicolor wonderland of blue vaulted ceilings, painted pillars, varnished-wood bars and a chessboard of a dance floor.

It sounds like tennis, it scores like tennis, but where's that fuzzy yellow ball? Tiger Electronics, a division of Hasbro, recently introduced Laser Tennis, a scaled-down version of table tennis with a gimmick: Players with child-sized plastic rackets chase a red "ball" of light around the "court." The infrared beam is safe to look at. The game can be played by a single player against a computer or by two players. Players set the game to the desired level of expertise.

Top-seeded Yinghua Gheng of Gaithersburg, Md., defeated Ekun Abass of New York to win the over-40 men's singles title in the U.S. National Seniors table tennis tournament Sunday at Leisure World in Laguna Hills. Gheng won, 21-18, 21-17, 16-21, 21-16. In the under-40 doubles final, Cindy Cooper of San Diego and Attila Malek of Costa Mesa defeated Herbert Lau of Huntington Beach and George Brathwaite of New York, 19-21, 21-15, 22-21.

Jay Dweck traveled from Westchester, N.Y., to Laguna Hills to compete in a table tennis tournament this weekend. What Dweck discovered is that 3,000 miles is a long way to go to get beaten by someone twice his age. Dweck is 42. Such are the stories at the Meiklejohn National Seniors Table Tennis Tournament at Leisure World, where anyone who mentions pingpong better be talking about panda bears or risk getting whacked with a paddle.