Nixon Library celebrates 40th anniversary of 'ping pong diplomacy'

Judy Hoarfrost and George Braithwaite warm up with paddles and an orange ping pong ball in the hallway at the Nixon Library in Yorba Linda. They were on the U.S. table tennis team that traveled to play the Chinese team in Japan in 1971, and to China itself the following year. It became known as “ping pong diplomacy.”

The Nixon Library on Friday marked the anniversary with a rematch of some of those U.S. and Chinese teammates.

"I had no idea what to expect when I went to China. All I knew is it was 'Communist China,' 'Red China,' you know. It’s a big mystery, closed off from the rest of the world. No one’s ever been there, is what I was told. In 20 years, there had been no group of Americans like us that had gone," said Hoarfrost, who was 15 at the time.

Hoarfrost says they didn’t get to interact much with the Chinese team, but she says she still learned a lot about what was then a mysterious country for an American teenager.

"When we were there, you know, they had just been through all of these years of the Cultural Revolution and there were all these political slogans all over the place. There was, you know, a portrait of Chairman Mao on every building. People had the Little Red Book, which I read that and I learned. We talked about philosophy and I learned about what the rationale was for their political system," she said.

Fellow 1971 “ping pong diplomacy” team member George Braithwaite says he initially thought it’d be a trip where he could go learn new skills from the Chinese players. He says it wasn’t until media started showing up everywhere they went that he realized it was a much bigger deal.

"Table tennis became the media that helped to pave the way for establishing better relations between two of the world’s greatest powers," Braithwaite says.

It helped to pave the way for a meeting in China between Chairman Mao Zedong and President Richard Nixon the following year. The president’s brother, Ed Nixon, says the ping pong tournament initially was just a goodwill sporting event, nothing more.

"When you see this happening, it’s just an occurrence happening that really reinforced the option to go in there now and get the leaders to come together. It did lay the groundwork by providing a little pinch of salt on an ice cube. And then we went in with a blow torch and blew the gate open just a little bit," Nixon said.

Original ping pong diplomat Hoarfrost says the trip sparked something that helped bridge a gap.

"People needed to hear the people-to-people perspective of, you know — that we were playing other athletes; we were playing other human beings and you know, people just like us that, you know, eat and drink and, you know, play ping pong," she said.

The Chinese ambassador to Los Angeles says those people-to-people relationships continue today as thousands of Chinese tourists travel to the U.S. and vice versa. Or as Ed Nixon says, ping pong diplomacy is dependent on the rest of us pushing to learn about each other, to bring ping pong diplomacy to the next generation.