This article tells the story of Andy Huang, a young table tennis prodigy from Taiwan who moved to the US and worked hard to achieve his dream. He scrubbed floors to earn money for tournaments and eventually caught the eye of a prominent table tennis coach.
He wanted to be a table tennis champion so badly that he scrubbed floors at a Portland, Oregon-area equipment store called Paddle Palace to earn money to chase that dream, journalist Tae Kim wrote in his book. Huang even competed in national tournaments and finished third in junior doubles at the U.S. Open Table Tennis Championships at age 15, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Born in Taiwan, Huang moved to the U.S. in the early-1970s and his family eventually settled near Portland.
He worked the graveyard shift at a Portland Denny's and hung out at Paddle Palace, The Oregonian. There, Huang's skills caught the eye of Paddle Palace owner Lou Bochenski, whose daughter Judy was a table tennis champion. The elder Bochenski considered it his duty to help discover promising young table-tennis players and develop them into national-level talents, Kim wrote in The Nvidia Way. Bochenski was taken with Huang's table tennis skills, calling the then-teenager perhaps the most promising junior ever to play table tennis in the Northwest in a letter. Huang was a straight-A student with an intense work ethic who earns his money to travel to tournaments, to take part in clinics and to play table tennis by scrubbing floors here at the Paddle Palace, Bochenski wrote. Huang has occasionally spoken about the lessons he learned while attempting to become a table tennis champion. As a teenager, he once competed in a national tournament in Las Vegas, where instead of resting ahead of the tournament, he stayed up late to walk the Las Vegas Strip, he told the Post-Intelligencer. Huang couldn't recall how he performed in the tournament, he said only that he didn't win, which taught him the importance of maintaining focus to achieve your goals. When you're 13 or 14 years old and you go to Las Vegas for the first time, it's hard to focus on the match, said Huang, adding: To this day, I regret not being more focused on the tournament
TABLE TENNIS ATHLETE DREAM HARD WORK DEDICATION
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