Master promoter Hearn puts new spin on 'ping pong'

Maverick sports promoter Barry Hearn likes to make statements as loud as Hong Kong's Noon Day Gun and his sporting events create as much smoke.

The man who dragged darts and snooker kicking and screaming out of the dingy back rooms of British pubs and workingmen's clubs and transformed them into glitzy global TV events has now turned his fortune, dry ice machines, techno lighting and music-pumping PA system to ping pong, the pejorative name for table tennis.

"It's rock 'n' roll. It's going to be high-fives, knocking balls into the crowd, interaction between the players and the crowd," rhapsodised Hearn as he launched his Ping Pong World Championships in London last weekend.

And he threw down the gauntlet to table tennis fans in Hong Kong to become part of his vision.

The rules of Hearn's raucous version of table tennis are a throwback to the early days of 1920s "wiff waff", the amateur game which dominated long before pimpled, scientifically engineered sponge bats brought to the world breakneck spins and rallies.

All of Hearn's ping pong contestants must use traditional, larger sandpaper hard bats that are assigned to them at the start of a match. The bats reduce speed and spin and increase rally length. The result is a slower game but with longer rallies and entertaining aerobatics.

Hearn, 64, aims to "catapult the game into the big league" and onto the international television stage, which he says has a potential audience of 700 million.