Married table tennis legends aiming for gold

Before match play even started on Monday at the World Veterans Table Tennis Championship in Las Vegas, Si Wasserman had already made history.

At age 96, the Oceanside table tennis legend entered the tournament as the oldest of nearly 4,000 players from 97 countries.

His wife and fellow legend of the sport, 66-year-old Patty Martinez, is also aiming for the record books. U.S. players rarely make the finals at the international championship, but she and her women’s doubles partner won a silver medal at the 2016 contest. This week she’s gunning for the gold.

“Only a handful of U.S. teams even make it to the quarterfinals, much less the semifinals,” she said last week. “We lost to Japan in the finals two years ago and to get there we had to beat teams from China and Russia.”

Si Wasserman, 96, returns a serve from his wife, Patty Martinez, 66, during practice at the El Corazon Senior Center in Oceanside on June 12.

(Pam Kragen/San Diego Union-Tribune )

That silver medal win — in Spain, with her partner Charlene Liu of Washington, D.C. — came just two weeks after Wasserman and Martinez tied the knot, with game paddles in hand, on May 4, 2016.

They married at the El Corazon Senior Center in Oceanside, where their May-December romance gradually blossomed over a five-year period during weekly tennis table practice sessions.

“I didn’t marry at 40 because I was too exhausted working two jobs to court somebody,” he said last week. “I spent 94 years looking for the right woman and I finally found her. We have so much in common, especially table tennis.”

Martinez said she’s been “deliriously happy” since the wedding and a move to Oceanside from her home in Seal Beach. As a girl, she grew up idolizing Wasserman, who is one of just 19 players to receive the USA Table Tennis Association’s Lifetime Achievement Award.

He led the U.S. men’s team to the 1959 world championship, wrote the definitive how-to book on the sport in 1963 and ran a table tennis club in Hollywood that produced many of the sport’s leading players in the 1950s.

It was at his club in early 1962 when Martinez first remembers seeing Wasserman. She was then a 10-year-old junior phenom from San Diego playing in a state tournament. Wasserman has no recollection of that day, but he would soon know her name.

Three years later, the 13-year-old Martinez became the youngest player in history to win the U.S. Open by beating the nine-time U.S. champion (50-year-old Leah Neuberger) for the U.S. women’s singles title.

Martinez went on to win two more U.S. titles and play on the U.S. teams in Munich, Sarajevo and Calcutta. She also played on the 1972 “Ping-Pong Diplomacy” exhibition tour with China’s national team (table tennis players don’t use the word “Ping-Pong,” which is a trademark coined by the gamemaker Parker Bros. to market its paddles in the 1920s).

At age 20, Martinez quit the sport to marry and move to Placerville, where she raised two children and worked for many years at a county job. After her husband died of cancer in 2009, she started playing again.

She was a spectator in the stands at a 2010 Northern California tournament when she saw Wasserman walk on to the convention center floor and became determined to meet him. They started out as friends and, later, practice partners. Their romance bloomed after Wasserman wrote a poem about her upset 1965 U.S. Open win.

Their married life revolves almost completely around table tennis. They practice and play together at least six days a week, either at El Corazon or at clubs around San Diego County. They also compete together and apart in tournaments throughout the Southwest.

At their new home in Oceanside they have a table tennis room where they play each other as well as a serving robot which shoots balls at them at varying speeds, spins and angles. And almost every night, they stay up until the wee hours watching videos of table tennis matches on Youtube.com.

The couple is already planning to compete in the World Veterans championship in France in 2020, when Wasserman will be 98. To keep her husband in the pink of health, Martinez says she’s been a taskmaster about his diet and exercise, which Wasserman admits leads to the occasional spat.

He said he now drinks a lot more water, eats foods high in Omega-3 fatty acids and walks a mile at least twice a week. His one indulgence is a nightly dish of Blue Bunny pistachio almond ice cream.

Since the wedding, Wasserman has had cataract surgery on both eyes, playing for the first time in his life without glasses. He has a new short haircut and he has gained a healthy amount of weight and muscle.

“Being married has brought me a lot more discipline,” he said. “Sometimes she scolds me if I don’t drink enough water, but I’m healthier and happier because of marriage.”

At this week’s tournament, which continues through Sunday, Martinez will be playing women’s doubles, age 60-64 division.

Wasserman is playing in the men’s singles, over 90 division. He’ll be playing against younger men in their early 90s traveling from countries including France and the Czech Republic.

“Because he’s 96, Si is giving up six years in this category, and that’s a lot,” Martinez said. “But we have the home court advantage. Las Vegas is like our second home. Jet lag can be tough to recover from at that age so we’ll see how it goes.”

pam.kragen@sduniontribune.com