Hi, I'm Rob. Tale Number 66. The Upside Down Trapezoid. Jeremiah loves ping pong. He goes to his local sports bar, Mar-Mar's, to play two nights a week, Tuesdays and Thursdays. And the setup is pretty simple. There is one ping pong table in the back of the bar, and its winner stays on. So there's a chalkboard with a list of names on it. When you arrive, you put your name at the bottom of the list, you grab a beer or your drink of choice, and you hang around the ping pong table socializing until it's your turn. When a match is over, The loser leaves the table and the next person on the list is up. And it's a pretty good system. The only weird thing is that sometimes someone will be really good so they can stay on all night. Some places with ping pong tables, they'll like have a rule if you win 10 games in a row, you have to go back to the bottom of the list. But not Mar-Mar's. So there were a couple people that, you know, if they came in and played, they would usually play all night basically because no one was good enough to beat them. And the night that we're speaking of, was one of those nights. This guy Kelvin, he was playing and he's really good at table tennis. He had been playing since he was a little kid. He was on the high school team. He was good and he was cocky. So he was annoying also. Sometimes after he had won a bunch of games in a row, he'd do weird things like take his shoe off and put it on his hand and play with his shoe as his paddle and he would still beat everyone. He was very good. And so Jeremiah's waiting his turn. Kelvin's probably won five Five or six games in a row. The next name on the board is Stephen S. Stephen walks up to the table with his paddle. Jeremiah, who's sitting at the bar watching, doesn't recognize Stephen. He's never seen him there before. Kelvin is not playing with his shoe tonight. He's just playing with a normal paddle. The game begins. Stephen is serving. He hits it over the net to Kelvin. Kelvin hits it back and Stephen returns it hard. The ball goes over the net, bounces on Kelvin's side of the table, and then shoots up and hits him right in the face. And he's shocked, but it's not a huge deal. It's a ping pong ball. And he shakes it off. So that's one to nothing Stephen. This surprises everyone. They're not used to seeing Kelvin lose many points. So it gets the attention of the room. Stephen serves again. The ball hits on his side of the table, goes over the net, bounces on Kelvin's side of the table. Kelvin does a quick return. And then again, Stephen just blasts it back at him. The ball hits the table, bounces up, and hits Kelvin in the chin this time. 2-0 Stephen. Both of his returns have hit Kelvin in the face. Stephen serves again. Kelvin returns. Stephen returns that. Kelvin hits it back. Stephen zings it to the corner of the table. Kelvin almost has to dive to hit the ball. And in a situation like that, you're just trying to get it back on the other side of the table, not really trying trying to score a point. So he hits like a high floater. In table tennis, when someone like floats it to you like that, it's the perfect opportunity to slam it back at them. So this high floating shot lands on Steven's side of the table and he rears back and does a power slam as hard as he can. It hits on Kelvin's side of the table. It bounces up and it actually goes into Kelvin's mouth and his eyes just open really wide. He's shocked. And the entire bar just gasps. And that ball, it has a lot of topspin on it. And so once it gets into Kelvin's mouth, it either catches the roof of his mouth or his tongue and it spins back into his throat. And everyone can see the look of panic in his eyes because there's now a ping pong ball that's lodged in his throat. And he drops his paddle and he's waving his arms and he's freaking out. And someone runs up and is about to do the Heimlich maneuver. But before that's necessary, Kelvin is able to take a deep breath through his nose and cough the ping pong ball back out onto the floor. The bar is totally silent. and everyone is staring at Stephen. He drops his paddle on the ground and walks out the front door. Nobody went after him. There was a lot of discussion about whether anybody knew him or not, but nobody had ever seen him at Mar-Mar's before, including Kelvin. And no one ever saw him there again. And the same goes for Kelvin. He kept playing table tennis at other places, but he never came back to Mar-Mar's. And he was different after that. He wasn't as cocky. He didn't play with his shoe anymore. He'd give up his turn after he won just a few games in a row. That night seemed to change him. The events of that night became known as the Steven Seagal incident, because his name was Steven S., they didn't know his last name, and he almost killed someone with a It sounded like something Steven Seagal may do in one of his movies. Jeremiah picked up Stephen's paddle. The handle was normal, but the actual paddle part was an upside down trapezoid, obviously homemade. And actually at Mar-Mar's, they nailed it to the wall for a little while, but someone stole it eventually. Jeremiah kept going to Mar-Mar's and he started going to some other table tennis nights. And he started this side hustle of selling people ping pong paddles because new people would come along all the time. They'd want to paddle and paddles can actually be really So he would go around to garage sales and things like that and look for them. And he had this huge collection. And when a new person came and started playing ping pong, be like, hey, look at these paddles I have. Do you want to buy one? Several years after the Steven Seagal incident. Jeremiah gets a call from a friend. They're at a garage sale and this house has like 50 ping pong paddles for sale. Jeremiah hops in his car and gets over there as fast as he can. The first thing he notices is that several of the paddles are homemade and they're that same upside down trapezoid as Stephen S's paddle. And the person manning the table is not Stephen S, it's a woman. He asks her where she got the paddles and she said they were her husband's who had died died a couple years ago. And Jeremiah asks, was your husband's name Stephen? And she says, yes. Did you know him? He tells her that he had seen him play table tennis before. She smiled a sort of wry smile and said he was obsessed. And Jeremiah didn't want to really push it further, but he said, I want to buy all of these paddles, every single one. There are like 50 there. And she was like, really? And then she said, I have some other things in our cross space. He had like a ping pong area. If you want to look at any of that, I didn't even think to bring it out, but there's some tables back there and other things. And Jeremiah's like, sure. So they go into this crawl space under their house. The floor is gravel, but the ceilings are high enough so you can stand up and walk around in there. And there's some ping pong tables. One is set up, and then there's some that are not set up. And then there's a workbench, and it looks like that's where Stephen was making his paddles. But the thing that really stood out to Jeremiah was the table that was set up. It was pushed up against this cinder block wall. So you could stand on one side, it looked like you could hit shots, and then it would hit the wall and they'd come back to you. So you could practice by yourself. And on that cinder block wall that you'd be hitting into if you were practicing, there were several little hand-painted targets, each of them about the size of a tennis ball, maybe a little bigger, and they were all about head high. And each time a ping pong ball had hit them when Stephen was practicing, it made a little mark. I don't know if it was from dust or if it was from paint, coming off the target, but you could see the targets had been pelted time and time again, probably with thousands of shots as Stephen practiced in his basement. And that's the moment that Jeremiah finally saw the truth of those events all those years ago. Up to that point, Jeremiah had convinced himself that maybe it was just bad luck. But no, here it was right in front of him. Stephen S. had practiced hitting shots thousands and thousands of times at targets that were face high. When he stepped step up to play Kelvin that night, his plan was to go for his head. The only question that remains is why? Was this some sort of new playing style that he was trying to create to throw his opponents off? And then the fluke was that the ball went into Kelvin's mouth? Or was he actually trying to hit the ball into Kelvin's mouth and hurt him? Jeremiah didn't have the heart to bring this up with Stephen's wife, which I totally understand. But he really wanted to talk to Kelvin about it because if Stephen was going after Kelvin, there had to be some personal reason behind it, and maybe Kelvin had just pretended not to know him. And so Jeremiah started asking around about Kelvin, and then he learned that, unfortunately, Kelvin had also passed away. And so, we don't have an answer. And we never will. Rob Tells Tales is produced by me, Rob Tiffin. Our theme music is by Mitchell Hardage. Our cover art is by Marcella Johnson. She also came up with the title of the podcast. Thanks to everyone who talks through these episodes with me before I record them. There are too many to list. And thanks to you for listening.