The Table Tennis Table as a Passport of Memory: Over 50s Black Men Forum and the Across the Table That Takes Me Back Home Heritage Project

In the United Kingdom, October is Black History Month. During that period, Table Tennis England, the national governing body for table tennis in England, publishes a community call-out: a search for the memories of Black men aged 50 and above about table tennis. That call-out mentions no tournament, no player, no performance figure. It asks a single question: "What did you use for a table and bat?" It is a question that seems small. But for someone who works with data as I do, it is an anchor point. Because over many years of following this sport, I have come to realise that the most important data usually does not sit in the scoreboard; it sits in the things nobody measures. A plastic ball 40mm in diameter weighs 2.7 grams. But when it rolls across a sheet of plywood resting on two chairs in a schoolyard in Zaria, northern Nigeria, and then rolls on through a community hall in an industrial city in England, it carries a weight that no technical measurement records. The project "Across the Table That Takes Me Back Home" was born to capture exactly that weight. I have spent many evenings reading data reports about major tournaments. But some reports make me stop for longer, because they force me out of the safe zone of advanced metrics and into another zone: the zone of memory, of migration, and of how a sport exists outside the spotlight. The context of this report needs to be placed correctly. This is not a results report. It is a community announcement, a call-out to gather material for a heritage project. The main actor is Over 50s Black Men Forum, abbreviated O5BM — a community organisation providing hubs where older Black men meet, play table tennis, and maintain social connection. Table Tennis England plays the role of host channel, and also of institutional backer. Behind it sits the National Lottery Heritage Fund, the heritage grant body of the UK national lottery, where the project is applying for funding. The timing chosen is Black History Month. The named contact is Enitan Kane. The first thing anyone who works with data must do with any report is classify the source. Here, almost all the information is supplied by O5BM itself. This is a primary source for the existence of the call-out, but only medium-reliability for event-based claims. Personal memory is self-reported data, with no independent verification. A 60-year-old man recalls that at age 12 he played table tennis on a wooden door taken off its hinges — an unverifiable fact, yet still valuable as a cultural specimen. What matters is separating these two kinds of value. Data does not lie; it is only the reader who has not been honest enough — and honesty here means acknowledging the limits of the source. Before moving to the core, the wider context must be made clear. Table tennis is a sport with a rare characteristic: it is among the cheapest to enter. It needs no regulation grass pitch, no pool, no running track. It needs only a flat surface, a net, and two people facing each other. This very feature explains why table tennis spread across the world through informal channels: schools, churches, youth clubs, and community halls. It also explains why the sport appeared in Zaria, in the Caribbean, and in immigrant neighbourhoods in Britain, long before any formal development programme existed. Reading the call-out, I noticed a detail that seemed incidental: the project asks about the table and the bat. Not about achievements, not about medals, not about opponents. Only about equipment. For someone who regularly works with behavioural datasets, this is a notable methodological choice. When you ask about equipment, you are collecting data about material conditions — about scarcity, about creativity, about how people adapt. You are not collecting data about glory, but about circumstance. And circumstance is precisely what achievement tables always blur out. Picture the data structure the project is trying to build. It has three layers. The first is qualitative memory: stories told in words. The second is objects: photographs, equipment, artefacts. The third is geographic context: Zaria, Africa, the Caribbean, Britain. Together these three layers form a migration map of a sport. This is the kind of data that sports historians call "history from below" — history written from the side of grassroots players, not from the side of the winners. Why does this matter to someone who works with data as I do? Because I have always believed that the value of a dataset lies in its ability to answer questions nobody had thought to ask. Achievement datasets answer the question "who is best" very well. But they can hardly answer the question "how did this sport pass through the lives of ordinary people". The O5BM project is trying to fill that gap. Data on the spread of table tennis through immigrant communities is a missing piece in the sport's global picture. In many countries, table tennis is seen as a sport of the urban middle class, or as a diplomatic tool. But there is a parallel history rarely told: table tennis as a community activity of migrants, as a way to stay connected to home, and as a social ritual in the halls of immigrant workers. The O5BM call-out touches precisely that parallel history. One point worth analysing closely is how the project operates its data-collection model. The call-out asks people to send a few sentences by email. Optionally, they may include photographs, equipment, or other items. And before quoting or publishing, the project commits to seeking permission. This is a data-collection model with a very low participation threshold. Anyone can contribute, with just a few sentences. The advantage is maximum reach; the disadvantage is uneven data quality. As someone who regularly has to clean raw data, I know that a set of hundreds of short, voluntary, self-reported answers produces a high-noise dataset. But high noise does not mean no value. Sometimes the noise itself is the signal. The commitment to seek permission before publication is a detail worth noting. In the context of heritage and oral-history projects, handling personal testimony carelessly can harm a community. When the project proactively states this commitment, it sets a standard for data ethics. To me, this is a positive governance signal, and it substantially reduces reputational risk for both O5BM and Table Tennis England. But there is an aspect the call-out does not make clear: the fate of the data after collection. Where will the memories go once submitted? Who owns them? Will they be archived permanently, or used only for a temporary exhibition? These are questions any contributor has the right to ask, and a serious heritage project should answer them before inviting the public to share. I raise this not to criticise, but because I believe a good data project is one that is transparent about the data lifecycle. Another aspect is timing. Tying the call-out to Black History Month shows a calculation about the visibility window and the funding window. In the UK, Black History Month runs in October. This is a period when media outlets, public bodies, and grant funds all pay attention to projects related to the history and culture of the Black community. Placing the call-out in exactly this period is a strategic decision, not an accident. As someone who has worked in market administration, I immediately recognise the logic of timing: you want your message to coincide with the moment your audience is ready to listen. The funding mechanism also needs to be addressed. The National Lottery Heritage Fund is one of the largest heritage grant bodies in the United Kingdom. It allocates money from the national lottery to projects that preserve and record heritage — including intangible cultural heritage such as community memory. O5BM publicly naming this fund before the application is decided is a notable move. It shows confidence in eligibility, but it also creates a risk: if the bid is rejected, the project will face expectations that have already been made public. The structural crux is this: the project's continuity depends on an external grant not yet decided. This is the kind of risk I call resource-dependency risk. In many fields, community projects have short lifespans because they are tightly bound to funding cycles. When money arrives, the project runs. When money stops, the project stops. And when a project stops mid-way, the people who contributed memories may feel abandoned. This is a stakeholder-side risk that is rarely mentioned. From a participation-data angle, there is something worth reflecting on. The target group is Black men aged 50 and above. This is a demographic that mainstream sports datasets usually ignore. Participation-rate datasets tend to focus on teenagers, on students, on those in the most vigorous working years. The over-50s appear mainly in studies of health and physical activity, rarely in studies of sports culture. By focusing on this group, the project is adding a missing slice to the data picture. There is a statistical truth I always remember when working with data on older age groups: participation in sport declines with age, and the decline is uneven across social groups. For communities with less access to facilities, the decline is sharper. This makes community hubs essential infrastructure. Not infrastructure for training athletes, but infrastructure for sustaining participation. And in table tennis, a low-entry-cost sport, community infrastructure is the backbone. Looking at the industry structure, a paradox appears. Table tennis is among the most popular sports in the world by number of players, yet has low commercial value compared with football or basketball. This paradox has a consequence: most of the sport's existence at community level depends on volunteering and public funding, not commercial revenue. That is why projects like O5BM's matter — they keep the sport alive where the market does not care. Reading about the project, I immediately connected it to my own experience. In 2026, when global football stopped because of the pandemic, I single-handedly collected Bundesliga data to measure the effect of crowds on player performance. I compared 120 matches with crowds against 98 matches without. The results showed total successful passes up 7.3%, sprints above 30km/h down 11%, and goals from set pieces up 14%. I sent a 62-page report by internal email without telling my boss. There are evenings I sit with data longer than with people, and I have never felt lonely. I mention this because it is directly relevant: when a familiar environment disappears — whether it is a crowd in the stands or a homeland left behind — people change their behaviour in ways only data can detect. The O5BM project is trying to detect exactly those behavioural changes, only at the scale of a lifetime. When the stadium has no spectators, players' behaviour tells the truth. And when a Black man over 50 sits down to talk about the plywood sheet he used as a table tennis table at age 12 in Zaria, he is also telling the truth in a way no achievement table can record. Notably, the project collects not only stories but also objects. The appeal for photographs, equipment, and other items shows the project is aiming for a museum-style collection, not stopping at oral history. This is a larger ambition in terms of material culture. It means the project wants to preserve things that are tangible, displayable, touchable — not only stories that fly on the wind. In the archival field, the difference between a story and an object is large. A story can fade with time and memory. An object exists independently of its teller. An old bat is still an old bat, even when its owner has forgotten the match it once played in. From a data angle, a collection of objects has higher value than a set of stories, because it is less distorted by subjectivity. But it also poses preservation challenges. Who will keep these objects? Where will they be stored? Under what conditions? And will they be returned to the community when the project ends, or will they sit forever in an archive the community can no longer access? These are important governance questions, and they are often skipped in the early enthusiastic phase of a heritage project. There is another aspect I want to analyse: the relationship between a national governing body and a community organisation. When Table Tennis England hosts O5BM's call-out, it does two things at once. First, it provides a platform and institutional credibility for a small project. Second, it sends a policy signal: that the governing body cares about diversifying its participant base and its own historical self-image. This is a signal I think needs watching over the next 6 to 12 months. In many sports, national governing bodies face a problem of historical image. Their official history is usually written by those in power, and often omits the communities that contributed quietly. Opening the door to community heritage projects is one way to rewrite that history in a more inclusive direction. But it can also be seen as a public-relations move if it is not accompanied by substantive change in resources. I do not have enough data to conclude which case this is. I only note that the signal has been sent, and how it is pursued will decide its real meaning. A counter-intuitive angle on this project concerns the nature of memory as a data source. In research communities, people often say correlation is not causation. But there is a less-cited principle: memory is not history. When a man recalls that he played table tennis on a plywood sheet in Zaria, he is recalling a memory — a version reconstructed over decades. That memory may be emotionally accurate, but not necessarily accurate in date or detail. This does not make memory worthless. It only means the project needs to treat memory as a special kind of data, with its own epistemological limits. A serious heritage project will not present memory as objective fact, but as a subjective understanding of the past. Here, I think of another story from my career. In 2026, when Germany were eliminated from the World Cup after a 0-2 defeat to South Korea, I wrote an analysis showing Germany created only 0.48 xG, while South Korea defended in a 5-4-1 block with an average PPDA of 6.2. That is, Germany was not pressed — it lost its own rhythm. The piece was attacked by a group of male readers with two words: a woman guessing. I did not argue. I simply posted the 40-page raw Opta data file. The day Germany lost to South Korea taught me that accuracy can be very lonely. I tell that story because it is directly relevant to how I view the O5BM project. When a group of people is deemed unqualified to tell its own story, recording their testimony becomes a political act. People ask me whether girls watch football. I answer with 92 pages of data. And when a Black man over 50 is asked about the plywood sheet he once used as a table tennis table, he is being empowered to tell his own story in his own language. That is something no ranking table can ever do. It must be stressed that this project has no competitive content whatsoever. No elite athletes, no rankings, no matches, no tactics. Any attempt to impose a performance-analysis frame on it is speculation. This is a story about participation, about inclusion, and about the social meaning of a sport. And I think that is exactly why it deserves serious analysis, rather than being filed away in the drawer of minor reports. From an industry-transmission angle, the project's impact is concentrated in the grassroots base and the inclusion agenda. Its impact on the equipment market is neutral and small. Its impact on the commercial ecosystem of events is neutral and small. Its impact on player commercial value is neutral and small. But its impact on the grassroots base is positive, small to medium, and its impact on policy and capital is positive, small, in the short to medium term. This is an impact model I call bottom-up transmission: it does not generate big headlines, but it strengthens the sport's foundation layer. There is a strategic lesson this project suggests for grassroots table tennis organisations everywhere, including in Vietnam. The lesson is: cultural and heritage funding streams can differ from traditional sport funding streams. If a table tennis organisation knows how to position its story as a heritage story — about memory, about migration, about community — it can reach resources that were previously out of reach. This is an idea I consider transferable, and I have not seen it widely applied. From my experience following matches and community programmes, I have observed that the most sustainable initiatives are not the loudest, but the ones with diversified funding structures. A project dependent on a single funding source is a fragile project. A project that combines public, community, and volunteer sources is one with more lasting vitality. The O5BM project, in its current structure, depends heavily on a single fund. That is a structural weakness I want to state plainly. Another aspect to analyse is the role of the individual contact. Enitan Kane is named as the contact person. In community projects, relying on a single contact person creates a risk that governance scholars call key-person risk. If that person leaves, the project may lose momentum and network. This is not a criticism of the individual, but an observation about structure. A sustainable project needs more than one human anchor point. Back to the central question the call-out asks: what did you use for a table and bat. This question, when put to hundreds of men of different ages, will produce a dataset about the material conditions of grassroots table tennis across decades and continents. This is the kind of data no statistical agency collects, because it is too small, too private, and too hard to standardise. But that is exactly why it is precious. Large datasets answer large questions. Small datasets, carefully collected, answer questions no one thought needed asking. I have always believed that the value of a dataset lies not in its size but in its ability to change how we see a problem. A collection of hundreds of short answers about tables and bats may not change how we understand the pinnacle of world table tennis. But it can change how we understand how a sport seeps into the lives of ordinary people, across borders, across generations, and across great historical upheavals. There is one thing I think this project gets right methodologically: it starts from the concrete. Not from an abstract concept of heritage. But from a specific question about a specific object. This is an approach I always support. When you want to understand a large phenomenon, start from a small, observable detail. A plywood sheet. A net made from rubber bands. A cheap plastic ball. From those small details, a larger picture gradually emerges. I remember once following an underrated player at a major tournament. While the media focused only on the stars, I noticed a substitute player running an average of 11.8 km per match, with 67% of his runs into the space behind the opposing defenders — the highest rate in the tournament. I wrote a piece about that player. Two weeks later, the player's assistant emailed to thank me, saying the piece had helped the player understand his own value. I tell this story because it taught me something: sometimes the greatest value of recording data is not to prove something to others, but to help the person involved see themselves. The O5BM project has the potential to do the same at community scale. When a 60-year-old man sends in the story of the first table tennis table of his life, and that story is recorded, valued, and preserved, he receives a recognition he may never have received in his whole life. That is a social impact that cannot be measured in money, but can be felt by observing the community's response. On risk, I rate this project low to medium. Ethical and competitive risk is low, since there is no competitive element. Delivery and funding risk is medium, since the project's existence depends on an undecided grant and on sufficient community response. Personal-data risk is low, thanks to the consent-before-publication commitment. Key-person risk is low to medium. Overall, this is a project with relatively well-controlled risk, whose main weakness lies in its dependence on external resources. What I want to watch going forward is the funder's decision. An announcement of funding or rejection will determine the project's continuity. I also want to watch the volume of community contributions, since that is an indicator of real momentum. And I want to watch whether Table Tennis England continues to support under-represented community groups, because that will signal how serious the diversity commitment is. From the perspective of someone living far from home, I find this project touches something very familiar. Migrants carry very few objects. They cannot carry a whole stadium, a whole club, a whole network of friends. But they can carry a way of playing, a habit, a memory. Table tennis, with its simplicity, is one of the easiest things to carry. It demands no large space, no expensive equipment, no complex organisational structure. It demands only two people and a flat surface. That is exactly why it became one of the most carried sports among migrants. This explains why the story of table tennis in Zaria, in the Caribbean, and in Britain is one continuous story. It is not three separate stories. It is one story about a sport that travelled with people across continents, adapted to each circumstance, and survived across generations. Every plywood sheet, every homemade net, every cheap ball is a link in that migration chain. I think this is the deepest reason the project deserves attention. Not because it will produce a large dataset. But because it records a phenomenon that large datasets always miss: the quiet persistence of a sport in the lives of ordinary people. A traveller does not need a compass if he has read enough data about the winds. And these men, though they had no compass, have travelled through many winds. From a sport-diffusion history angle, this project can contribute to a field still short of material: the history of table tennis in post-colonial and immigrant communities. This is a field where official documents are often silent. National federations record the achievements of elite athletes, but rarely the activities of community clubs. As a result, we have a large gap in understanding how this sport actually operates at grassroots level. When people talk about inclusion and diversity in sport, they usually focus on the present: how to get more people participating, how to distribute opportunities more evenly. But there is a rarely noticed dimension: the historical dimension. Who is remembered, and who is forgotten in a sport's official story. Recording the memories of Black men over 50 is one way to correct that imbalance. It does not change the past, but it changes how we remember the past. One more point I want to raise is the two-way nature of memory data. When a person contributes his story to a heritage project, he does not only give data. He also receives something: recognition, a sense of belonging, and a feeling that his experience matters. This is a form of exchange I call non-market value exchange. It appears in no balance sheet, but it is an important part of the project's real value. I also want to speak about the time dimension of data. Some data has permanent value, some only value over a short period. Personal memory belongs to the first kind. A story about a childhood in Zaria will still have value 50 years from now, perhaps even more. Meanwhile, a report about a friendly match loses value after a few days. This is an interesting paradox: data that seems small and private has a longer lifespan than data that seems large and public. This has implications for how we value recording projects. We tend to overvalue what creates immediate resonance, and undervalue what accumulates quietly. But in the long run, quiet archives often become the most precious source material for later generations. A researcher 50 years from now will be able to use these stories to understand a historical period that official documents did not record. On organisational structure, this project is an example of cooperation between three tiers: a community organisation, a national governing body, and a cultural funding body. This three-tier model is increasingly common in grassroots sport. The community organisation provides the connection to the community and local knowledge. The national governing body provides credibility and a distribution channel. The funder provides resources. Each tier has its own role, and success depends on all three operating in sync. However, this three-tier model also has weaknesses. It creates interdependence, and interdependence creates fragility. If one tier withdraws, the whole structure can collapse. In this case, if the funder does not award the grant, the project loses its main resource. If Table Tennis England stops supporting, the project loses its distribution channel. If O5BM loses its organisational capacity, the project loses its heart. So the project's sustainability depends on maintaining all three tiers' involvement. From my experience working with transfer datasets, I have observed a rule: the most sustainable deals are those with multiple layers of protective clauses. Likewise, the most sustainable projects are those with multiple layers of structural protection. A project with a single funding source is like a deal with a single clause — fragile against volatility. A project with multiple resources, multiple human anchor points, and multiple contingency scenarios is one with better resilience. I want to return to a question I always ask myself before concluding anything: how will this data change when the context changes? For the O5BM project, the context could change in at least three ways. First, if the funder awards the grant, the project moves from collection to production, and the question of output quality becomes important. Second, if community response is low, the project must adjust its outreach strategy. Third, if the socio-political context around ethnic issues changes, the project's meaning changes with it. Each scenario will produce a different dataset, and a different reading. On fairness and representation, this project makes an important contribution. It focuses on a group often overlooked in both sports data and mainstream sports stories. The Black man over 50 rarely appears in sports reports, except in stories about social problems. Placing him at the centre of a story about joy, memory, and connection is a change of narrative frame. And the frame matters, because it decides how a group is perceived. I remember a colleague once told me that datasets are never neutral, because choosing what to measure and what to ignore is already a value-laden act. I agree. The project choosing to measure the memories of this group is a value-laden act, and it is a value I share. In an industry where attention usually focuses on the young, fast, and famous, making space for the old, slow, and unknown is a necessary balance. From an industry-transmission angle, I think this project can inspire similar initiatives in many places. For example, in Vietnam, table tennis is a popular sport in schools and community clubs. There is a generation of players who have been attached to the sport since the subsidy era, when equipment was scarce and people often made their own tables and bats. Those memories are also fading with the generation that holds them. A similar recording project could have great value, not only in sport but also in culture. This is one of the things I find interesting about the O5BM project: it is not merely a local project. It is a transferable model. Its approach — starting from a specific detail, tied to a specific moment, cooperating with institutional bodies, and aiming at cultural funding streams — can be applied in many different contexts. On long-term outcomes, I see three scenarios. In the worst case, the grant application is rejected, the project stalls after the call-out, and those who contributed memories feel their expectations were unmet. In the base case, the call-out generates enough testimony and artefacts to strengthen the application, and the project continues with contributors' consent. In the optimistic case, the project is funded, delivers a heritage archive, and strengthens Table Tennis England's community and equity credentials. I think the base case is the most feasible, based on how the project has been positioned. But I am also aware that the worst case cannot be entirely ruled out, since it depends on an external decision the project does not control. This is the nature of any project dependent on public funding: you do not control your own fate. There is a philosophical aspect I want to touch on before finishing. In the modern sports world, we are obsessed with measurement. We measure speed, distance, probability, value. But there are things that cannot be measured, and those are often the most important. The joy of a child hitting a ball for the first time. The connection of two older men playing together in a community hall. The memory of a distant homeland, evoked by a plywood sheet. The O5BM project is trying to record these unmeasurable things, and turn them into a form of preservable data. Data does not lie; it is only the reader who has not been honest enough. And sometimes, honesty requires admitting that some data does not sit in tables, but in memory. This data is harder to process, harder to standardise, harder to verify. But it is not therefore less important. It only requires a different method, and a different humility. I will keep following this project. Not because it will produce a large dataset. But because it raises a question I think the sports industry needs to answer: whom do we remember, and whom do we forget. The answer to that question is not in the rankings. It is in the stories we choose to tell, and the stories we choose to skip. If, 50 years from now, a researcher wants to understand how table tennis passed through the lives of migrant men, where will he find the answer? Not in the archives of federations, which preserve only the achievements of winners. But in projects like this one, where the memories of ordinary people are recorded before they vanish with the generation that holds them. That is why, despite having no scoreline, this project still deserves to be recorded as a notable event in the industry.