When Rachel Smith took her nine-year-old son, Ivor, for ping-pong lessons, she took him to a Manhattan table tennis club she’d heard good things about. What she didn’t discover until later was that ...

The point of a game is usually to win ... but not for Pico Iyer. After years of playing ping-pong at a Japanese community center, he's learned a different lesson: competition can be "an act of love." ...