When Ralph Gerraty walks into a ping-pong arena, people shiver. The extra-powerful air conditioning that Ralph requires for his matches makes everyone and everything cold—except for his game, which blazes like a Wesleyan student on Foss Hill.
“The great thing about ping-pong,” said Ralph, “is that you can play it in any state—New Mexico, New Jersey, sober, on E. It’s a game that will give old-timers a chance to take out their dentures and throw it down in a punk-ass way on some poor sucker.”
So when the ping-pong juggernaut walked into the Freeman Athletic Center this past Saturday to compete in the first annual Cheez-it Open, the murmurings began.
People know Ralph is good, Ralph knows he’s good, people who have never heard of Ralph know he’s good, and certain animals such as cats know he’s good.
“To put it simply,” says Lin Ma, the number two ranked player in the International Table Tennis Federation, “Ralph is good. If I wanted to put it in a complex way, I would say that Ralph’s game is like a waterfall made of gold that flows gently through a small village exhibiting a photoelectric effect and causing every person who sees it to make a facial expression that looks like they just received fellatio but don’t know from whom.”
Ralph mercilessly slaughtered his opponents with his axe-like forehand slice. One opponent chose not to shake Ralph’s hand after the match, but rather point a finger at him and say, “You’re good you, you’re good,” to which Ralph cavalierly responded, “You got that from Robert DeNiro in Analyze This!”
In the last round, Ralph was up against his long-time nemesis, Eli Scherer. Ralph served the ball in his distinctive style, which his most devoted protégés and stalkers describe as the most erotic and alien-like action ever witnessed. One stalker went so far as to say “I feel like I’m watching an alien bending over.”
Ralph decided to play the match with his eyes closed and use a paddle taped to his navel. He won every point. Once Ralph left the Freeman Athletic Center, hordes of people and animals greeted him with glee. “When you’re a ping-god, these things don’t bother you. You just play day in and day out and you have so many women to keep you company at nights that when you rack up the Guinness World Record for women slept with and instances of gonorrhea, you just chuckle and say to yourself—’damn, I’m good. I’m so, so damn good.”