The sound of ping pong balls hitting back and forth immediately filled Pleasantville’s Westchester Table Tennis Center, as it held its November tournament.

“This is the quietest we’re going to get,” said Will Shortz, owner of the center, as he squeezed his chair into the only corner that didn’t have a ping pong table in its vicinity.

Shortz’s history with ping pong

Born and raised in Indiana, Shortz started playing ping pong as a kid in the family recreation room. By high school, he won several trophies, which are in the display case at the entrance of the table tennis center.

“Anything from the 1960s is mine,” he said.

However, after launching a career in crossword puzzles, he took an extended break from playing in 1986. It wasn’t until 15 years later, in 2001, when he rediscovered his passion for the sport.

“A friend found a table tennis club, here in Westchester, that played a community center,” he said. “So I picked up the game again [and] started playing two nights a week. Then, we found another place to play in Westchester, so I moved up to three and four nights a week. And then we got another place and I was up to six nights a week.”

After serving as a manager for a club, Shortz eventually opened his own, in 2011, with friend and three-time Caribbean Champion, Robert Roberts. The club, which Roberts manages, is the only place in the U.S. to host four-star monthly tournaments, according to Shortz.

“We’ve held these [monthly tournaments] since January 2012,” he said. “We offer $6,000 in prizes every month, with $2,000 for the first prize. Since we’ve started this, we’ve awarded more than half a million dollars in prizes.”

With a variety of other events, from handicap tournaments to a weekly program, held on Wednesday nights, for players with Parkinson’s disease, there is an everlasting range of ages, abilities, and one common love.                                  

“It’s a matter of training your body to perform instinctively or automatically in certain situations,” Shortz said. “During a match, the challenge is to explore and exploit your opponent’s weaknesses and meanwhile, covering up your own weaknesses,” he added.

Today, at age 67, Shortz has a USA Table Tennis (USATT) rating of 1788, which, he said, is a little above average for tournament play.

While his rating may not reach the best players of America, who have a rating over 2700, Shortz has started a record of his own: having the most consecutive days of playing table tennis. To date, he has played for more than 2,600 consecutive days.

Shortz even celebrated an earlier milestone over the summer.

“I have not missed a day since Oct. 3, 2012.” He laughed to himself. “There is no one else insane enough to do this.”

Roberts agrees and said this about Shortz:

Shortz’s other passion

In addition to table tennis, Shortz has another obsession: crossword puzzles. He started making puzzles as early as eight or nine years old and sold his first one at 14.

Through the Individualized Major Program at Indiana University, Shortz even earned an undergraduate degree in enigmatology, which is the study of puzzles.

“I took courses on word puzzles, math puzzles, logic puzzles, the psychology of puzzles, and crossword magazines,” he said. “My thesis was on the history of American word puzzles before 1860.”

After a 15-year run at Games Magazine, Shortz became a crossword editor for The New York Times, where he has been since 1993.

According to Shortz, the biggest part of the job is looking at crossword submissions, with the help of his two assistants. Every week, he receives more than 125 submissions.

“I only publish seven, but everything needs to be looked at and replied to,” he explained. After a puzzle is accepted, it’s allotted for a particular day of the week. The puzzles also increase in difficulty as the week goes on.

“Mondays are the easiest,” Shortz said. “It builds up to very hard on Friday and Saturday. Sunday has a larger grid, but it’s like medium in difficulty.”

When it comes to editing the accepted puzzles, in his Pleasantville home, Shortz has a specific system. He noted that he fact-checks every clue and then edits the puzzles for the correct level of difficulty, as well as its freshness.

Generally, it’s common for Shortz to rewrite a majority of the clues.

“I can change as little as five or 10 percent of the clues for someone who writes really good clues, but I can also change 90 to 95 percent of the clues for someone who gave me a fantastic grid or theme, but wasn’t any good at clue writing,” he said.

Shortz satisfies his interest with puzzles in other ways, too, by serving as the chairman for the World Puzzle Federation and the program director for the National Puzzlers’ League convention. He also hosts the weekend puzzles edition every Sunday on NPR, from the comfort of his home.

“I keep myself busy,” he said.

Balancing the two

While Shortz does make time to play table tennis every day after work, he noted that work comes first and it has to get done. However, he credited the sport for keeping him sane.

“If I didn’t have this, life certainly wouldn’t be as interesting,” he said.

Shortz also mentioned how his two different passions are similar and create stability within his life: