Fifty-one year-old Robert Blackwell, Jr., a Chicagoan via Philadelphia and Kansas, has had his hands in many different industries. He’s worked at IBM and in the diamond business. He’s been an options trader and a tech entrepreneur.
But he seems to have found his true niche in, of all things, table tennis.
In 2002, Blackwell founded a company called Killerspin, based in Chicago. The idea came to him when he was asked to help host a table tennis exhibition in Chicago in the early 2000s, an event meant to celebrate the anniversary of the good-natured exchange of table tennis players between the U.S. and China later known, of course, as Ping Pong Diplomacy. (The difference between “ping pong” and “table tennis,” you ask? Nothing. They are the same sport. “Ping pong” is merely a phrase that was trademarked by Parker Brothers and is now owned by Escalade Sports.)
Blackwell saw something at that event. Here was a sport, not unlike skateboarding, that was dominated by white suburban teen males (n the U.S., anyway) and was played everywhere. “It was something many people did, but there was no leading brand,” says Blackwell. Perhaps an even bigger factor: The game is the national sport of the world’s growing economic behemoth, China.
Thus, Killerspin, which Blackwell calls a “content and tech company.” The “content” is the three or four exhibitions hosted by Killerspin in the U.S., which act as hospitality events in places like Chicago and the Mohegan Sun in Connecticut. The events bring together the top players in the world, most of whom are from China. “It’s the only time the top athletes from China come to the U.S.,” says Blackwell. The events have been broadcast on ESPN. More recently, they’ve been shown on China’s media giant, CCTV. Notice a name that keeps popping up here? Blackwell seems to want to position his company to catch some cross-branding genie in a bottle: China’s biggest sport played here in the U.S. One of Blackwell’s ideas is that the table tennis will attract some of the annual 1.6 million Chinese who visit the U.S. “These are very valuable tourists,” he says.
The events are somewhat different from what you might have seen during the table tennis competition at the London Olympics. “It’s WWE meets table tennis,” says Blackwell. The players are introduced by beautiful women. The players are dressed in flashier outfits. One of those players is Biba Golic, the product developer for Killerspin and a former Serbian national team member who is now known as the “Anna Kournikova of table tennis.” (She's appeared in ESPN The Magazine's Body Issue.)
Blackwell says his goal with the events is something “sexy, edgy but not offensive.”
The technology part comes with the company’s products. The utterly slick-looking tables retail for up to $3,500. Blackwell says Phil Mickelson owns two. Ms. Kournikova herself bought one for boyfriend, Enrique Iglesias. Killerspin also produces paddles.
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