Matthew Syed: An unlikely hero

Matthew Syed is England's Number 1 table-tennis player, and is going for his fourth Commonwealth gold next week. But he also has a first from Oxford and dreams of becoming a Labour MP. HOWARD JACOBSON (left) meets a man of many parts

If Matthew Syed were a sprinter, or a gymnast, or a synchro-swimmer even, much would be made of his going for a fourth consecutive Commonwealth gold medal for England in Manchester next week. But Matthew Syed plays table tennis, and though we all play table tennis – perhaps because we all play table tennis – we are unable to believe in it as a sport. Ping-pong, for God's sake. How can you be passionate, let alone patriotic, about ping-pong?

Well, there was a time when table tennis attracted spectators in their thousands, lovers of the game's geometry and existential wit, enthusiasts not only of intellect in action but of spectacle, for nothing in sport is more spectacular than a player retrieving an object barely bigger than an eyeball just inches from the ground, 20 or 30 feet back from the table, almost in the street, almost in another venue sometimes, making one little room an everywhere. Think Agassi throwing up a lob on Centre Court while playing on Court Number One and you get something of the drama that once was table tennis, and still is when Syed's playing.

He is the game's last defensive player. It was the invention of the lightning-fast, silent sponge-bat in the 1950s that removed the give-and-take from table tennis, smothering the ball's talkativeness, undermining the old enthralling dialogue between attack and defence; and technology has been making that contest unequal ever since. Changes in racket surfaces, regulations reducing the ratio of height to width of pimples (don't laugh – these things matter) and glues which make fast rubbers even faster have all favoured attacking table tennis. Now the game is so fast you cannot see it. In place of probing conversation – one player gradually finding out all there is to know about another – the three-ball kill: serve, return, smash. The most recent innovation, a bigger ball which spins less, has delivered the coup de grace to the defender, who relies on subtle variations of pace and drag. To play anything but marauding table tennis now – wham-bam-thank-you-ma'am – is to approach the game in the spirit of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, wanting to be thrashed.

I put this to Syed, who has an Oxford first in Philosophy, Politics and Economics, and so is familiar with perversion in all its varieties. He ponders what I say. He has a lean, austere look, his head shaven for celerity, his skin the colour of marinated olives, his eyes close together, like a bird's, as they are supposed to be if you are a ball player. Bjorn Borg has the same eyes. So, I like to think, have I. But when Syed laughs he shows an unexpected voluptuousness: beneath the man of concentration and composure, a sensualist. "I've always loved the aesthetic of going back and playing from the floor," he tells me. He is standing now, showing me, legs bent, chopping low – a sweet parabola of a forehand, like taking the heads off a bed of daisies with a scimitar – almost thinking the ball back on to the table, the way I have seen him do in tournaments, bringing audiences to their feet, the one crowd-pleaser left in table tennis.

"There's something beautiful about the idea of sustaining the rally," he goes on, "having that lovely flow. Just smashing it past your opponent – I see nothing in that. I prefer to be the guy against the barriers."

Our birdy, ball-players' eyes meet. The guy against the barriers, eh? But he wants me to know that he is a metaphysician not a deviant. "I like impregnability based on vulnerability," he says. "The technology, the geometry – everything stacked against you. Doing it against the odds. I think there is a grandeur to that."

It turns out that he approaches all games this way – impregnable in his vulnerability – even Monopoly. "How do you play Monopoly defensively?" I laugh. He laughs back. "I build up my portfolio slowly. A few houses here, a few houses there. I don't rush to put up hotels."

For someone not rushing he has a lot on his plate. As England No 1, he is forever travelling, competing in Japan and France and Germany for much of the year, where the money is. He broadcasts. He writes for a national newspaper. He acts in an advisory capacity to the English Table Tennis Association, by whom he is seen as some sort of redeemer figure, bringing back excitement, publicity and who knows, maybe even audiences, to the game. To which end he has recently conjured a Commonwealth Masters tournament out of the ether – conceived it, entrepreneured it, impressario'd it, competed in it, and got the BBC's Grandstand to show it. Suddenly, as though at his command, the game on which telly turned its back is returned to the mainstream. "I found organising it immensely fulfilling," he says. "You could see what it achieved and what it inspired." But whether it will inspire other defenders of his quality is less certain, and without them, how many of us will want to watch?

If he is the redeemer, he doesn't yet walk on water. Else he would have beaten John Redwood against whom he stood, as a Labour candidate, in the last general election. As a one-task-at-a-time man myself, I am astounded by Syed's versatility. He looks too slenderly strung to be taking on so many things at once. But then he admits that Foot-and-Mouth helped him when he was fighting Redwood: had the election not been postponed, he would have had to miss the World and Commonwealth championships. As it was, he could nip abroad, win his gold, and be back in time to canvass. Next election he will be competing less and who knows – he takes a long look into the middle distance here – maybe trying for a safe Labour seat.

He is on some mission of seriousness beyond the ordinary. As with the balls no one else can get back, so with the chances life has thrown at him. They confer an obligation beyond the merely competitive. How many times has he used the word "purity" today? Purity of game, purity of stroke, purity of purpose. There is religion in the family; his mother the daughter of a Welsh pastor, his father a Pakistani who converted to Christianity. And along with religion, a white-hot passion for reason, education and self-improvement. Both his parents took degrees late in life. Syed himself studied for Oxford under his own tutelage after leaving school. His father wrote down Balliol College as first choice on his son's application form.

Syed remembers his father weeping on the morning Callaghan conceded defeat to Mrs Thatcher, inconsolable because the party which had brought in the Race Relations Act was out of power. He talks about it with such vividness, opening his arms wide as though embracing a globe, extending his attenuated fingers into the past, I forget how young he must have been at the time and ask if that election mattered to him, too. "It mattered to me afterwards," he tells me, "because it mattered to him." And so he duplicated the experience Freudianly in 1992, while he was competing in the European Championships in Stuttgart, on hearing that John Major had beaten Neil Kinnock. He remembers the date: 9 April 1992. "I was absolutely distraught. We played Hungary and I lost to a bloke who had never beaten me before."

It is not certain he will win a fourth Commonwealth gold. The odds are against him. He is in his thirties now. A formidable Chinese-Canadian player has entered the lists. The glues get speedier. The ball gets bigger and less spinny. The voracious hitters carry all before them. And he has a lot on his mind. But that seems to be how he likes it.