“A coach came to my kindergarten when I was six,” Kai Zhang says, “and he just, like, touched my body, my shoulder, that kind of stuff, to see my potential.” Photograph by Henry Lee

Five years ago, dipping into the small fortune that his crossword and Sudoku puzzles have brought him, the Times crossword editor Will Shortz bought an old “junk dealer’s warehouse,” near his home in Pleasantville, New York, and—because puzzles aren’t his only obsession—turned fourteen thousand square feet of it into a world-class Ping-Pong facility. In late October, Westchester Table Tennis Center hosted one of Shortz’s monthly club tournaments, which are the largest in the United States, boasting as much as seven thousand dollars in cash prizes and a four-star rating from USA Table Tennis. They regularly draw top talent from New York and beyond: Togo, Côte d’Ivoire, Poland, India, Mexico, Switzerland, and, of course, China.

Table tennis is one of the most popular sports in China. Since it became an Olympic sport, in 1988, Chinese players have won every gold medal but one on the women’s side, and the majority on the men’s side, too (including four of the past five). The silver and bronze medals have also mostly gone to China. This hasn’t come easily. A Chinese child as young as six might be persuaded to attend an intensive table-tennis academy—where, to judge from one young man's experience, he’ll be expected to play for some six to eight hours a day, six and a half days a week, well into his teens, if he shows real talent. By ten, he may receive no other formal schooling. The best Chinese players can have careers in the game, earn money from sponsors, and a handful, every four years, attain Olympic glory.

Those just below this level sometimes move to other countries, where reaching the Olympics in table tennis is a little easier and, not insignificantly, using Facebook is allowed. One such young man is the eighteen-year-old Kai Zhang, currently ranked No. 1 in the United States. He trains at W.T.T.C., where his sponsor is Shortz. What does their sponsorship arrangement entail? “Well,” Shortz told me recently, as we watched Zhang warm up for the October Open, “he lives with me.” Indeed, one of the most promising young table-tennis players in the United States has, in an unlikely twist of fate, come to share a roof with the “puzzlemaster,” “enigmatologist” and NPR personality Will Shortz, who is sixty-three and had, until recently, lived quite contently without children.

On a recent Friday, I joined Zhang and Shortz at the New York première of a documentary film that the Los Angeles Times describes as “table tennis’ ‘Hoop Dreams.’ ” In less than three years, Zhang has become fluent in English, which wasn’t taught to him in China. Shortz has helped: while driving into the city that evening, they practiced SAT words: “incongruous,” “unfettered.” (Zhang, a junior, would be taking the PSAT the next week.)

“Remember ‘fanatical’?” Shortz asked Zhang.

“Like you,” Zhang laughed.

They first met in China, in 2011, when Shortz was visiting Beijing. Shortz believes that he holds the record for having played in the most table-tennis clubs in the U.S.: more than two hundred and fifty. He has also played table tennis on each of the past one thousand one hundred and twenty days—and counting. The last time he didn’t play was October 3, 2012: “I was in Kraljevica, Croatia,” he told me, “for the World Puzzle Championship. Of course, I’d lined up a local club to play at that day, but I had trouble finding it—the street signs in Croatian were not helpful—and I finally arrived just as they were turning off the lights. That was the only day in the entire year that I missed.”

Like puzzle-making, table tennis does not require imposing physicality: Zhang is five feet seven, weighs a hundred and twenty pounds, and has played table tennis almost every day for the past twelve years. For him, it long ago became “like a job.” He didn’t smile at all when Shortz first saw him compete, even when he won. “A coach came to my kindergarten when I was six,” Zhang told me, “and he just, like, touched my body, my shoulder, that kind of stuff, to see my potential.”

“Isn’t that amazing?” Shortz said. “He’d never even picked up a paddle and, just from his build and the way he walks, the coach knew he had potential.”

In October of 2012, Zhang moved to the States to train for the Olympics—his dream, he says—and to try to earn citizenship. After a few months, he ended up in Pleasantville, largely because of the top quality of Shortz’s new club. As for Shortz himself, Zhang said, “I knew he was sort of famous, and a very good guy.”

“I did everything I could to find a place for him to stay,” Shortz told me. “I talked to the Pleasantville International Association. I went to a church. I went to a film about table tennis and made an announcement.” No one stepped forward. “So I decided I would own this. I’ve never had a kid, and suddenly a fifteen-year-old lands in my house.” He fixed up the third floor. “My biggest concern was that he’d be noisy. I work at home and need my quiet. But he’s thoughtful, considerate. It’s worked out just fine. It’s an interesting experience in life.”

Shortz became Zhang’s legal guardian. Since then, he has found himself doing fatherly things for the teen-ager, who, since he is close to his size, has inherited many of Shortz’s old clothes. (Shortz tends to wear “Mr. Rogers”-style sweaters and slacks.)

“He had a class project this week involving W. E. B. DuBois,” Shortz said. “One of the options was to make a puzzle, which he presented today.”

“Me and Will made it together,” Zhang said. “A word-search puzzle.”

“You have a grid of letters,” Shortz explained. “And normally you have a list of words at the side that you find and circle. But we made it more interesting: Kai wrote a thumbnail biography of DuBois and left out eight significant words. Like, ‘He was the first African-American to get a Ph.D. from ____.’ Seven letters. And in the word-search grid there are those eight words, which you find and circle.”

“I think they liked it,” Zhang offered. “But nobody could complete it.”

“They only had ten minutes,” Shortz said, as we headed from dinner to Cinema Village.

The film “Top Spin” follows three young table-tennis-playing Americans—Ariel Hsing, Michael Landers, and Lily Zhang—over three years as they try to qualify for the Olympics. Late last year, Kai lost to Landers, who, at fifteen, became the U.S. national champion. (He is now studying at New York University’s Stern School of Business.) “Kai beats almost everybody,” Shortz said. “But he lost to Michael. And it hurt him to the quick. Not just to lose but to lose to someone who was born and raised in America. We had long conversations about that. He said he’ll commit suicide if he ever loses to me! I think I have a fifty-fifty chance if he spots me nine points, though.” (Shortz has a rating of 1,850 on the U.S.A.T.T. system, while Zhang's rating is around 2,700. This is roughly the gap between a decent junior-college athlete and an all-star-level professional.)