A ball only he could see clearly

Shanghai, 2005. Men’s singles round of 16 at the 48th World Table Tennis Championships.

Liu Guozheng of China against the German star Timo Boll. The stakes were anything but casual: Chinese men’s table tennis was in a slump, having lost the world singles title at both the 2003 Worlds and the 2004 Olympics. The whole squad was carrying that weight into Shanghai, desperate to turn the page.

The match went to a deciding game, then to the final points. Liu Guozheng started badly, trailing 3:8, then miraculously clawed back to 7:8; the score ground its way to 9-all, 10-all. Boll reached match point first, Liu saved it. Boll took the next point — 12:11, match point again.

At that moment Boll attacked with everything he had. Liu Guozheng could only manage a weak block — the ball flew off the table and hit the floor.

The hall went silent. The umpire signaled the end of the match. Everyone believed Liu Guozheng had lost: Liu himself was dazed, already accepting the result, and Boll’s coach was getting up to rush onto the floor and celebrate.

Only one person didn’t move. Boll raised his right hand.

He pointed at the edge of the table: the ball had clipped the edge.

It was the faintest of touches — too faint for the professional umpires to see, faint enough that even his opponent thought the ball was long.

“Fair play left me no choice”

Play resumed. Liu Guozheng took the game 15:13, and with it the whole match.

Boll had just lost a World Championship match that could have reshaped his career.

Asked about it afterwards, he said one quiet thing:

“I wanted to win, but my heart told me I couldn’t do it that way. I saw the ball clip the edge. That’s how the game is — fair play. I had to do it. Fair play left me no choice.”

This was no staged gesture. Nobody understood the weight of that point better than Boll: stay silent, and he was one step closer to a world title. He chose to speak.

He was not alone

Two years later, at the 2007 World Championships in Zagreb, men’s singles quarterfinal: Ma Lin against the Belarusian great Vladimir Samsonov.

In the match, Samsonov’s smash landed off the table, but the umpire called it an edge ball and awarded him the point. Ma Lin pointed to the big-screen replay and asked for the call to be reversed; the umpire ignored him. When play restarted, Samsonov did something that brought the entire hall to its feet — he deliberately served into the net and gave the point back to Ma Lin.

At those World Championships, the loudest applause did not go to the champion.

These moments are precious precisely because of where they happen — in situations where staying silent would have won.

An opponent, and a friend

Boll holds a special place in Chinese fans’ hearts for reasons well beyond that edge ball.

Seven Olympic Games, four Olympic medals, two World Cup singles titles, nine World Championship podium finishes, a career-high world No. 1. At the 2005 World Cup in Belgium, he beat three Chinese mainstays in a row — Wang Liqin, Ma Lin and Wang Hao — to take the title, still regarded as the classic foreign campaign against the Chinese juggernaut.

From Kong Linghui and Liu Guoliang, to Wang Liqin, Ma Lin and Wang Hao, to Ma Long, Fan Zhendong and Wang Chuqin — he spent more than twenty years trading blows with generation after generation of Chinese table tennis.

At the Paris 2024 Olympic Games, in the men’s team quarterfinal, 43-year-old Boll played the last international match of his career. The whole crowd rose to applaud, the arena screens played a tribute film, coaches, teammates and opponents came over to embrace him. The 43-year-old wept.

Ma Long has said that Boll is respected by every table tennis player — “not just for his game, but for the person he is.” Boll posted a photo with Ma Long, captioned with a single word: Legend.

A closing thought

Deng Yaping once said something that fits here perfectly:

“A great player doesn’t just win matches — they win their opponent’s respect.”

Boll never did get that world title. But years later, when people talk about that ball in Shanghai in 2005, what they remember is not who won — it’s that one man chose honesty when silence was available.

For everyone who plays, that scene points to a simpler question: what do you do when you’re certain no one is watching?

Your answer is your sportsmanship.

Full profile of the German star: Timo Boll; the gentleman who gave Ma Lin a point back in 2007: Samsonov. And a 12:11 score in a deciding game can only exist under the 11-point system — when did the rules change.