Having a ball with the pros

After falling to fellow Olympian pingpong player Crystal Huang in the first round, three-time U.S. Olympian and eight-time national champion Gao Jun rallied to beat Huang in a best-two-out-of-three battle at South Coast Plaza’s Pingpong Diplomacy: The Rematch on Saturday.

Part of Ancient Paths, Modern Voices, a six-week festival celebrating all aspects of Chinese culture, the pingpong tournament returns to South Coast Plaza today with appearances from world-class players.

For five dollars, shoppers can take on a pingpong pro today, the second day of the tournament. The donations will benefit the Richard Nixon Foundation and the Philharmonic Society of Orange County.

The event is geared at recreating the famous “pingpong diplomacy” of the 1970s, whereby the game helped thaw long-frigid Sino-American relations.

A friendship began to grow between the Chinese and American pingpong teams at the 1971 World Table Tennis Championship in Nagoya, Japan, after the captains of each team exchanged gifts.

Touched after reading news accounts of the gift exchange, Mao Zedong invited the American table tennis team to China for a series of matches attended by top Chinese government officials.

“That paved the way for one of the most historic presidential diplomatic visits of the past century,” said Sandy Quinn, vice president of the Richard Nixon Foundation.

Photographs of Nixon’s groundbreaking 1972 visit to China, courtesy of the foundation, are also on display at South Coast Plaza during the tournament.

Snapping open and shut large fans emblazoned with the American flag, dancers from the Performing Art Troop of the American Chinese Culture Assn. marched on the polished marble shopping center floor to piped-in patriotic marches at the beginning of Saturday’s event.

Organizers hope the event will cash in on pingpong’s growing cultural cache, said South Coast Plaza spokeswoman Debra Gunn Downing.

“When we sat down with the group at the Nixon Library, the idea of pingpong came up,” Downing said. “Pingpong is very chic right now. [Fashion designer] James Perse even designed a pingpong table. It’s a nod to the past, and also a very modern icon.”

Reporter Candice Baker contributed to this article.

For photos from Nixon’s trip to China, click here.

For a video, click here.

If You Go:

What: Pingpong Diplomacy: The Rematch

Where: South Coast Plaza, in the Crate and Barrel/Macy’s Home Store Wing, Level 1

When: noon to 4 p.m. today. Amateurs can play world-class pingpong players at 2:45 p.m.

Cost: $5 donation