In the late 1960s identical twins Jean-Pierre and Jean-Paul Kessel were catapulted to minor stardom as juvenile ping-pong prodigies, alternating their conventional doubles prowess with trick acrobatic exhibitions that confirmed their uncanny mastery of the medium. Their interest in the game was awakened at the age of eight in the course of an English lesson delivered by Jeremy Booth-Clifford, at the time a bohemian student of international law supplementing his meagre scholarship money by giving private language lessons, but later to become one of London’s most prominent and certainly most flamboyant barristers, despite having been tragically blinded after staring at the sun while acid-tripping at Stonehenge in 1971.

For that particular lesson Booth-Clifford had chosen as his didactic text a Player’s cigarette card he had come across while haphazardly browsing just minutes before among the bouquinistes of the Pont-Neuf. Dating from the mid-thirties it depicted reigning world table-tennis champion Victor Barna, bat in hand and impeccably dressed in double-breasted pinstripe suit and tie. The syntactically shoddy legend on the verso, which Booth-Clifford drastically obliged the twins to learn by heart (despite their tender age they were excellent students) went as follows:

World’s undisputed champion of table-tennis, and at the age of 22 has held the title for five years out of the last six. Born in Hungary, Barna lives most of the time in France, and last year successfully defended his title in London, and set all England in rapture by his amazing play. Tall, dark and handsome, a perfect-looking specimen of physical fitness, which is necessary to play this sport, which needs speed of eye, hand and foot as well as expert judgement. Barna, a teetotaller and non-smoker, keeps in regular strict training, trotting, running and sprinting on the roads at top speed; also has a strictly chosen diet. Holds Doubles Championship of the world with a fellow countryman, and various mixed doubles titles.

Spellbound by the immeasurable glamour of Barna’s teetotal world of international table-tennis, the twins began to practise fanatically and within three years were proclaimed French juvenile doubles champions at Montlhéry, a feat they repeated for the following five years. By this time, however, they had well and truly tired of conventional match-play and were spending their training time devising tricks and stunts in which pure virtuosity was the object of the exercise. 1967 saw the expulsion of both brothers from the European singles championship when it was revealed that it was in fact Jean-Paul (a marginally superior singles player) who was playing in his brother’s stead in the quarter-final match against the diminutive Mexican albino phenomenon Eusebio (“El Chihuahua”) Ibargüengoitia.

As the twins developed their new exhibition routines, they reverted to their idealized image of Victor Barna, not only appropriating the elegant attire he sported in the photograph reproduced on the Player’s cigarette card but also relinquishing the sponge-rubber racquets prevalent since the beginning of the decade in favour of the so-called ‘hard bats’ (pimpled rubber on a wooden blade) with which Barna dominated the game in his heyday.

Forsaking the healthy ambit of pure sport for the dubious world of showbiz invariably brought the Kessels into contact with a louche panoply of managers, agents and publicists who eventually proved to be the downfall of the prodigious twins. Contracted to entertain at private parties attended by the tout-Paris, gatherings that often degenerated into torrid partouzes, Ping and Pong soon lost their innocence: while Jean-Paul developed an immoderate fondness for gambling, Jean-Pierre was rarely to be found without a flask of ether in his hip pocket. Deteriorating performance at the table put an end to their career before they turned twenty, while the dissipation they both succumbed to only succeeded in driving a wedge between them. And when Jean-Pierre refused to underwrite his brother’s increasingly heavy gaming debts, the stage was set for definitive estrangement. Having clearly decided that their talents were best devoted to the demi-monde of bars, nightclubs and houses of assignation, they each went about their business with fluctuating success, continuing to live virtually within sight and sound of each other but forever locked in mutual ostracism and neglect.