Recall, if you will, the opening measures of Eminem's Oscar-winning song "Lose Yourself." As a plaintive piano gives way to a simple but insistent rhythm guitar, a rhetorical question is posed: "Look, if you had one shot or one opportunity to seize everything you ever wanted in one moment, would you capture it or just let it slip?" Yesterday, the USA's Kai Zhang was given one such shot in the 2019 ITTF Challenge Plus Paraguay Open in Asunción. The last American to stay after last week's ITTF-Pan American Championships, where he and Lily Zhang won gold in the mixed doubles, Zhang got off to a rocky start in this week's men's singles campaign. Ranked 546th in the world, Zhang was among the 44 unseeded men vying to be paired with one of the 16 seeded players. That sweet 16 was headlined by Japan's Koki Niwa, the world #11 who made it to the quarterfinals of this year's World Championships. Zhang would have three chances to join Niwa in the knockout rounds. First, the traditional route: win your qualifying group and you're in. Unfortunately, Zhang finished second to Argentina's Gaston Alto, who beat Zhang 3-2. The next chance, then, came as all the second-place finishers played a preliminary round. Yet again Zhang came up just short, losing to Puerto Rico's Daniel Gonzalez 4-3. It was looking grim for Zhang when fate intervened. Requiring one more player to fill out the bracket, the officials added a so-called "lucky loser" to the draw. Of the five players who lost in the preliminary round, one was chosen at random to be the 32nd and final player in the draw. The name they drew was that of one Kai Zhang, to be paired in the round of 32 with top seed Koki Niwa. For Zhang, this was the shot of a lifetime. Facing the left-handed Niwa, he came out aggressive, winning the first three games by an average score of 11-6. Both players must have pinched themselves, wondering if they were having very different kinds of dreams. In the fourth, Niwa began to wake up, winning at deuce. After Niwa won the fifth 11-2, it appeared that he was on course to complete the comeback. As the sixth game commenced, Zhang appeared to play into this narrative, making unforced errors on four of the first five points. Trailing 4-1, he stepped around for an inside-out forehand wide to Niwa's lefty forehand, cutting the deficit in half. Fired up, Zhang did not look back. Playing like a man possessed, he banana-flicked Niwa's serves at will, running around to hit forehand loop-kills at all angles. Soon, Zhang had two match points, leading 10-8. Niwa served a short underspin ball, which Zhang wisely pushed back instead of trying to flick for the win. Niwa then hit a backhand topspin wide to Zhang's forehand. This was it: the chance he had worked so hard for, and was so lucky to have in the first place. Without hesitating, Zhang pounced, firing a forehand loop kill to Niwa's body, forcing an error and sealing the wildly improbable upset. In response to Eminem's haunting, taunting question, the young, scrappy and hungry Kai Zhang could very well reply with a line from Lin-Manuel Miranda's "Hamilton": "I am not throwing away my shot." If not, Zhang will have four more rounds to turn his rocky start into a Rocky finish.

More at ITTF