From the time he fired Questlove and played Finding Nemo to his 4am breakfast runs with Dave Chappelle, there are countless great tales from Prince’s 57 years on planet Earth. Last night, Jimmy Fallon shared another too-good-to-be-true story involving a game of ping pong.
As Fallon tells it, hours after his wife gave birth to their first child, he received text message from Prince challenging him to a game of ping pong. Fallon accepted, and the very next day the two faced off at Susan Sarandon’s private ping pong club in New York City.
“And Prince is standing there, with a double-breasted crushed blue velvet suit, holding a ping pong paddle, and he goes, ‘You ready to do this?'” Fallon recounted. Shockingly enough, The Purple One was pretty great with a paddle, and he disposed of Fallon relatively quickly. So quickly in fact, Fallon didn’t even have a chance to congratulate his opponent.
“It’s his serve and he says, ‘game point.’ And he hits this ball, and it’s slow motion and it’s turning and it’s slow motion and flames are coming off it, and it hits the edge of the table, it’s unhittable. He wins the game. I go back to get the ball, and he’s gone.”
“He was in the car already,” Questlove added. “I run up to the car, and the windows come down. And I say, ‘What happened? What happened?’ And he says, “Ask your boy.”
For more on Prince and the tributes that have been pouring in, head to our Remembering Prince page.
