There’s probably no better way to celebrate the life of Prince than to real dig into just how much of a strange, mysterious and, above all, deeply sexy person he was. He lived his entire life with an incredible theatrical element that was both wildly eccentric and just deeply cool.
The story Jimmy Fallon tells on The Tonight Show about being repeatedly invited by Prince to play ping pong with him makes it pretty convincing that his stage persona and actual personality were not all that different.
Apparently Prince’s management told The Tonight Show that, as part of a musical appearance, Prince wanted to play ping pong with Fallon – but not on camera, just because he thought he would be fun to play with.
On the night of the appearance Prince didn’t pay any attention to the ping pong table and no mention of it was made. It didn’t come up again until one night Fallon got a text from Prince asking him to come to a ping pong club owned by Susan Sarandon (which seems like a whole other interesting thing):
“I open the curtain and Prince is standing there with a double-breasted crushed blue velvet suit, holding a ping pong paddle, and he goes ‘Are you ready to do this?’.”
The rest of the story is exactly what you would imagine playing ping pong with Prince would be like:
[Editor’s Note: Video has since been deleted]
Source and photo: Uproxx.
