The clock struck midnight. 

With the 22-year-long Laotian civil war ending with communists controlling the country, it was time for Noi Sackpraseuth’s family to leave.

His father, a soldier for the opposition, was tracked by the government. And the family could have been in grave danger.

It was an escape for survival.

So it was time to leave. As time ticked away on the clock, the family let Sackpraseuth know that he would have to drop everything he had ever known, keeping out of the situation as long as they could to protect him. 

Sackpraseuth, 10 at the time, had no clue what was going on or where he would end up.

“I was so young, you just do what your parents tell you to do,” he said.

Sackpraseuth and his family left their home without any belongings; they just up and left with only each other and the clothes on their back to their name. 

His family fled to join the thousands of other Hmong refugees who made their way across the Mekong river that separates Laos and Thailand and would bring them to safety.

The long trek brought him to America and his new home for the next 35 years — Des Moines.

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Sackpraseuth was interested in computers until he was 20. That led him to Des Moines Area Community College in Des Moines to study computer programming. 

That’s when he saw it. 

Trying to relax and overcome the waves of stress from his schoolwork, Sackpraseuth came across a pingpong table and a light flickered on in his head. This was something that he could play. 

He spent endless hours knocking the plastic ball against others and sometimes against himself. He fell in love with the game.

Sackpraseuth spent most of his free hours teaching himself the game of table tennis through YouTube videos and playing against opponents. 

“There’s a lot of video out there,” he said. “I watched a lot of professionals play … I tried to watch them, study them and mimic them and then play. When I played, I started to know which one is working and which one is not.”

In 2000, he was forced to give up the game that he had spent the last nine years mastering for his wife and newborn baby. 

“My wife made me stay home and take care of the kid,” Sackpraseuth said with a laugh. 

Sackpraseuth spent some of that free time playing pool and hustling players out of money. Since pingpong isn’t a big-money sport in America, he had to use other means to make some cash. 

“I became a pool hustler because I wanted to play for money,” Sackpraseuth said. “But they were gonna come after me, so I said, ‘I gotta quit here.'”

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What got him back into pingpong was not what he would have suspected.

A visit to the doctor in 2008 revealed that Sackpraseuth had high cholesterol, something that could have been life-threatening if Sackpraseuth didn’t change his lifestyle

“Before I returned, I was taking care of the baby and just watching TV and wasn’t doing much,” Sackpraseuth said. “I said, ‘I want to play pingpong because that’s what I like to do.'”

“In pingpong there is no money, so people don’t come after you,” he concluded with a laugh. 

A return to table tennis saw his rise to the top of the game in Iowa. In his first Iowa Games, the then-39-year-old took a gold medal in the 19-39 division and third place in the championship level.

Not so much rust to shake off after the eight-year hiatus.

“Surprisingly, when I came back, I got first place,” Sackpraseuth said. “It’s like, ‘Woah,’ I still have some talent there.”

Little did he know that his talent would bring him overwhelming success.

On Saturday in the 2015 Iowa Games, Sackpraseuth won his fifth title in the championship level in the last seven years, his 11th championship when you include his wins in the 40-and-over division.  

He attributes his constant success to is one of his favorite parts of the game — strategy.

“When you play this game at this level, you not only need tactics, you need a strategy as to how to beat your opponent,” Sackpraseuth said. “It’s almost like playing chess. You need to be able to adjust to your opponent.”

In his pingpong club in Des Moines, Sackpraseuth is somewhat of a legend, defeating most of the opponents he faces. He doesn’t let that cloud his helpful nature, though. 

“He obviously loves to win,” said Kevin Nabity, a fellow club member who has known Sackpraseuth for seven years. “But if you ask him how [you] can improve, he’ll tell you. He knows that if we [the club] all get better, that makes him better. Because if he beats on us all the time, he doesn’t improve. But if we beat him once in a while, he can improve.”

As Sackpraseuth carved his way through the competition Saturday, he came across a tough matchup in the semifinal against a fellow Des Moines Table Tennis Club member, Justin Dewey.

Dewey claimed the second set of the best-of-five-set game, but Sackpraseuth battled back to claim a victory and a chance at another title.

This time it would be against Phuong Nguyen, another member of the Des Moines Table Tennis Club. Sackpraseuth cruised to a three-set victory.

“He is the top guy,” Nguyen said. “He has a lot of experiences. He has a great mentality and control of the ball. If he loses a ball, he is able to adjust because he is able to figure out how he lost that ball.”

He won’t finish with a win in the state, however. 

Sackpraseuth will participate in one of his first national events at the State Games of America, where winners from the state games across the nation will congregate in Lincoln, Neb., for a winner-take-all tournament.

The Laotian native is ready to tackle the new challenge, just like when he adjusted to his new Iowan environment as a 10-year-old boy or when he made his start in the sport 25 years ago.

“This game here never ends,” Sackpraseuth said. “There [are] always people that are going to be better than you, and there will always be people worse than you.”

He pointed up. “There might be people that are up here, and that’s OK. You go each day and see how you get better. You might not win but always have fun.”