New York, April 3, 2008 - “George Clooney is not the greatest football player in the world, and he will admit to that”, Clooney’s good friend Richard Kind told us at a screening of the new football comedy Leatherheads at the Museum of Modern Art on Thursday evening.  “He’s a great ping-pong player”, Kind added.  “He will take on anybody, and proudly.” 

Later, Clooney, who stars in and also directed Leatherheads, played host at a dinner at “21”, and we brought up his pal’s appraisal of his sporting abilities.   “That’s probably true”, he told us.  “I’m a very good ping-pong player.”  He honed his table tennis skills, Clooney says, on TV and movie sets where ping-pong tables are sometimes set up.  So does he keep a ping-pong table in the rec room at his villa on Lake Como?  “I don’t”, he said.

Also at the private screening were Bruce Willis and girlfriend Emma Hemming, Ellen Barkin, Danny Glover, Howard Stern and Beth Ostrosky, Sam Rockwell, Patricia Clarkson, Candice Bergen, Harvey Weinstein and Georgina Chapman and Clooney’s former ER costar Julianna Margulies.

Leatherheads costars Renee Zellweger and John Krasinski did not attend.

George Clooney image by Max Sands/ Unimedia Images