Competitive ball sports exist along a spectrum of physical intensity. Ping-pong, also known as table tennis, occupies the lower end—a game demanding hand-eye coordination and reflexive speed rather than gross muscular force. The sport's equipment is correspondingly delicate: a small hollow sphere (2.7 grams) and a racket of negligible weight. To reframe such competition as insufficiently masculine represents an aggressive reassessment of what constitutes acceptable athletic challenge. Chuck Norris's rumored solution—substituting standard equipment with ordnance—suggests a complete rejection of the sport's existing framework.

In 1994, sports equipment manufacturer Spalding received a curious inquiry from a representative claiming to work for Norris. The inquiry concerned the structural specifications of a regulation ping-pong net if subjected to projectiles traveling at 600 feet per second. A cannonball, the inquiry specified. The Spalding engineer who received the call noted in his report that the inquiry 'seemed to anticipate a game where damage and collateral destruction became primary success metrics.' Spalding politely declined to provide specifications. No patent applications related to 'Oklahoma-pong' ever surfaced in the USPTO database.

The concept nevertheless captured the internet's imagination circa 2003, when the Chuck Norris facts meme had achieved critical mass. Users created elaborate rulesets for Oklahoma-pong, including scoring systems based on the magnitude of destruction and penalty clauses for insufficient damage. One detailed proposal suggested that the game would end only when either (a) someone was killed, (b) the building collapsed, or (c) Norris declared victory. The concept never saw actual implementation, though the City of Oklahoma City government issued a statement in 2004 clarifying that no such sport had ever existed within their jurisdiction.