A few years ago, Sara Rossein was hunting around a thrift store and found the book The Money Player: The Confessions of America’s Greatest Table Tennis Champion and Hustler. Rossein figured the book — a 1974 memoir of a swaggering Jewish table tennis savant named Marty Reisman in mid-century New York — might interest her husband, the filmmaker Josh Safdie. So she brought it home.
She was right. Safdie found inspiration in the memoir’s high stakes story of a gritty, gambling, globe-trotting, prestige-hungry hero. Using Reisman’s memoir as a springboard, Safdie and screenwriting partner Ronald Bronstein started to craft their own story, inventing characters and conflicts set in a similar world of table tennis hustlers. The resulting film, Marty Supreme, follows Marty Mauser (Timothée Chalamet), a cunning, ambitious table tennis player from the Lower East side careening through a series of frantic confrontations in 1950s New York City. As a hero, Mauser is appealing; abrasive, cocky, and duplicitous but nonetheless charming, authentic, and intrepid. The film is, in essence, Mauser’s push toward transcendence via the only path he truly understands. “Table tennis is seen by Mauser’s family, his community, and likely most of the audience too, as something frivolous, trivial, even laughably so,” explains Bronstein. “Meanwhile, [Mauser] experiences it as the total measure of his worth and identity.“
Though the filmmakers have made it clear that Marty Supreme is not a biopic or adaptation, the film’s buzz has led to a flurry of interest in Marty Reisman’s story. For his part, Reisman can’t comment — he died in 2012 at 82 years old. His book, now long since out of print, is in high-demand, and copies are now going for thousands of dollars. But, as luck would have it, I own one. So what follows is an abridged version of Marty Reisman’s story as told by the man himself. The book is told out of sequence, with no real plot, and, outside of official records, no third-party attester to verify his stories — some of which are wild.
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BORN IN 1930 AND RAISED ON Manhattan’s Lower East Side, Martin Reisman was the son of Sarah, a Russian immigrant, and Morris, a cab driver, sometime bookie, and incessant gambler. “My dad was a compulsive loser,” Reisman wrote. To wit: Morris once won $10,000 (nearly $250,000 today) only to lose it all at craps that same night. In 1940, when Marty was 10, Sarah left Morris and moved with the kids to a tenement across the street from Seward Park, a public space that happened to have a communal ping-pong table. It was there, at that worn outdoor table that the lanky, bespectacled Marty discovered his calling.
Marty played his first money match in a park at 12 years old. He lost, but was hooked. Searching for a place with real players, he met a bookie who spirited the boy uptown to Lawrence’s Broadway Table Tennis Club, a former speakeasy where hustlers competed and gamblers reliably found action. “The best players in America were at Lawrence’s,” wrote Reisman; more than a few of Lawrence’s regulars would, in fact, go on to win national championships and populate the U.S.’ World Championship Team. That first day, the bookie staked Reisman in a series of money matches, came out $125 ahead, and sent the young Reisman home with $5.
By 14, Marty was supporting himself with table tennis. Hustling during the day so he could afford to go up against real players at night, Marty observed a principle promulgated by his dad: never bet on anyone but himself. And through the years, Marty never deviated. Well, almost never.
While other kids fantasized about movie stars, Marty daydreamed about table tennis pros. He’d bolt over to Lawrence’s every day after school and stay until one or two in the morning. When this behavior began to worry his mother, Marty moved in with his father. Morris didn’t mind the late hours or Marty’s preoccupation. After all, Reisman wrote, “the only times he could win were when he came to Lawrence’s and bet on me.”
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Soon, Reisman was playing table tennis 10 hours a day, every day. “School meant little to me and more often than not I was absent,” he wrote. Marty didn’t mind when he was expelled. “Everything I wanted to learn I could find out at Lawrence’s,” he wrote. Marty lived for the Friday-night cash tournaments that packed Lawrence’s and often ran through dawn. It wasn’t long before he was a fixture in the finals, hundreds of dollars riding on him as he faced down some of the world’s best players. “When I first arrived at Lawrences there were many players who could beat me,” Reisman explained. “Soon I was able to beat them all.”
Competitors became mentors, rivals, and lifelong friends as Marty developed his aggressive “fast hit,” attacking playstyle — striking the ball the moment after it hit his side of the table. “My plan invariably was to slam and slam and make the opponent run and exhaust himself,” he wrote. Reisman learned to put on a show, returning balls behind his back, between his legs, with his heel, with his glasses. By positioning his face right below a descending ball and when it came close, blowing “as hard as a child does when…blowing out candles on a birthday cake,” Reisman could float a ball over the net using his breath alone. His skills and instincts were so honed that he was able to trounce opponents using kitchenware, a shoe, a garbage-can lid in lieu of a racket, talking trash the whole time. “He’d have continuous quips,” Larry Hodges, a Table Tennis Hall-of-Famer, coach, and historian who was friends with Reisman, tells Rolling Stone. “Always had a quip.” Reisman reveled in showing off for a crowd, and mastered stunts like standing a cigarette on the far edge of the table, taking aim, and hitting a ball across the table so hard that it snapped the cigarette clean in two.
TRIVIAL SKILLS AND STUNTS DON’T typically count for much outside of a table tennis club. And that might’ve been true for Reisman if not for a tragic accident. Throughout the late 1940s, Reisman’s longtime friend and sometimes rival Doug Cartland had been touring as a support act to the Harlem Globetrotters — he and a partner taking the stage to warm up the crowd, entertain at halftime with table tennis tricks, stunts, visual gags. But in 1950, Cartland’s partner was killed in a car crash. Knowing Marty had the requisite skill, as well as the confidence, Cartland offered him the job. Marty accepted immediately. “I had the time of my life touring with the Harlem Globetrotters,” he wrote. “For a while people even stopped sneering at the fact that table tennis was all I did.”
Marty Reisman in 1948
Bettmann Archive/Getty Images
For the next three years, Reisman and Cartland traveled the world, performing all of the stunts he’d perfected at Lawrence’s, plus a few more. “Doug and I began by putting two balls into play,” he wrote. “Then we played with three, four, five at one time… we were the only players in the world who could do it.” Now, rather than entertaining a group of a dozen or so glassy-eyed onlookers at Lawrence’s, Marty was performing for packed stadiums. “That, in the end, was the real reason I decided to make table tennis a lifetime career,” Reisman wrote. “Crowds had risen to their feet and cheered my talent.”
Though Reisman’s confidence was instrumental to his success, it often veered into hubris. “He could be looked on as arrogant,” says Hodges. “But he was always charming.” Once, fired up by a crowd at an exhibition match in Idaho, Marty tried to return a shot in midair, behind his head — a move he hadn’t practiced. He fell and broke his arm. “In New York I was known as a showman, a flashy shot-maker,” he noted.
He could also come off as prickly. “If you were nice to him — which basically meant treating him like a god,” a person could find themselves in Reisman’s good graces, says Hodges. “On the other hand, if he saw a chance to be a center of attention, and it happened to be at someone’s expense, he wouldn’t hesitate.” Hodges remembers Reisman’s affinity for public disagreements with officials over virtually anything. “Tournament directors and referees and umpires — they hated Reisman. If the guy says ‘you can’t wear your hat,’ to him it’s a double win because not only is he gonna get to keep the hat, everyone gets to see him stand up to the referee.” And if feigning ineptitude is an essential part of a hustler plying their trade (losing or winning by just enough to give an opponent false hope) Marty had a tendency to sandbag himself. “Reisman had one weakness when it came to hustling,” Hodges says. “He liked to show off. He wanted people to know how good he was.”
Between ages 13 and 15, Marty carved his way through local, city, and state tournaments. He didn’t make the World Championship team in 1947. But the next year, with 175 trophies already to his name, 18-year-old Reisman qualified and found himself in London, crossing rackets with legends like Richard Bergmann, Bohumil Vana, Victor Barna. “Those were just a few of the greats who came to London in 1948,” he wrote. Here, Reisman’s characteristic self-aggrandizement didn’t exactly vanish — he still took a moment to quote World Champion Victor Barna telling him, “I understand you’re going to be one of the greatest of all.” But the tonal change from braggadocio to lionization is notable, Reisman slipping at times into the giddiness of a die-hard fan meeting their idols. “What a thrill it was to stand in the lobby of the Royal Hotel and see the great table tennis players of the world,” he reflected. Merely making it to the Championships in London put him in rarified air — meeting players he “had read about and dreamed about and admired, if only vicariously for years.”
Reisman’s memoir is a primer on table tennis’ heroes. Sol Schiff, Lou Pagliaro, Dick Miles — Reisman’s longtime rival and 10-time US National Champion. Chuck Medick the blind referee. Originator of the loop drive serve, Yatin Vyas. Women’s National Champion, Davida Hawthorne. George Braithwaite, a black player who represented the US in international competition no fewer than 70 times. Sorko Dolinar who used a racket emblazoned with a skull-and-crossbones above the names of world-class players he’d beaten. One legendary player Reisman held in especially high regard was Alex Ehrlich, a Polish Jew who, prior to competing in London, had been a member of the French Resistance. Imprisoned at Auschwitz, on several different occasions, Ehrlich was spared the gas chamber when — each time — a Nazi recognized him as a table tennis champion. Forced to defuse bombs in the nearby woods, Ehrlich once happened upon a honeycomb. “He smeared the honey all over his body,” wrote Reisman. “When he got back, the inmates licked the honey off his body for nourishment.” To Reisman, Table Tennis players are, simply, a different breed of athlete. “Remembering [meeting these players], I find it amazing how many people around the game of table tennis have stayed with it their entire lives. It is a game that infects the bloodstream,” he wrote. “Ehrlich was tortured by the Nazis, but he never let his scars show.”
“Reisman had one weakness when it came to hustling. He liked to show off. He wanted people to know how good he was.”
IN 1948, SHORTAGES IN WAR-BATTERED England spurred huge demand for U.S. commodities. Reisman learned that the foreign black market could spin a few pennies’ investment into much more. In preparation for his first overseas voyage, Marty loaded up on nylon stockings, which cost him 50 cents per pair and sold for a pound sterling apiece — a 400-percent return at the time. This, he wrote, “was a small beginning for a personal smuggling operation that would grow much larger.” Far from apologetic, Reisman had no compunction about justifying his actions. “A player who depended on exhibition fees could starve,” he wrote. With their freight often paid by foreign entities in exchange for exhibition matches, smuggling was many U.S. players’ bread and butter. Marty considered himself no exception when he wrote that “the top players were either gamblers, smugglers or both.” Over decades, playing countless matches in hundreds of countries, Reisman’s smuggling had him hawking ballpoint pens, perfume, or crystal drinkware; when conflict in East Asia had begun to boil over, he bounced around that continent wearing clothes laden with 20-plus pounds of pure gold. “He did a lot of smuggling,” says Hodges.
Engaging in high-stakes illegal gambling, dodging creditors, perpetrating international smuggling — these are exploits that would be the event in almost anyone else’s life. For Reisman’s, it was merely what happened between table tennis matches. At various points in his memoir, after pages-long passages describing the moment-to-moment, back and forth of an intense match, Reisman will mention events like getting so drunk with the pilot of a commercial flight that a flight attendant had to land the plane; teaching a chimpanzee to volley; or watching through a plane window as the aircraft he was supposed to be on crashed, killing six people. He recounts being carried through the streets by adoring crowds, an audience with the Pope, and being flown to Angkor Watt on the King of Cambodia’s helicopter. He was promised the title of “ping pong minister of the Philippines” by the governor of Cibu Island, evacuated by military plane from Hanoi the day before France’s defeat at Điện Biên Phủ, and chosen to represent the U.S. in ping pong diplomacy with China, anticipating Nixon’s famous trip by two years. And through it all, what mattered most to him was always table tennis — and the way it glorified, clarified, and justified him as a person.
But Marty didn’t win the 1948 World Championship. Or the next year, either. And after a public episode with a jilted creditor, he was barred from competition for a few years. Still, he wrote, “the decision I made at 13 did not mean that I would be content to reach the… [World Championship] semifinals or even the finals… I decided 1952 would be my year.”
In 1952 the World Championships were held in Mumbai (then Bombay). In a preliminary match, Marty was bracketed against a Japanese player who had never competed internationally. “Hiroji Satoh [was ranked] number nine in Japan at the time,” Hodges explains. “He was a good player, but nowhere close to the level of Reisman.” Marty’s assessment was less diplomatic: “Satoh played like a rank amateur,” he wrote. Many believed that Reisman’s signature attacking style would make the match no more consequential than a let serve.
Up until this point, players used “hardbat” rackets; wood with a thin layer of dimpled rubber or sandpaper. Satoh was permitted the use of “a weapon” that Reisman wrote “would make table tennis a different sport.” Coated in three-quarter-inch foam rubber, Satoh’s racket — now the standard in professional play — enabled previously unachievable degrees of speed and control. “Sometimes [the ball] floated like a knuckleball,” Reisman wrote. “On other occasions the spin was overpowering.” The foam also silenced Satoh’s hits, rendering his opponents “deaf mute in a game that required dialogue.” Satoh had only to make contact with the ball and Reisman’s strength became an Achilles heel. “I was throwing lethal punches and hitting myself in the face.”
Hiroji Satoh won the World Championship. Reisman won the consolation tournament immediately afterward, but it was cold comfort. In subsequent World Championships, Marty would earn bronze three separate times, but he would never take home a gold. Still, not long after his fateful loss, he and Doug Cartland arranged an exhibition rematch in Osaka. By waiting for his moments, allowing himself to play Satoh’s game, and operating with a hustler’s patience, Marty won.
THE MONEY PLAYER ISN’T EVEN half of Reisman’s story; in the 38 years between publishing his book and his death in 2012, Marty kept playing, coaching, and competing. He married his wife Yoshiko Reisman, and together they had a daughter, Debra. With the help of a psychiatrist, Reisman faced down a lifelong struggle with debilitating anxiety attacks that, in high-stress situations, could render him blind. Reisman bought his own table tennis club that would welcome the likes of Bobby Fischer, Kurt Vonnegut, and Don Rickles.
There is something elusive about Reisman — it’s the same enigmatic air that wafts around everyone of his ilk. Hustlers are people who insist upon life at the margins of conventional propriety — who are at their quintessential best and, ironically, most authentic when they’re getting away with something. This is true of both Marty Reisman and his fictional counterpart, Marty Mauser. So without Reisman to shed light on this impetus, it feels appropriate to turn to Mauser. “For Marty, taking a steady job would be a trap. Comfort, security, domesticity — these represent anchors; ones that will pin him to the present and derail the future that he’s mapped out for himself,” says Bronstein. This alternate Marty’s schemes, his moment-to-moment resourcefulness, are how he “preserves his autonomy, refuses the social contract, and makes sure that his ambition is not sedated by the rhythms of an ordinary life. It comes at a cost of course. There’s a relentless strain and isolation that accompany a life lived in defiance of stability.”
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The veracity of Bronstein’s observation bounces back and forth. “I was 12 years old when I learned to play table tennis,” wrote Reisman. “From that day on, I had something that really interested me. It involved anatomy and chemistry and physics and, if a person had imagination, astronomy too.” And here, finally, is the essential truth underlying Marty Reisman, the hustler, the money player, table tennis great whose story now looms larger than he ever could have imagined. “The game so engrossed me,” he wrote, “So filled my days, that I did not have time to worry.”
