Josh Safdie’s sports drama “Marty Supreme” follows Marty Mauser (Timothée Chalamet), a talented but impulsive table tennis player in the 1950s who’s determined to become the top player in the world. Along the way, he gets distracted by side hustles, a fling with an aging starlet (Gwyneth Paltrow), and retrieving a gangster’s (Abel Ferrara) lost dog, all of which almost leads to self-sabotage on an epic scale.
It’s a story that feels both larger than life and like it was ripped from someone’s biography. And it turns out, both things are true. The character of Marty Mauser is loosely based on the real-life 1950s table tennis champion Marty Reisman. Mauser’s flamboyant style of play and mischievous antics in “Marty Supreme” are an homage to Reisman, who died in 2012.
Here’s what to know about the real Marty Supreme.
Marty Reisman was a ping-pong champion player dubbed ‘the James Bond of table tennis’
Reisman discovered his talent for playing ping-pong at a young age in New York City’s Lower East Side and became a junior champion when he was 13.
Nicknamed “The Needle” due to his thin fame, Reisman was described in a 1977 Sports Illustrated profile as “the James Bond of table tennis” because of his creative shots and charismatic style.
He won 22 titles over his career, which spanned the late 1940s to 2002. He won five bronze medals at the World Table Tennis Championships in that time, as well as two United States Open titles and a British Open crown at London’s Wembley Stadium in 1949, which featured him doing a shot between his legs and forehand shots clocked at 115 mph, which the British press called “The Atomic Blast.”
When he wasn’t playing competitively, Reisman traveled with the Harlem Globetrotters, entertaining tens of thousands of people with trick-filled performances all over the world.
By the 1970s, he ran the Riverside Table Tennis Club in New York City, which became the hot spot for top players, as well as celebrities who loved to play table tennis, like Dustin Hoffman and Walter Matthau. Even chess sensation Bobby Fischer could be spotted there.
From hawking watches to smuggling gold bars, Reisman always had side hustles
Reisman was known for hustling, and was always devising ways to make a quick buck while traveling the globe.
The Sports Illustrated story highlighted his antics, which included him coming home from his first trip to London with a bag full of nylon stockings, which he sold on the streets of New York for five times what he paid for them. During trips to Hong Kong, he smuggled gold bars out of the country, earning $1,000 each time (he boasted in the story that he did it 25 times). When he finally stopped jet-setting and returned to NYC for good in the late 1950s, he went through customs with two dozen Rolex watches hidden on him.
But his greatest scheme was the way he sought revenge on his nemesis, Japanese player Hiroji Satoh.
At the 1952 world championships in Bombay, Satoh, using a new paddle featuring foam rubber, blew through the competition, including Reisman. It was a landmark moment, as the paddle has since become the standard in the sport. But Reisman would not go quietly.
Reisman and Doug Cartland, who was his partner during the Globetrotter events, worked their way from Bombay through the Far East hustling and doing exhibitions, and eventually made it to Tokyo. There, the duo publicly challenged Satoh and Nobi Hayashi, a world doubles champion, to a match. The event was held on the stage of a movie theater in Osaka. Fans who couldn’t fit in the 5,000-seat venue could hear the happenings on national radio, which covered the US vs. Japan showdown.
The event came down to a singles match between Reisman and Satoh. Reisman won, causing such an embarrassment for Satoh that he never played international competition again.
Reisman was a master of trick shots
In the movie, Chalamet’s Mauser possesses incredible talent for ping-pong and a penchant for trick shots. This seems to be heavily influenced by Reisman.
Reisman would play people using a shoe for a paddle or play with the handle end of the paddle hitting the ball. During his stint with the Globettrotters, he and Cartland would play with five balls at once, or, using pots and pans as their paddles, they would play the melody of “Mary Had a Little Lamb.”
Matthew Broderick once told a Reisman story on “The Late Show with David Letterman,” explaining how Reisman would stand a cigarette on the far end of a ping pong table and forehand smash the ball with such power and accuracy that it would break the cigarette in two. (Moments after Broderick told the story, Reisman appeared and attempted the trick live onstage, but he did not succeed.)
In the movie, Mauser blows a ping pong ball into the air in the middle of a match; yep, he got that from Reisman.
“Marty Supreme” is now playing in theaters.
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