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Long before Timothée Chalamet starred in “Marty Supreme” — the hotly anticipated movie that hits theaters nationwide on Christmas Day — there was Marty “The Needle” Reisman, the wild-eyed, high-strung Ping-Pong hustler who inspired the namesake character.
For that, we can thank “The Money Player,” a 1974 memoir written by Reisman, which set director Josh Safdie and co-writer/co-producer Ronald Bronstein to get deep inside the world of high-stakes table tennis and the man who electrified it.
“One day, Josh’s wife handed him the book,” Bronstein, who also worked with Safdie on 2019’s “Uncut Gems,” told The Post. “Josh already loved playing table tennis and then he got very turned on by the subculture of it.”
Safdie’s wife was lucky to get her hands on it. There is just one copy available on Amazon, signed, and it goes for $1,999.
While Reisman did not dodge bullets, or endure the abject humiliation that came from literally being paddled, as Marty “Supreme” Mauser does in the movie, the two men share a go-for-broke demeanor and a natural love of hustling.
Speaking with the New Yorker in 1960, Reisman described himself as a taxi driver’s son, born in 1930, raised on gritty East Broadway in Lower Manhattan and possessing an early obsession with science. He claimed to have spent so much time looking through telescopes and microscopes that his eyes went buggy. Other sources claim that he had a nervous breakdown at the age of 9.
Whatever the case, he told the New Yorker: “My optometrist suggested it might help my vision if I took up table tennis. I got completely engrossed. Within three or four weeks, I could beat anyone around. It was already apparent to experts that I would be a great player.”
The experts were right.
At age 13, in 1943, Reisman was the New York City Junior League champion. And he had already begun gambling on the game. His first money match was against a local pedophile who took money off young players and then offered them a double-or-nothing opportunity. “The double was that the boy had to go to bed with him if he lost,” Reisman said, never revealing if he won or lost the bet.
From a young age, he plied his hustling craft at a joint called Lawrence’s Ping Pong Parlor — a former Midtown speakeasy once owned by Jack “Legs” Diamond, with Prohibition-era bullet holes scarrin the walls. Reisman beat weaker players, including, the stories go, the actor Montgomery Clift and the president of the Philippines.
The Needle later went on tour with the Harlem Globetrotters, providing half-time entertainment by playing Ping-Pong with a frying pan instead of a paddle.
Away from the court, he used a theatrical sense to hustle rubes.
He recalled once relieving an Omaha high roller of $20,000 after convincingly hitting a few shots off the table and over the guy’s head. “The sucker,” he told the Times of London, “has to believe that what is happening is genuine and that means you have to have the skill to make the most audacious shot look like beginner’s luck.”
An iteration of Lawrence’s Ping Pong Parlor was re-created for “Marty Supreme,” as best as possible. “We only found one or two photos of the actual Lawrence’s,” said Bronstein. “Ping-Pong was such an aberrant pastime that it was not documented.”
Explaining that he and Safdie took liberties when writing their main character, Bronstein added of Reisman: “This Lower East Side dreamer became a patron saint for the project.”
Reisman, who won an impressive 22 major titles — including a pair of US Men’s Singles Championships — the Needle had an experience that parallels a key scene in the movie, in which Marty confronts a new kind of paddle during a key match in Bombay. It had foam padding built in, and Reisman called it “the greatest hustle in the history of table tennis.”
He lost in Bombay but kept traveling the world, playing matches and putting on exhibitions. Along the way, he scored a side hustle: smuggling seven-pound gold bars for a Chinese grifter.
Media maven Tina Brown’s husband, the late journalist Harold Evans, was a table-tennis fanatic and frenemy of Reisman’s rivalry, and the two often met for matches at the couple’s home.
In her Substack, “Fresh Hell,” Brown describes Reisman as a “weird, chain-smoking stick-insect figure in a Panama hat and tinted aviator shades,” adding that he didn’t play the game unless it was for money.
“I took on people in the gladiatorial spirit,” Reisman told The Times in 2012, nine months before he died from heart and lung complications at age 82. “Never backed down from a bet.”
English (US)