For a few weeks now, I could not shake the sense that there was something familiar about Timothée Chalamet’s relentless press tour for “Marty Supreme,” his new postwar table tennis epic.
It was not just the orange leather suit he wore to the film’s Los Angeles premiere, though that did deepen my convictions.
It was not merely the sight of an entertainer talking up his fanatical dedication and training, which also rang some bells. Not even the percussive hum of a New Yorker’s New Yorker riffing on ambition and greatness and wanting it all, though I’d once heard that from someone, too.
Really, it was all there in the movie poster: Chalamet’s Marty, bespectacled and insatiable and committed to his own curated legend.
I knew that guy.
“I took on people in the gladiatorial spirit,” the real-life inspiration for his character had told me back in 2012, describing — and I cannot stress this enough — a life of table tennis. “Never backed down from a bet.”
That man, Marty Reisman, a serial champion in the sport and a super-serial hustler-gambler-rambler, died nine months later at 82, insisting upon the grandeur of his story to the end.
For years, he has been my standard answer whenever someone asks me about the most interesting person I’ve interviewed. (Apologies to Mike Tyson, Nancy Pelosi, Guy Fieri, President Trump and their many fellow nominees.)
It helped that Reisman found himself so interesting. He claimed to have made fortunes, and lost fortunes, and met everyone, and defeated everyone.
He flirted prolifically into his 80s, with acquaintances and strangers, and quoted Shakespeare soliloquies to animal-rescue petitioners on Manhattan sidewalks for reasons that escaped his audiences.
He had a habit of measuring the height of the net before matches to ensure precision — with $100 bills.
Why not a $1 bill, I wondered? Its dimensions were the same. This struck him as self-evidently ludicrous.
“Why be chintzy about it?” he responded.
With its wide release this month, “Marty Supreme,” which is loosely inspired by Reisman, has positioned him for the kind of posthumous cultural ubiquity and megawatt treatment that he always believed his arc deserved.
“Table tennis is like show business,” Reisman told me, wearing a Borsalino fedora, skintight red turtleneck and tinted glasses indoors. “You’ve got to have presentation.”
Nicknamed “The Needle” for his slender frame and wrist-flick wit, Reisman tended carefully to his bespoke passions: the nobility of hardbat paddles (not the spongy monstrosities that would upend the modern game) and especially any tale that perpetuated what he self-lovingly called “the Reisman myth.”
The movie draws from Reisman, but it is not a biopic. While the director, Josh Safdie, has said Reisman and his immodest memoir (“The Money Player: The Confessions of America’s Greatest Table Tennis Champion and Hustler”) were his “entry point” into the subculture, the film uses a different surname and strays substantially in the particulars.
Reisman’s relatives said they had no contact with the filmmakers, conceding complicated feelings about the project.
On the one hand, Reisman’s daughter and two of his grandchildren said in interviews, it is painful that he is no longer around to tell his own story — and that the family was afforded no role in this one. (They said they were finalizing another autobiography that Reisman had worked on, which they hope to publish in the coming months.)
Still, they can imagine how Reisman would have greeted this moment. “He would be so happy,” his daughter, Debby Reisman, said, “that he’s worldwide famous now.”
Onscreen, there are more than a few echoes in Hollywood’s Reisman myth: This Marty is an incorrigible striver, voracious and needy and needle-y.
And if Chalamet has found, in this role, an all-time character, it is surely in no small part because Reisman was an all-time character.
The occasion for my 2012 article was the death of Reisman’s friend and rival, Sol Schiff, the man known as “Mr. Table Tennis.” Reisman was feeling nostalgic — for the competition, for the semi-fame, for the grimier and more rollicking iteration of a basement sport that he feared had lost its edge.
A city junior champion at 13, Reisman had graduated quickly to proper hustles, paddling for cash at a former speakeasy, Lawrence’s, on Manhattan’s West Side.
At 15, while in Detroit for a national competition, he attempted to place a $500 bet on himself, slipping five bills to a man he thought was a bookie. It was, instead, the head of the national table tennis association. Officers hauled Reisman away.
Across the decades, no financial stakes were too flimsy for Reisman to pursue. “We’d go out to Columbus, Ohio, for a $50 war bond,” he recalled. “I once wasted a trip to Toledo because they said they were giving away a Jeep.”
And no competitive stakes were too weighty for him to navigate. From 1946 to 2002, Reisman won 22 major titles, enshrining him as one of the game’s best.
But it was Reisman’s less formal C.V. that powered his folk status.
He toured Europe with the Harlem Globetrotters, swatting at balls with frying pans and the soles of his shoes.
He attempted his signature trick — breaking a cigarette in half from across the table — on David Letterman’s late-night set.
He operated an Upper West Side table tennis parlor that counted Dustin Hoffman, Kurt Vonnegut and violinists from the Metropolitan Opera as regulars.
He bought three-piece suits for his kindergarten-age grandsons, coaching them to repeat a favored line to waiters at fancy restaurants: “The food is exquisite. Compliments to the chef.”
“He was a West Side character, you know?” said John Catsimatidis, a billionaire supermarket magnate and another avowed West Side character, who was for a time Reisman’s landlord. (Catsimatidis, who appears in “Marty Supreme,” said that Safdie was unaware of their connection during casting.)
Reisman’s path had a way of zigzagging. The club closed. He invested in a Chinese restaurant chain. He called himself a three-time millionaire and a three-time former millionaire.
He lamented table tennis’s lagging popularity with some Americans.
“The public was so jaded after landing on the moon,” he reasoned.
By the 2010s, the sport was experiencing a modest renaissance of cool, exemplified by a consciously trendy Manhattan club called Spin. Reisman was positioned as a bridge between eras.
When we visited Spin, whose décor included a portrait of Reisman in leopard-print pants, he quickly eyed a talented 20-year-old, Mark Croitoroo, practicing with a new-school paddle. Reisman asked if Croitoroo would mind rallying with throwback equipment.
“This racket is the purest reflection of a player’s ability,” Reisman said. “The modern game is played with fraud, deceit, and deception.”
Croitoroo obliged. They exchanged a few perfunctory feel-each-other-out shots. The young man looked a little restless. Suddenly, Reisman turned his shoulders, tucking his right arm against his torso, and scorched a backhand to end the point.
Both men smiled.
“He’s a hustler,” Croitoroo said afterward, watching as Reisman tried to hit a photographer’s camera with his serve.
The outing, in March 2012, would be one of Reisman’s final interviews before his death that December.
When the article ran, he left a voice message that I’ve saved for 13 years.
“Phone was ringing off the wall today, you know?”
This thing was getting buzz, he gushed. There was still an appetite for the Marty Reisman story.
“Still ringing, you know?”
Matt Flegenheimer is a correspondent for The Times focusing on in-depth profiles of powerful figures.
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