Having played competitive table tennis since the age of 9 and competed at both national and international tournaments, I have become familiar with a particular scenario that never fails to foster an anxious frustration within me. Watching the new hit film Marty Supreme brought it rushing back.
This scenario goes as follows. I’m with a group of people who somehow heard that I spent my younger years as a highly ranked table player in the U.K. Almost miraculously, a game table appears, perhaps in the corner of a dusty bar, alongside some worn-out paddles. “Jonathan!” my companions exclaim, “we must see you play!”
I feel my insides shrivel, knowing that what I wanted to say would sound so feeble. How could I explain that without my particular paddle, I may as well be playing an entirely different sport? I know what such sentiment would sound like to an average person: utterly pathetic. “A good workman never blames his tools!” they might think.
In a pivotal scene in Marty Supreme, this very conundrum befalls table tennis player Marty Mauser.
Loosely inspired by the life of American table tennis champion Marty Reisman, the new movie includes a scene where Mauser, competing in the 1952 World Table Tennis Championship, faces Japan’s Koto Endo in the final. The scene is drawn from a real, second-round match that Reisman played against Japanese player Hiroji Satoh in the 1952 World Championships in Bombay, now known as Mumbai. In both the movie and real life, the young Japanese player uses a paddle radically different to the hardbat paddles used at the time. By lining his paddle with a layer of latex sponge, Satoh beat Reisman, spurring a revolution in table tennis and changing the game forever.
If you’ve ever watched Olympic table tennis in recent years, what you will see is a game almost entirely different from the game played by Reisman and his fellows. Modern equipment enables players to regularly hit shots that travel at speeds over 100 kilometers per hour, and today’s players can swerve the ball around the net, serve so that the ball bounces in all four boxes on the table, and hit spins that cause the ball to rotate over 133 times per second.
For Reisman, a man accustomed to the rhythmic thwacks of the hardbat, Satoh’s sponge, with its strange spins and almost silent sounds, left him devastated. He lost the match, and Satoh went on to win the tournament.
Scott Gordon was both a historical consultant for the film and a good friend of Reisman’s in New York City. Given the significance of the hardbat for Reisman, Gordon was initially worried about how his style of play would be portrayed in the movie. In an interview, he told me how “part of Marty’s crusade of life was that he thought the style of play before sponge was better than the style of play after sponge.” He described how Reisman enjoyed the longer, almost conversational rallies of the hardbat sport, with players switching between offense and defense, compared to the all-out attacking that dominates so much of modern table tennis. Indeed, even in his later life, Reisman would reportedly talk for hours about how modern equipment had “destroyed” the sport.
Gordon and I shared some similar opinions on the table tennis shown in the film; it was clear that Timothée Chalamet had not quite mastered the sport, with rallies often looking quite wild. Occasionally the ball bounced too high, the timings seemed slightly off, or the footwork appeared unrealistic. Despite all of this, however, both the playing hall and the playing style did resemble what the sport looked like in the 1950s, with its deep chops and long strokes. It was clear that many of the extras on set had played table tennis before, though many of them likely came from the sponge game.
The film also nods to other towering figures and moments in table tennis. Mauser’s friend Béla Kletzki is based on Polish table tennis champion Alojzy Ehrlich, who was reportedly saved from the gas chambers of Auschwitz only because the Nazis recognized his lanky frame. Mauser’s own Jewish upbringing, made clear in the film, didn’t muffle the gasps of those around me in the theater during a scene in which he told reporters that “I’m gonna do to Kletzki what Auschwitz couldn’t!”
In the final scene, Mauser embraces Endo, the Japanese player, in a reminder of the sport’s role facilitating cultural exchange, and a possible reference to ping pong diplomacy, in which friendly table tennis matches between the U.S. and China helped pave the way for establishing diplomatic relations between the two nations in 1979.
Throughout the film, Mauser is egotistical and manipulative, frequently hurting those around him in his effort to make it in the sport. Still, the modern sponge game prevents even a hardbat hustler from competing at the highest levels—just as ultimately as Marty Reisman’s hardbat game would shatter against the superior sponge paddle. Having myself spent countless hours playing hardbat hustlers in bars, I know that older equipment crumbles against robot-like techniques developed from many hours in the training halls with modern equipment.
Still, the hardbat game is far from dead.
It was my second week in Washington, D.C. (having moved from London) and I decided to go to a bar called Breadsoda, which had some game tables. There, I met Jimmy Pelletier, a close friend of Reisman and passionate hardbat player. When I asked him what Reisman was like, he called him a “mythical legend” who converted Pelletier from a sponge player to a hardbat player overnight after falling in love with the sound and the soul of the older game. He told me of Reisman’s love and warmth towards all people, of walks down Broadway in New York City, of Reisman’s charisma and confidence in his own abilities—somewhat ironic given that Reisman was introduced to table tennis after suffering a nervous breakdown. “There will never be anyone like Marty,” he told me.
Hardbat table tennis leagues and competitions persist; Pelletier continues to train and play hardbat, and last week he reached the semifinals of a tournament. A group (now including me) largely composed of hardbat players meets up every Tuesday night at Breadsoda. Indeed, hardbat table tennis has become its own sport, with its own leagues and tournaments, separate from modern table tennis. And Pelletier believes that it’s thanks to Reisman that the hardbat game has survived for so long in the U.S. Indeed, Reisman’s legacy is not only his dazzling showmanship and skills—his love for the game has inspired others to carry the older, less spongy baton.
