To this day Reisman can be comically precise about the horrible sensation of playing against sponge – “It’s like scrambled eggs out here,” he calls to me during some side-event in Fort Lauderdale, his opponent an especially unpretty and ham-fisted sponger.  But his objection at the last is a societal one.  It’s harmony he’s missing.  Harmony and methodology and order.  One word crops up again and again in Reisman’s critique of post-Satoh ping-pong - chaos.

That, really, should have been that.  To the victor the spoils.  To the loser - oblivion.  Although Reisman did win another US title in 1960 (his one faithless shmooze with sponge), oblivion, as far as tournament table tennis was concerned, was where he was heading.  He opened his own ping-pong parlour on 96th Street.  Played for money.  Turned up as a ping-pong clown on television.  Made a bit of a fool of the game which he felt had made a fool of him.  Then suddenly he was back, ‘lured out of retirement’, as he puts it, by the reinstatement of a hardbat event at the US Open in Las Vegas in 1997. 

Which he won.  Won with dash, according to all accounts, won magnificently.  The come-back kid and having won, was now ready to challenge the whole world.  Not just fellow 5 ply and rubber pimple players, you must understand, but every hated thieving sponger out there.  Roll up, roll up!  At last, fired by a forty year old grievance, determined to prove once and for all that his pocket had been picked in 1952, he was staking his own money on a showdown with any player in the country bold enough to disarm, toss in his sponge, and slug it out with Marty, hardbat to hardbat.  No fool like a resurrected fool.

It was Jimmy Butler, three times National Champion, not yet thirty, who took up the challenge.  Romantics bet on Marty.  Promptings of the heart again.  More realistic punters went for Butler.  Secretly, Marty’s admirers held their breath, fearing an annihilation, but there was no annihilation.  Nothing like.  Yes, Butler won it, won the re-match too, but the fight Reisman made of it - looking like a possible winner himself there for a while - made friends even of his detractors.  Now not only was Reisman back, the old game too was recovering its glory.  Top players were rumoured to be taking up the old fashioned paddle again, if only for the fun of it.  Today there is a Classic Hardbat magazine, put out by a Hardbat Committee peopled by poetical hardbat diehards, publicists and polemicists of the classical game, and at their centre, tricky as a spider, only more garrulous, Marty.

Outside the Convention Centre in Fort Lauderdale players are glueing up.   For glues too are now part of that technology which, in Marty’s words, ‘covers up shortcomings in a game the way gravy covers up bad meat.’  The modern ping-pong player begins his day reaffixing his rubbers to his blade, selecting from glues slithery, glues speedy, glues that will leap out of his hand and play his ping-pong for him.  He glues up outside the hall because if he glues up in it he risks damaging the health of other players and spectators, except that there are no spectators.   At the World Championships there is a glue-sniffing machine which tests bats deemed too toxic to play with.  At the American Open they are more trusting.

Inside, on the practice tables, young kids are getting last minute coaching in the modern mechanical game, hit, hit, hit, hit, hit.  They stand with their feet apart, bouncing, automatons treating every ball the same.  They could be asleep, but their bats are deadly.  Inverted pimples on sponge.  You don’t buy them like that; you start with a blade made of whichever blend of plywood, carbon and fibreglass your game demands, then set about assembling the weaponry you fancy.  You choose the sheets of rubber, packaged like CDs: Salvo, Samba, Zenith-G, Tackiness, depending on how you like your surfaces - spinny, slippery, sticky - and how you like your pimples - in or out.  You’re making decisions about speed, spin, silence.  When the kids with the closed eyes hit the ball you don’t see it or hear it.  Chaos.

There’s been another change to the bashful, introspective game I used to play.  Now, when you win a point, you raise a fist, stamp the ground, and make a noise identical to Homer Simpson’s self-denigrating - ‘D’oh!’  The difference being that your ‘D’oh!’ is an ejaculation of personal triumph.  ‘Offering to make drama,’ Marty mutters scathingly to me, ‘where there isn’t any.’

For those of us hoping for drama from Marty himself, the worry is whether he is as confident as he says he is.  There is the arm to take into consideration, the double loss to Jimmy Butler, and the inadequacy of what he has the gall to describe as ‘rigorous four-hour training sessions’ with Steve Berger.  I watch him bumble through his early rounds, tentative and out of touch, complaining about the light, the space, the floors, the conditions of modern life, but always doing just enough to get through.  ‘I’m in a struggle to the death,’ I hear him saying to himself, ‘with someone I could once give 15 points to.’  The truth is it’s that same knowledge on the part of his opponent that allows him through.  Eye to eye with the possibility of beating Marty Reisman, most opponents cave in.  He is the object of an almost universal veneration.  Players from all over the world cross the hall to watch him, to beg an autograph, to tell him he is their lifelong hero, the reason they took up ping-pong in the first place.  One by one, seeing me with a notepad in my hand, they repeat the tribute - ‘This guy’s a living legend, you know.’  Wanting to be certain I’ve got that, Marty says, ‘You hear that, Howard?  A living legend.  Nice, huh?’ 

Yeah, nice.  The fear though, is that sooner or later he is going to run up against an opponent who is not bothered by living legends.  He does.  Barry Dattel from New Jersey in the quarters.  This is Marty’s third day of play in Fort Lauderdale.  He is already out of all the any-old-surface Micky Mouse events he had entered, as befuddled and maddened by sponge as he was in 1952.  But this is the big hardbat one.  Beat Barry Dattel in the quarters and he meets Ty Hoff, the canny chicken-boned holder from Georgia, in the semis.  That’s a match everyone has been looking forward to.  When Steve Berger, who has finally got here, learns that Marty has only Bary Dattel to knock over before he makes the last four, he makes a gesture of dismissal.  ‘Joke city, Marty!’  The rest of us are not so sure.  Marty hasn’t been attacking well.  He’s been playing safe, pushing, trying to chisel his way through his matches.  What will happen when he has to hit?  

Because Marty Reisman is a living legend in Puerto Rico too, he has a legion of Puerto Rican kids cheering for him.  Every time Marty gets one past Barry Dattel, the kids cheer, but as the match progresses they have less and less to cheer about.  In dribs and drabs they leave the playing area.  You can feel it going Dattel’s way.  It’s a petulant contest, all stops and starts and quibbles about perspiration on the ball.  But that suits Dattel.  He doesn’t have to do much.  Just stay in there.  Keep the ball in play.  Let Marty make the running if he dare.  Because it’s obvious now that Marty dare not.  He has one of the best forehands in the world in his locker, but he won’t bring it out.  Does he fear failure suddenly?  For years he has been mouthing off about his hardbat prowess, throwing out challenges to the best players in the country, wagering his own money on his forehand.  What if it means to make a liar of him in the end?  So he keeps it under lock and key and plays pat-ball.

And loses.

A great sadness descends on the arena.  Only Barry Dattel is in good spirits.  Many of Marty’s supporters cannot even bear to commiserate with him.  Yoshiko mops him down.  I can tell from her expression that she doesn’t know the result.  She follows him faithfully from match to match, pinning his number to his back, wiping the table  - an exquisite apology for Satoh from the people of Japan - but she has never understood how the game is scored.  Maybe he wants her to stay in ignorance.  Maybe tonight he will tell her he has won.

To me, in stream of consciousness, he say, ‘Finished . . . that’s it . . . where does this leave me? washed up . . . this is the worst loss of my career. . . career . . . ha! . . . it’s now nothing but a shambles.’  For the first time since he arrived in Fort Lauderdale he looks his age.

Tim Boggan comes over, wildly jubilant.  He wears a gold table tennis bat stud in his ear, the ball a diamond.  He blazes so furiously it is a miracle the stud is not molten.  His eyes seize mine.  ‘That’s the end of the article, huh!’ he says, like a man vindicated.  I am speechless.  Sure, they’re all rivals, these old stagers, but can he be pleased, can he feel somehow justified, that Marty’s lost?  Then I see that I have it wrong, that he is furious with Marty for proving him right about lack of match-fitness, for letting himself, for letting all of us, down.  ‘There’s a big difference, Marty,’ he snaps almost pitilessly, ‘between playing Steve Berger every night and going into a tournament!’

But already Marty is starting his repair work on himself.  He returns to the table he has just lost on, to inspect the net.  ‘That’s the crap they pull in the so-called modern game,’ he says.  But whether he means the net is too high or too low, too loose or too tight, I cannot tell.  ‘I was bothered by the mushiness of the ball,’ he says to an aguished fan.  ‘The conditions are terrible.  You can’t do any kind of fine play out there.’  Then, after another ten minutes, to me he says, ‘I’ve still got a whole life in front of me.’

I sleep badly that night.  This must be what sport is for: to absorb all the cruelties and injustices of life.  After some sporting losses - Ali to Spinks, Rosewall to Connors at Wimbledon in ’74 - I have suffered the desolation of the dying.  When you recover you are stronger, but first you must lie in pain.  That’s the deal.  God knows how Marty is doing.   Tomorrow I fly home and think about something else, but what else does Marty have to think about?