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If you missed the first installment click here
I, like many others who cannot decide whether to love him or just suffer him, forgive the omnivorousness, and sometimes even the callousness of his triumphalism. The comedian Jackie Mason, who grew up poor with Marty, makes no bones about the self-obsession. ‘Marty’s a tremendous egomaniac,’ he told me, ‘but a loveable egomaniac. He can’t get over the fact that he’s a sensational player. He’s still intrigued with himself after all these years. Like a kid with a new toy. But I never saw him do a bad thing to anybody in his life. If being obsessed with yourself because you’re good at ping-pong is the worst thing you ever do - is that so terrible?’
Besides which, the braggadoccio isn’t quite what it appears. In the end, the person who is meant to be persuaded by Marty is Marty. What Reisman is riding is the come-back trail to himself.
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It’s a journey he has been on all his life. Back he has had to come, again and again, from one ping-pong fiasco or catastrophe after another - dust ups with the authorities, suspensions, inexplicable slumps in form, emotional collapses, to say nothing of that cold-hearted passage of time which has put to bed most other athletes his age. Now, it’s an operation on his playing arm he’s recovering from. In a little Japanese restaurant where he had taken me to meet his wife Yoshiko, he showed me the cicatrice - a single, silvery, horizontal stigma marking the place of the surgeon’s intervention. When was that, I wondered. He turned to his wife. ‘The date of my operation, Yoshiko?’ Not a fraction of a second’s hesitation. ‘November the 23rd, 1998.’ A good wife bears the dates of her husband’s operations like battle scars. Especially a Japanese wife whose lineage is undiluted Samurai. Though I have to say that as she painted word-pictures with her hands in the spaces between Marty’s ruminations on his form, it was the wives of novelists she most reminded me of, and the wives of quite a few poets I could think of as well. She had that grand, devotedly obliterated look that comes with living in the company of distinguished self-absorption.
Marty’s operation was for a floating tendon. Now it’s back where it’s meant to be, attached with 2 titanium screws. And now Marty’s almost back where he’s meant to be as well. ‘When my game kicked in after my operation,’ he told me, ‘I realized what a rare skill I had. I woke up in the morning and I started to cry with pure joy.’ Another question for Yoshiko: ‘You remember when I came home and I told you “It’s back!”’ Oh yes, she remembered. I didn’t doubt she remembered the very hour of the very day.
But I was in danger of giving into craven discipleship myself that evening. Earlier in the day Marty had worked me over for several hours at the Westside Billiards and Table Tennis Club, corner of 50th and 11th. As a boy I’d read about the new aggressive game that was exploding out of America. Dick Miles and Marty Reisman - they were the names to conjure with. Dick Miles the more defensive of the two, but both of them capable of taking the ball earlier than any other player in the history of the game, and generating extraordinary pace, not to say variations of pace, by infinitessimally subtle changes in racket-head velocity. Who was faster? Miles shows up occasionally at the Westside himself to renew the rivalry; use the phrase ‘best forehand in the world’ in their hearing and each will look up, assuming you’re talking about him. Marty reckons there was always too much preliminary flourish around Dick’s forehand for it to have been the equal of his; Dick, for his part, opens his chestnut brown eyes, and says nothing. Anyway, whether Marty’s was the best or the second best, there I was facing it. Partly, I think, because of the smallness of the playing area, partly because power is generated close to the body and is therefore suggestive of intimacy, there can be an imperious wit about great attacking shots in table tennis. And Marty’s forehand is over and above witty, not only by virtue of its classical follow-through - the bat cleaving the air like a sword that has unseamed you from the nave to the chops - but also because of the pleasure it takes in making space where there is none, in finding corners of the table that do not exist. Set yourself the task of retrieving Marty’s forehand and the table changes shape before your eyes. So this is no merely dry wit I’m describing: you actually catch yourself laughing appreciatively while you’re chasing.
‘Here’s something else you might find funny,’ Marty declared, mid-rally. ‘I’m desperate to get back into competitive table tennis. Do you know why? I felt I was in a life and death struggle with old age. It was horrible. Then I went to bed and said I wasn’t going to let him get me. And I haven’t heard a peep out of him for weeks.’
‘Don’t you think it’s terrific that Marty’s still going?’ I say to Jackie Mason later, knowing I’m talking to a man who exercises by reading papers in a chair.
‘I think it’s more than terrific. I think it’s remarkable. Most people his age can’t even walk straight, and he’s doing somersaults round a table.’
Dick Miles wonders why he doesn’t call it a day. Go down to the country for weekends. Put his feet up. But then Miles was always a more reclusive figure, isn’t driven as Reisman is, and doesn’t appear ever to have felt what Reisman feels - that a World Title was once stolen from his grasp. Another piece of ping-pong news kept us excited at about the time Dick Miles and Marty Reisman were making a name for themselves: sponge. It was sponge that removed the two New Yorkers from the front page. And it was sponge that broke Marty Reisman’s heart.
He is dressed for the kill in Fort Lauderdale, like no other player in the history of table tennis. A black and white cap, suggestive of Las Vegas. A silky black shirt. Maroon pants and matching sneakers. It turns out that the sneakers are new and too tight for him, but it is important he looks colour-coded at the table. Even the laces have been thought about. You don’t catch Reisman in dirty Reeboks. Or in shorts. Nothing to do with age; Reisman has always cut a queer sartorial dash. This is because he likes to give off the whiff of the pool-room and the late night poker school when he plays - but you can bet your life it is also because he has never much cared for his legs. He is thin as a string bean. A switchblade is how he thinks of himself, a murderously slim weapon concealed in a hustler’s fancy vest. His logo has his slippery silhouette, bent at the knee to retrieve a lowdown ball, forming the S of ReiSman. He is no longer as sinuous now as he was, but in motion he still makes me think of Kokopelli, the mythic Indian Dionysus you find graffito’d on rocks all over New Mexico and Arizona. Call him Kokopelli, Coyote, Reynard the Fox: every culture throws up its own trickster. Ping-pong has Marty Reisman, sacred by virtue of his extravagant contortions, his vagabondism, and his bravado.
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To this extent he has been a victim of his own magic: it hasn’t always been necessary that he actually win. In ping-pong, as in all sports, it is often the journeyman who triumphs, the calculator, the percentage player, the grubbing chiseller. There is a beauty and extravagance of stroke that befits only the loser, which only the loser has the leisurely grace to indulge. In Reisman’s case there was an emotional pay-off, in spectator affection, as a consequence of the compact he made - however we are to understand it - with defeat. So that when his great disillusionment with competitive table tennis set in he was able to play the fool and get away with it. People who know nothing of his astounding promise, of the excitement he generated in other parts of the world, remember him vaguely as someone who hustled for a living, toured with the Harlem Globetrotters, could make the balls sing Mary Had a Little Lamb, could hit any ordinary mortal off the table with a bar stool, could spot you twenty points and still beat you with the heel of his shoe or the lens of his spectacles. Marty Reisman? Isn’t he that guy who taught a chimpanzee how to play ping-pong?
In this way does America remember its heroes.
But in this way, too, did one of America’s heroes choose to be remembered.
He was in trouble from the very beginning of his career. Look at photographs of him as a horse-faced teenager in chess-player’s spectacles, and you’d think butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth. But aged fifteen he was already being escorted out of a national tournament in Detroit - by uniformed cops, is how he likes to tell it - for trying to lay a bet of $500 on himself. First lesson if you’re going to be a sportsman and a gambler - don’t mistake the head of the association for your bookmaker. And certainly don’t count the notes out one by one into his palm. Graham Steenhoven became famous for leading the American ‘ping-pong diplomacy’ team to China. But maybe his most significant contribution to American table tennis was looking like a bookie and putting Marty Reisman on the wrong side of the law. Another veteran player, Freddie Borges, told me how he found Reisman in tears outside the tournament venue, escorted him back in and played merry hell to get him reinstated. ‘Gambling? - ha!’ Freddie told me. Everyone in ping-pong was betting then. There was no other way to turn a buck. The thing Reisman had against him, in a game that was administered from the Mid-West, was that he was a smart kid from New York. A smart Jewish kid from New York. Don’t forget, Borges reminded me, this was the time someone in the US Table Tennis Association nearly got away with laying down a motion banning ‘Negroes’ from the game. |
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The $500 is probably an exaggeration. And in The Money Player, his ghosted autobiography published in 1974, Reisman says nothing about the tears. It’s more fun, on the page, to be the dude who roughed up the Establishment. In conversation, though, he doesn’t pretend that the wounds caused by his fallings-out with authority have healed. He was suspended or simply ‘not picked’, as a consequence of disagreements over gambling, expenses, or just decorum, more frequently than was good for his career. He was denied the opportunity to play in all the tournaments he should have played in. Officialdom stood in the way of his destiny, which was to be World Champion. Though it wasn’t any official who stopped him dead in the 1952 World Championships in Bombay. It was Hiroji Satoh and his magic sponge.
Hard to tell from this distance in time precisely how fancied Reisman was to become World Champion that year. There were certainly others in the running, not least Dick Miles who had just won the US open. But that Reisman was among the three or four players considered likely to win, that he was tipped to win it sooner or later (and that he considered himself hot favourite to win it sooner), is unarguable. He had won the English Open in style. He was United States doubles champion. He had the form. He had the cheek. The only thing he didn’t have was what Hiroji Satoh had.
Losing to Satoh in Bombay put Reisman in good company. Satoh swept the board. No one could handle the diabolic spins and dead floats which came off his revolutionary racket. Nor the insult of seeing this hitherto unknown player simply jabbing his bat in the direction of everything you threw at him and having the ball come back at you faster than you’d hit it. Satoh became World Champion. His sponge demoralized everyone and changed ping-pong forever. But most players made their peace with it. If you had to be spongeiform to win, then spongeiform you became. I remember cutting up a foam bedroll to make my first sponge bat. I doubt there was anything in the rules to have stopped me playing with the bedroll itself. An interregnum of modification and restriction followed - no sponge thicker than so thick, then no sponge which wasn’t sandwiched between rubber. Whichever way we cut it, though, we were all now little Hiroji Satohs in the making. All except Marty. For him, the significance of Bombay was not only that he had been cheated of his title - ‘There I was at the height of my career and they brought in a piece of equipment that had a skill of its own’ - but that ping-pong had lost its aesthetic. No longer was it beautiful. No longer was it sensuous. No longer was it a contest ordered by hearing and touch. So what was it ordered by? Well, it wasn’t ordered at all - there precisely lay Reisman’s objection. Like an eighteenth century aristocrat beholding the beginnings of revolution, he stepped back aghast at the spectacle of unrule. To this day he 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.
To be continued … |
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| View photo gallery of Marty HERE |
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