The U.S. was once a powerhouse. Marty Reisman's brash hustler persona eventually came to overshadow his elite talent, but as he recounted to the legion of writers—from Murray Kempton to Jerome Charyn to Susan Brownmiller to George Plimpton—who came to schmooze and volley with him, once upon a time, in the late 1940s and 1950s, a slew of skilled Americans, Marty very much included, were ranked among the world’s best pongistes.
These athletes changed the direction of the sport. Their matches were contests of stamina with extended, flurried rallies as they roamed far beyond the table to retrieve their opponent's shots, then reversed course and raced to the net to cover a drop shot. Thousands of adoring, chain-smoking spectators followed the action with the rapt attention these days reserved for tennis.
"To play with the hard rubber racket is to be in communion with the ball," Marty put it. "The strategy, the entrapments, the players could be understood and enjoyed by everyone."
Reisman grew up Jewish and poor in New York City. Comedian Jackie Mason was a childhood friend. Reisman's father owned a fleet of taxis that he squandered shooting craps and playing poker; Marty admired his dad and also called him a "compulsive loser." Young Marty overcame a nervous breakdown at age nine—he was admitted to Bellevue for a month—and poor eyesight by shaking hands with a paddle. It was as if he'd gripped a lifeline: Ping pong was basically the only job he ever had.
He learned the rudiments of the game in Seward Park and at a settlement house. He was obviously gifted from the get-go, but didn't excel until he dropped out of high school and matriculated at a fabled ping-pong emporium in Midtown Manhattan. Lawrence's was located on two floors in a former speakeasy allegedly once owned by "Legs" Diamond, the bullet holes in the walls a relic from Prohibition. A Barbados-born black man named Herwald Lawrence turned the establishment into the focal point for the sport in the U.S. and policed the Friday night tourneys (and wagering: one unofficial rule at Lawrence's was that no one played just for fun) that lasted until dawn. "Care for a game, old top?" was his greeting, delivered in a clipped British accent, whenever a newbie wandered into his establishment at 1721 Broadway.
Amid the ceaseless twickety-tock, a teenaged Reisman learned from ping-pong royalty, many of them fellow Jews or émigrés from Hungary and Czechoslovakia, names now familiar only to the cognoscenti: Sol Schiff, the redheaded southpaw who led the U.S. to its lone Swaythling Cup at the 1937 Worlds; Lou Pagliaro, nicknamed "The Terrible Midget" during his three-peat streak as U.S. men's singles champ; and Dick Miles, the 10-time U.S. men's singles champ who was "Bjorn Borg to Reisman's Jimmy Connors," according to journalist Nancy Franklin.