The Real Table Tennis Player Who Inspired <i>Marty Supreme</i>

Warning: This post containers spoilers for Marty Supreme In Marty Supreme, out Dec. 25, Timothée Chalamet stars as a table tennis player who ping pongs between playing in tournaments and hustling for money in the seedy underworld of New York City so he can travel to more matches. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] His character Marty Mauser is loosely inspired by Marty Reisman, a New Yorker who was one of the world’s best table tennis players, boasting 22 major titles from 1946 to 2002, including two United States Opens and a British Open. While plot details in the movie are fictional, Reisman was known for his constant hustling. Here’s what to know about the real athlete who inspired the film.  The Marty in Marty Supreme The movie starts out with Mauser as a young salesman in his uncle’s Lower East Side shoe store, playing competitive table tennis as an escape. While Marty Reisman did work as a shoe salesman at one point—though not as a young man or for a family member—the job is supposed to represent one of the many short-term gigs he did over the years “largely as a way of avoiding roots or stability,” as screenwriter Ronald Bronstein puts it. Director Josh Safdie first learned about Marty Reisman when his wife Sara bought him a copy of his memoir The Money Player. He pored over it, and with Bronstein, began to write a story about “a Lower East Side provincial dreamer who managed to thrust himself onto the postwar world…

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