How the Real Marty Supreme Haunted My Basement, plus my Fav Snaps from 2025

Dec 22, 2025

The supreme Timothée Chalamet (Credit A24)

It was only when I first saw the trailer for the Oscar-tipped Timothée Chalamet table tennis blockbuster that I realized it’s loosely based on the life of the eccentric ping-pong champion Marty “The Needle” Reisman, whom I so often found sitting on a sofa in my living room on East 57^th Street. He was waiting for my late husband Harry (late being the operative word, as Harry had often forgotten the appointment and gone swimming) to play a ferocious game on a beat-up ping-pong table that Harry, a fellow lifelong pongiste (his nom de guerre: “Hurricane Harry”), had had wheeled into our building’s basement, alongside the storage cages, metal folding chairs, and coin-slot washing machines.

Hurricane Harry and Marty “The Needle” Reisman battling in the basement of our 57th St apartment

Harry and I may have been marital soulmates for nearly 40 years, but there were some activities of his I refused to be interested in, and table tennis was one of them. Marty, I confess, was the bane of my life for two decades, yet another of the maddening randos Harry collected in his inexhaustibly curious journalistic odyssey, who then stuck to him forever like burrs. (They ranged from a niche steamboat historian whom he’d met on the QM2 to the tailor who shortened his pants and with whom he kept up a vigorous email dialogue about Brexit.) I had zero interest in Marty Reisman, this weird, chain-smoking stick-insect figure in a Panama hat and tinted aviator glasses, who showed up once a week to play table tennis at 6pm, the very time when my husband was supposed to be absorbing his share of childcare chaos. Even more aggravating, as far as I was concerned, was that Marty had an unpublished sequel to his autobiography that Harry insisted was a work of genius, if only Marty would finish it.

Drop-Shot Demon

Now, the oddball dude is the star protagonist of Marty Supreme, which opens Christmas Day. Yes, that guy who haunted our building’s bright aqua basement is played by Hollywood’s hottest young phenom, Chalamet (already nominated for a best actor Golden Globe), alongside Gwyneth Paltrow. After attending a screening, I can attest that Chalamet makes an amazing and frenetic young Marty, capturing the way he literally flew though the air with all his limbs going in different directions. Turns out Harry was right about him all along: Marty was a showman for the ages.

They first met in 1948 when they played against each other at the English Open Championship, and reconnected 45 years later to revive their slashing combat across the table, as if no time had passed. Marty was a born hustler who only played for money, all over the world, even in our basement. He had learned the game watching the experts at a former speakeasy owned by the gangster Legs Diamond (a delicious detail I was surprised the movie did not make use of) and, by age 15, was one of the best players in the country, and went on to become the three-time U.S. singles champion, winner of some twenty national and international titles. He sometimes played exhibition matches with a frying pan or a trash can lid. His forehand clocked in at 115 mph, roughly equal to Carlos Alcaraz’s tennis serve. (After Harry had knee surgery in 2010, he wrote to Marty, when they were both in their eighties, “It will be bad news for you that my left knee is now as God made it, and I have my right fixed June 8. Watch out.”)

Harry and Marty played once a week at 6pm for decades, amidst the sound of basement washing machines.

Ping-pong purists both, they were committed to retro hardbat paddles, coated with pimpled rubber. Marty derided the contemporary sponge racket, introduced in Bombay in 1952, as a purveyor of “fraud and deception.” And nothing was more beloved by Harry than the “kerplock-kerplock conversation” of those classic hardbats. He compared the sponge enhancement to “a silencer on a pistol” and insisted that the classic bat be de rigueur also for the growing circle of media friends who showed up in our basement at the now-christened Print and Paddle Club. (They included The New Yorker’s TV critic Nancy Franklin, Daily News publisher Mort Zuckerman, The Observer theatre critic John Heilpern, and Nancy Bass Wyden, owner of The Strand bookshop, and financier Ernie Pomerantz.) “The whole thing was so unlikely,” Nancy Franklin recalls. “Who walks into a doorman building in the east 50s and goes down to the basement? But that’s where the action was, like the third-class dance in Titanic going on out of sight and earshot of the first-class passengers above them.” Marty and Harry even hatched a business to market hardbat originals and promote national ping-pong tournaments. The pitch deck promised: “It is not unreasonable to assume that we could have a valuation of $200 million in five years.” (Actually, it did turn out to be unreasonable, according to Pomerantz, who genially kissed goodbye to his $25K investment.)

Marty in action in the 1950s, when his flashing forehand was acknowledged as the world’s fastest.

Former Bloomberg Businessweek editor Josh Tyrangiel was a young reporter at Time magazine in 2003 when he was dispatched, for reasons he never understood, to the New York Athletic Club to cover a Print and Paddle game between Harry and Marty. “Harry, wearing shorts and a white polo shirt, welcomes me and calls me Jason, then Josh, then ever after Jason,” Tyrangiel remembers. “Marty is wearing a giant mechanic’s boiler suit, what looks like a huge colorful Gucci cravat, and a Panama hat. They are both playing 20 feet back from the table and it looks like I have wandered into Taipei in 1970 with young Chinese people, out of their minds, playing ping pong, going at it like crazy. Harry and Marty stop after 15 minutes and Marty asks, ‘Would you like to play like that?’ and the two of them give me a half-hour instruction on the forehand slice (‘Tilt the paddle at an angle to get a crazy backspin.’) and how to deflect with my backhand (‘Move vertically, almost like washing a window.’), a tutorial that has allowed me to be a competitive barroom player ever since.” Tyrangiel continued, “When Harry told me they were starting a New York ping-pong publishing league, I asked when. He said ‘imminently.’ And I never heard from him again. My afternoon with them was like a wrinkle in time. In my limited exposure to this guy (Marty), I thought, this is the kind of eccentric you want populating your life for an evening once every six months.”

Marty checking out a portrait of himself. At the age of 67, he stunned by recapturing the U.S. national title he’d won 37 years before. (Richard Perry/NYT)

How I wish Harry and Marty, both no longer with us, were here to see Chalamet’s portrayal of Marty’s sizzling backhand chop light up the big screen! My daughter Izzy, now 35, remembers the scruffy magic of those 57th Street evenings. “When I was about 13 or 14, I had been playing with Dad and Marty for some time as an unofficial member of the Print and Paddle Club. As a special gift one year, Marty got me my own hardbat with my initials inscribed on it. He had carefully picked it out and talked about the racket’s attributes—its propulsive elements, the exact texture of the wood—the way men usually talk about cars or horses. He was a charismatic storyteller, always punctuating sessions with old jokes and tales from his earlier days. But what was so interesting was his transformation before or after a game. When he wasn’t playing, he didn’t speak and retreated into shyness. Because he was so animated in the game, I didn’t recognize him sometimes waiting in the lobby to come in, because he was small, and quiet, and staring outwards.”

A moment of repose before the ball spun, the hardbat swirled, and he was once again Marty Supreme.

This is the last Fresh Hell post of 2025. My first year on this platform has been nothing but a blast and I’m so deeply grateful to all you subscribers who have come along for the ride. Commenters, I love hearing from you. You are a wise and witty tribe and I hope you will continue to respond to my scribblings with such energy. Very happy holiday season to all Fresh Hellions. I look forward to rejoining you the week of Jan. 5!

In the meantime, sharing some happy snaps from 2025 as this crazy year slinks out the door.

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