'Ping Pong Hustler: Marty Reisman' - 2006 Mass Appeal Issue 41
Intro: R Nicholas Kuszyk
Photos: Jonathan Mehring
Okay, before we talk about smuggling gold and hustling with the mafia, lets talk about ping-pong. Ping-pong is the largest participant sport in the world. China: 10 million registered competitive ping pong players. England: 200,000. Japan: 50,000. America: only 6,000! Sure Americans can drive real fast and hit big things, but a little piece of plastic spinning across a table at 100 miles an hour is just too quick for the average American to comprehend. Alas, it used to not be like this. Before the fancy rubber tricky paddles that make the game so fast and hard to follow today, ping-pong was a big deal in America. Ten thousand people would come to see a ping-pong match. In the late 1940s and into the '50s, NYC was a hotbed Mecca for ping-pong and Marty Reisman was one of the best..
A revised version of Marty's 1972 memoir (The Money Player) is soon to be rereleased under the title, The Ping Pong Hustler. There is also a movie based on his life in the works by the producer that brought you Saving Private Ryan.
He's the only man who has the potential to revitalize the sport to what it once was in America. He's been to more than 60 countries and won 23 international championships. He had to land a full military cargo plane in a field in Brazil because he got the pilot drunk. He's flushed $20,000 down the toilet (literally).
He toured with the Harlem Globetrotters. He hustled his way around the world with only his ping-pong paddle and charm to protect him. And at the ripe young age of 77, he will beat the pants (or watch, depending on how nice it is) off of you and everyone you know at ping-pong. He'll even give you an 18-point handicap.
But don't bother asking around for a money match with him unless your willing to drop at least a grand because he won't unzip the case to pull out his paddle for less. Here are a few of the highlights from a conversation we had prior to a two hour match we played in his private basement ping-pong parlor up on the eastside of the fanciest part of town. Ladies and gentlemen...Marty Reisman!!
"I've been playing this game since I was 12 years old. I remember walking into the game room and picking up a paddle for the first time. It was a tremendously exhilarating feeling to have what I experienced as extraordinary control. That's what I love about the game, the connection that is made from the paddle to the mind. Very quickly, my game got good. I don't recollect ever having played a bad game of table tennis. I was playing kids for money. In those days 14th St. was considered uptown and we would play games for as little as a penny, a big game was a quarter. After a short while, I was beating everybody. I needed to get some competition. Then I found out that the good players played at a place called Lawrence's Table Tennis Place located on Broadway and 54th St.—it was a former speakeasy owned by the gangster Legs Diamond.
Behind the main [ping-pong] table, where later played some of my best money matches, there were bullet holes in the wall from someone who had tried to assassinate Legs unsuccessfully.
Back in those days ping pong was far more wide spread. Competitions only cost 25 cents to enter. The winner got three bucks. Now, I don't usually play a money match for less than $1,000. I went on to win a total of 23 national and international titles including some obscure titles like the French Indo-Chinese Championship. Table tennis was like my magic carpet that allowed me to travel to some of the most God forsaken places. Ping pong is played everywhere in the world. But still, I was almost ashamed of telling people in America that I was a table tennis player. I would never carry my racquet publicly because everyone else was into basketball and baseball.
I was a risk taker and if the game wasn't exciting I would make it exciting, often putting the game on the line. It's cost me dearly from time to time in terms of blowing a match that I didn't want to blow. But it's paid off for me by giving me this kind of reputation that no other player in the world has. I'm 77 years old and the world is running after me. My game is nowhere near what it once was, but it seems that the more I lose the more famous I become! It's also because I put my money where my mouth is. Many people think of me as a hustler and sure, I've done my share of that, you know, but a hustler is someone who is hiding in the corners springing out on some unsuspecting sucker. That has not been my modus operandi. I have done that out of necessity during lean and hungry times. But for the most part, being a risk taker, I want to subject myself to the pressure and rise to the occasion.
How does one get into gold smuggling? First of all you need the mobility, which we had because we were doing ping pong exhibitions for the US military. Another advantage we had was that the dollar value fluctuated far more from country to country back then. You had ways to take advantage of those rate discrepancies. There was military currency, which were called 'scripts, which could only be used on military bases back then. We would buy scripts at a cheap rate and convert that into goods and sell that in a green dollar area. Here's a simple version: start in the Philippine Islands with $100, with that buy 150 scripts. Take that 150 military currency and buy a $150 camera. You take that camera to Taiwan where there was an embargo on luxury goods. Sell the camera for $225 and go back to the Philippine base and turn that into 337 scripts and buy two cameras with that. From there your money just grows at an exponential rate until you arrive at an airport with 21 pounds of gold neatly tucked in your handmade gold-smuggling vest. Your heart beats fast as you made your first trip out to the airport all loaded down with gold. It had such a reality to it. How much closer to reality can you get than gold?
Smuggling sounds nefarious, but when you look around at the guys that parade around on the mantle of respectability, like the Kenneth Lays and the other people from WorldCom, people that effect the economy-what I did was child's play. Excitement just to put a few extra bucks in my pocket, a little extra sake in my stomach, some silk suits on my back, and a couple women under my arm. It was very exhilarating, like a ping pong game, getting yourself into a tight spot and finding a way out. Imagine stepping off your plane with 21 pounds of gold and one of your shoulder straps break. But hey, I'm a ping-pong player not a low-down smuggler."