"In the winter of 1977, Sports Illustrated reporter Ray Kennedy ventured into the Riverside Table Tennis club at 96th and Broadway. It was a dingy joint with leaky pipes, below street level, beneath a supermarket, inhabited by characters with names like Freddie the Fence, Betty the Monkey Lady, and Tony the Arm, a smattering of celebrities-Walter Matthau! Art Carney! Bobby Fischer! Kurt Vonnegut!-and a group of violinists from the Metropolitan Opera."
"The club's main draw was the magniloquent Marty Reisman, its owner-operator, with a heavy emphasis on "operator." Marty was then 47 years old, past his prime as a competitive athlete, which had been back when the United States was a ping-pong powerhouse and New York City was the hub of the sport in this country. But "The Needle," so-called for his cadaverous frame as much as his sharpness, was back in the spotlight,"
"Reisman had taken advantage of the moment to publish his ribald and mostly true memoir, a romp of a read with the immodest title of The Money Player: The Confessions of America's Greatest Table Tennis Champion and Hustler, in which he related said hustles. To lure in prey for the wagers, he'd agree to play with any imaginable handicap-using a Coke bottle for a paddle, or a garbage-can lid, a shoe, a light bulb, his eyeglasses."
The Riverside Table Tennis club sat beneath a supermarket at 96th and Broadway, a dingy, below-street-level venue with leaky pipes and a cast of colorful regulars. Marty Reisman ran the club and drew crowds with his theatrical presence, antique Hock Special hardbat, and willingness to accept outrageous handicaps for wagers. Reisman published a risqué memoir titled The Money Player and capitalized on renewed interest in table tennis after Ping-Pong Diplomacy with China. Celebrities and musicians frequented the club, while Reisman hustled opponents—playing with Coke bottles, lids, shoes, light bulbs, or his eyeglasses—and sold books to defeated challengers.
Read at Defector
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]