“Marty Supreme”, a film that premiered in São Paulo cinemas last week, produced in the style for Timothée Chalamet to finally win his Oscar, has reduced its artistic value – it was too small for the competition, Wagner Moura included.
But the “real” life guy on whom Timothée’s character is inspired, New Yorker Marty Reisman (1930-2012), was in fact quite biopicable: a figure, endowed with a rare, somewhat crooked self-confidence, he was a multiple American table tennis champion and one of the most popular personalities in that sport in the 1950s.
Using sport as a metaphor for redemption is beef in Hollywood, but “Marty Supreme” happily tries to avoid that path, preferring him to the “wild” side of Reisman, who learned his craft on the street, playing for money for the first time at the age of 12.
His school was Lawrence’s Broadway Table Tennis Club, taken there by a gambler. At the age of 14, according to his autobiography published in the 1970s, he was already supporting himself through sport, playing at Lawrence’s until unpublishable hours of the night.
The other school, the one with the books, went to space.
Reisman developed histrionic, circus-like skills at the ping-pong table, which would greatly help him in between performances by the Harlem Globetrotters, with whom he toured precisely in the years of his “prime”, between 1949 and 1951. In 1952, in India, the favorite, he would lose the world title to a Japanese underdog, Hiroji Satoh, a pioneer in the use of the racket that would henceforth become dominant, with a rubber surface.
My Buenos Aires friend Hernán Reig, 55, is a kind of South American Reisman. Although he is not a sports professional, he devoted himself to table tennis, after embarking on an erratic career in the visual arts, photojournalism and popular music.
Ping-pong took him to play games in Pará and Paraguay and to hold regularly, since before the pandemic, a meeting in Buenos Aires at a cultural center with music bands and matches of his sport.
In São Paulo, he introduced me to a city unknown to me, taking me to the “peaks” of the sport he discovered. At the Piratininga club, a few meters from Largo da Batata, in Pinheiros, I saw dozens of tables occupied by a small crowd of practitioners, something that shouldn’t be very different, apart from the “hustler” aspect of Reisman’s Manhattan.
Like Reisman, Hernán never had a penchant for corporate life. If anything, he worked at the beginning of this century at the Objetos Founddos store, owned by a friend of his in Palermo, under a very flexible regime, a time when he produced visual ready-mades in the style of Duchamp and sold them there.
At one point in the film, Marty claims to have “purpose”, a concept sordidly appropriated by corporations. “If you think this is a blessing, it’s not,” says the character, then implying that it is almost a curse, the already written destiny of a Greek tragedy hero.
Once in his small apartment, in the center of Buenos Aires, Hernán began teaching my two daughters, then young, to play ping pong. The table was the “department’s” own wooden floor. The rackets were like Hiroji’s.
LINK PRESENT: Did you like this text? Subscribers can access seven free accesses from any link per day. Just click the blue F below.
