Who Is Marty Supreme Based On?

Marty Supreme (2025) stars Timothée Chalamet as a gifted, cocky, slick-tongued table tennis player determined to launch himself from the backstreets of New York City to global supremacy. Though the Josh Safdie-directed film is not a biopic and much of its high-octane plot is fictional, it does take inspiration from the life of the late American legend Marty Reisman, a showman, a hustler, and one of the biggest proponents of classical hardbat table tennis. Reisman’s many achievements—he won 22 major titles, including the English Open (1949), two U.S. Open singles championships (1958 and 1960), and the U.S. hardbat championships (1997)—offer only a glimpse into his near-mythical legacy, which he regularly embellished. Above all else, Marty Reisman was a player who always bet on himself—literally and figuratively.

From hustler to champ

Reisman was born to a Jewish family in New York City on February 1, 1930, during the early years of the Great Depression. Reisman’s father was a cab driver and bookmaker who gambled wildly and lost heavily. Reisman inherited his father’s gambling habit but maintained that there was a crucial difference: He only wagered on what he was sure of—himself. He took up table tennis at age 11 and found that he had a natural talent for the game. An attacking player, he improved so quickly that he was soon holding his own against America’s finest players at the famed Lawrence’s Broadway Table Tennis Club and in 1947 made the national team for the World Championships. Nicknamed “the Needle” because of how skinny he was, Reisman was never shy about hustling eager players out of a few dollars. His fondness for betting and his distaste for rules did get him into serious trouble on occasion; most famously, at age 15, he was hauled out of the 1945 U.S. Championships when he mistook the president of the U.S. Table Tennis Association (USTTA) for a bookie and attempted to place a bet with him.

Reisman was as serious a sportsperson as he was a gambler. In 1949 he won the prestigious English Open—a feat no other American man had achieved before or since. That did not prevent him and his teammates from being suspended by the USTTA shortly afterward over a dispute concerning lodging expenses. The suspension, which lasted about 18 months, reflected existing friction between players and the governing body, which often struggled with funds. About that time Reisman began a three-year tour with the iconic exhibition basketball team the Harlem Globetrotters, playing exhibition table tennis matches in their halftime shows and pleasing crowds with a bag of tricks, including snapping a cigarette in half by hitting a ball at it and playing rallies with frying pans to the melody of the nursery rhyme “Mary Had a Little Lamb.”

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The villainy of sponge

In 1952 Reisman was considered a favorite to win the World Championships, set to be held in Bombay (now Mumbai), India. That was before the Japanese team unveiled a secret weapon: a paddle covered with thick sponge rubber. The standard table tennis bat at the time—the classic hardbat used by such players as Reisman—was covered only with thin pimpled rubber. The addition of sponge brought with it heavy spin and noiseless contact that threw off many traditional players. Reisman was knocked out of the tournament by Satoh Hiroji, who went on to win the championship for Japan with the sponge rubber bat.

Even as sponge rubber became the standard in modern table tennis, Reisman refused to adopt it—with the exception of the 1960 U.S. Open, which he won but not without guilt for his brief tryst with the paddle. He publicly railed against sponge rubber rackets, once saying that they were “true evil its worst form” because they made rallies shorter and the game less interesting to watch. Though he faded from the spotlight in subsequent years, he later staged a remarkable comeback: When the first-ever U.S. National Hardbat Championship was organized in 1997, the 67-year-old Reisman shrugged off retirement to win the contest, becoming the oldest player ever to win a national open in a racket sport.

By all accounts Reisman, often seen in a Panama hat, remained an optimist until his death in 2012—always ready for another money match, always full of self-praise, and always believing he could only improve as a player.