The Lifelong Hustle

The champion courts recognition; the hustler flees it. Only one sport is so obscure yet so popular that an ace can play both roles simultaneously. The game is Ping Pong; the hustling ace is Marty Reisman. Even in the '50s, when Reisman held the U.S. singles and doubles titles, he was unknown to more than a handful of table tennis freaks. To supplement his income, he played exhibition matches between halves of the Globetrotters' basketball games and conned wealthy amateurs into believing that they could beat him if he gave away 19 points and sat in a chair. If the money was right, Reisman would even play with a garbage-can lid. After being approached by a Chinese smuggler during a Far Eastern tour, the kid padded himself with contraband gold, then ferried it across international borders.

"Smuggling never bothered me," Reisman recalls in his confessional autobiography The Money Player (Morrow; $6.95). "Table tennis players have to survive on their own wiles. A player who depended on exhibition fees could starve. I had won 175 trophies, but I could not eat them."

Not all of The Money Player is scandalous. When he was not involved in grand or petty larceny, the self-styled "Bad Boy of Table Tennis" could fill his wallet and his mouth by legitimate means. At his peak, Reisman was the best hard-racket man in the world. Today, at 44, he can be beaten only by players using trick spins off the modern soft-sponge paddle. As the champ says, his kind of Ping Pong is entirely unlike the metronomic rec-room game familiar to most Americans. World-class players can propel the ball at speeds exceeding 100 m.p.h.; facing them across a table is like batting against Nolan Ryan from a distance of 9 ft.

It is small wonder that Reisman and his colleagues collected crowds in Asia and Eastern Europe, where table tennis is the sport of commissars. It is smaller wonder that the pros tend to develop quirks that decorate their egos like gargoyles on a tower. Richard Bergmann, the late English titlist, once searched in vain for the perfect sphere; he went through three gross of balls before he found one worthy of him. Alex Ehrlich, the Polish prodigy, could discern no life purpose beyond Ping Pong. To this day, when he finds a promising young player he counsels, "Now the first thing you must do is quit school."

Lucky Shots. As his confessions reveal, Reisman was never quite comfortable on the tournament circuit. The lifelong con man preferred to hustle--to persuade naifs that he was past his prime, that in a $100 game he could no longer give away 15 points and still win. Reisman's professional reputation stopped growing years ago, but in the gamblers' world he remains a legend--the equal of Minnesota Fats and Bobby Riggs.

Given the champ's current reputation, there is a crocodilian element to his plaint, "I am probably better known in Singapore than in the United States." It is that very anonymity that allows him to pursue his chosen field. Recently, in his own Manhattan Ping Pong parlor, Reisman greeted a player who had journeyed uptown to knock off the old pro in Billy the Kid style. Reisman, attired in boots, electric blue suit and matching cap, hesitated. His arm ached, he said, his vision was blurred. Nevertheless, he agreed to spot his opponent 15 points per game. After an ostensibly titanic struggle, a series of "lucky" shots and some impossible retrieves, Reisman pocketed ten $10 bills. "Lucky," he said, gasping for breath. "I could never do it again. I'm going to give up this goddam game." Then he sold his challenger a copy of The Money Player at "cost" --$6.95. Later the victim spotted a sales slip in it; Reisman had bought the book from his publisher at an author's discount of $4.

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