Josh Safdie’s latest movie Marty Supreme spurred a renewed national interest in ping-pong. I played my way through New York City to try to find out more.
From the set of Marty Supreme.(A24)
It’s 10:30 am on the first Sunday of the new year. I am standing at a ping-pong table, accessed through the parking garage of an unassuming office building in Midwood, Brooklyn. Across the table is Stephen, a lanky Russian-speaker from Sheepshead Bay, with a white tuft of hair and wearing black joggers. He told me he hasn’t played in 10 years. Still, he makes me pay when I hit to his forehand, bashing a winner to my back right corner. I zero in on the 3×3 hologram of the profile of a Bengal tiger behind him before my next serve to win the match.
I move to the next table to square off against Igor, a squat man in a tight blood-red athletic shirt. While we warm up, he inspects my borrowed paddle. During the first match, I successfully push the ball from side to side to win 11-6. Igor looks annoyed and protests that he cannot follow the orange ball. I shrug, unsure of how to answer his complaints about his own ball.
Around the room, there are eight tables with 20 men and two women jammed into the basement coming to blot the world out for a few hours and compete in the weekly tournament at Brooklyn Table Tennis Club. The owner, Nison Aronov, runs the tournament from a folding table in the front, shouting to players in Russian, Farsi, and English to direct them to their next match. The walls, ceiling, and floors are painted in various shades of blue, with lights overhead. “Today, a lot of players come,” he says, surprised at the number of bodies. “Not always like this.”
Between games, I look at the walls filled with photos and press clippings. Aranov points to a circled clue on a framed crossword puzzle from a July 2005 issue of USA Table Tennis Magazine: “Best Lobber in U.S.?” “That’s me,” he said, with his last name handwritten into the grid with a pencil.
I am playing in a table-tennis tournament this morning because, almost overnight, the sport seems to have reappeared in the American imagination, spurred, at least in part, by Josh Safdie’s manic film about a competitive player named Marty Mauser (Timothée Chalamet), loosely based on Lower East Side hustler and hardbat legend Marty Reisman. Set in the lean years after World War II, the film makes a long-dismissed basement pastime feel newly urgent, fast, and serious.
The hype began far before the film’s official release on Christmas Day. In New York City, select guests were invited to special prescreenings of the film. Then, a splashy social media promo event for the movie transformed St. Patrick’s Basilica into an underground ping-pong party hosted by Airbnb, with a special appearance by Timothy Chalamet himself. Things only escalated from there. Last month, Major League Table Tennis reported its first sell-out events in league history during a three-day run in Portland. At my local billiards bar in Park Slope, where ping-pong was once relegated to the back room, a bartender, who rents out paddles, told me that “demand for tables has doubled.” Hasids and hipsters played side by side as Rakim blared from the speakers. In a society increasingly optimized for screens and solitude, table tennis seems to offer something doggedly analog and communal. I wanted to find out more, and the subterranean Brooklyn Table Tennis Club seemed to be the perfect place to do so.
In my third match at the tournament, I face Carlos from Jackson Heights. He uses a furious Penhold grip, spinning his hand around like a sorcerer to conjure up his serve, picking apart every one of my attempts to stave off an onslaught. I go on to play Umut from Uzbekistan, by way of Kings Highway, whose lack of focus (and turtleneck) could not withstand my aggressive paddle style. Michael, a very serious 11-year-old from Forest Hills, however, could, flashing a smirk after he won the tiebreaker.
After the game, I go sit in the front next to Aranov, who is eating one of the brittle sesame squares he’d laid out for the players along with a box of parve chocolates. He tells me how table tennis saved his life.
He grew up poor in Dushanbe, then the capital of the Tajik Soviet Socialist Republic, with a single mother, no running water, and a habit of stealing change to play ping-pong in a park. A coach, Valeriy Elnatanov, who later became his “second father” watched him in the park and invited him to join a local table-tennis club, but only if he quit fighting, smoking, making homemade tattoos while improving in school.
By 16, he was a junior champion of the Soviet Union, going on to win eight straight singles titles in Tajikistan, before civil war pushed him to New York in 1993, where he promptly stopped playing. “There was no money in this country for table tennis,” he tells me. For 10 years, he drove a Yellow Cab, raised his children, and played the game he couldn’t afford in private, until his brother—also a cab driver—fronted him money to start the Brooklyn Table Tennis Club.
Like the fictional Mauser in Marty Supreme, Aranov too is a self-motivated immigrant willing to play every angle to get ahead. He too was too obsessed to ever really leave the table, a sport he saw less as recreation and more as a way out of his previous lifestyle. Both came up through scarcity and learned the game as a discipline of survival. After Aranov escaped from the dissolving edges of the Soviet Union, with no guarantees but with a little luck and help from his friends, he was able to rebuild his passion from the margins within a harsh American system that offered little in return. While Aranov never got his face on the cover of a Wheaties box, he has managed to keep Brooklyn Table Tennis Club open for over 20 years, outlasting, by his count, some 20 other independent clubs in the city, including one run by Reisman himself.
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Marty Supreme renders the obsession with the sport, and his abilities to succeed at it, with outsize flair. We witness the rise of Mauser in Wembley Stadium with cathedral-like scale and the incongruous pulsing synthesizers that signal his fall and the triumph of foamy sponge over pebbled rubber racquets. After his fall from grace, we experience the dark corners and collapsed smoke-filled world of Lawrence’s on Broadway, a real-life former speakeasy, according to Marty Reisman, in his 1974 autobiography The Money Player: The Confessions of America’s Greatest Table Tennis Champion and Hustler, the pied piper of ping-pong that the film is loosely based on. Reisman played there 10 hours a day, hustling at table number 7 atop a splintered wooden floor amid a bad paint job. Still, he had some gripes, like all players seem to have.
“How can any serious table tennis player NOT see this movie?” wrote Larry Hodges, a table tennis coach, on his weekly blog. An expert at the sport, he had fundamental complaints: By his count, only about 15 percent of the film showed actual game play. Hodges was grateful, however, that the movie omitted his own loss to the real Marty Reisman in the 1997 US Nationals Hardbat final—though he still felt compelled to explain it away, insisting that one of Reisman’s minions had stolen his racquet, forcing him to borrow one that “played completely different!”
This reminded me of Marty Mauser on screen, arguing that his loss was due to the ball’s not being orange and thus visible, or when the real-life Reisman blamed a tournament loss on a nose bleed. Perhaps that type of pettiness is what is needed for the gift certain great players have to make the tiniest adjustments as soon as their racquet hits the ball. As Resiman writes in his book, “Table tennis players have to survive on their own wiles.”
In Brooklyn, Nison Aranov eventually discovered Mishel Levinski, a poor, new immigrant to the city whom he coached for free, until Levinski eventually went on to play for the American national team. He even won the opening game in his international matchup against Ma Long of China, a three-time world champion. Nison tells me, smiling, “For a guy in Brooklyn to take a game from one of the most amazing players in history, that’s a big deal. Levinski showed how great he was.”
Dick Miles, an American champion across three decades in the mid-20th century, writes in The Game of Table Tennis: “The expert plays table tennis as a sport; the basement player is, for the most part, piddling at ping-pong.” Reisman also writes in The Money Player about this divide between a top player and the basement variety. “The average fan would never consider putting on the gloves with George Foreman.” While I lived so much of my life with restraint, I took my chances at an all-out slam. Others around the room strove for more because table tennis attracts champions.
One of them, a lawyer named Alexander Zubatov commuted from Manhattan for the tournament. “I originally started to come here, looking for a place to get away from my wife,” he joked. That was 20 years ago. Now he comes to the club four times a week. He told me how the ball moves too quickly to be caught on screen. The International Table Tennis Federation has even increased the size of the ball to try to slow it down and increase viewership. Instead, players learned to hit even harder, a reflection of the rebelliousness of the players and their attitude toward compromise.
When I ask Zubatov about how Safdie’s movie has brought a renaissance to table tennis, he has mixed feelings. More people could mean overcrowded clubs, he said. But more interest might also mean new clubs, a net good for the game.
Curious about one of the few places to have opened recently in the city, I went the day after my time Brooklyn Table Tennis Club with a friend to PingPod, which first opened up in the Lower East Side in 2020 before expanding to over 18 prime locations across New York and other major cities. The founder has reported a spike in reservations this year. The PingPod location I visited was only a few blocks from where Marty Reisman was born and learned the game on a public table in Seward Park.
PingPod’s sleek, app-booked table-tennis booths that treat the game more like a personal workout than a communal pastime, have become a stand-in for the clubs that once anchored the scene in the city. Signing up required a smartphone, an online account, and many clicks, each one a small toll, especially for someone without steady access to time or money.
Get unlimited access: $9.50 for six months.
The company’s mission statement declares that table tennis has been overlooked in the United States and that technology can “activate neighborhoods.” As proof, a video on the homepage featured a match between a top tech YouTuber and a competitive player turned influencer.
My friend and I tapped our phone to unlock the doors where we entered the aggressively bright second floor and found our reserved table but none of the warmth of the dark corners we typically played. The space was cold, with cameras in every corner and screens cycling through past recordings of chipper, confident players, advertisements welcoming dogs, and announcements to remind us to be present and to be sure to embrace diversity in the pod. Through the warmth of an automated kiosk, players could purchase protein bars and performance shirts, as Coldplay droned overhead.
We warmed up, as I tried to let go of the fetching color-coordinated gear, the company’s ubiquitous slogan, or the group of young guys behind us shouting “Kobe” and “Marty Supreme’d” after each point. On the back wall, the television flashed the time remaining, as I anxiously tried to keep it together. I feared I had been physically flattened into the Internet.
With the $50 hourly price tag, online fluency, and smartphone needed to be able to sign up and play, would Marty Mauser on-screen or Reisman off-screen have been able to get their start here? What about Aranov? I wondered who was designed to be left out and why it hadn’t worked on me.
I watched the ball bounce flatly below oppressive tube lights, thinking about whether ping-pong, and the world, was still actually round. I wondered what the Marty’s would think about what is advertised as the future of ping-pong. (Perhaps, fortunately, Reisman passed away in 2010.) Ping-pong is a game of feeling: the touch of the paddle and the ball, and the contact of the players themselves. PingPod conversely advertises its VC fundraising and optimization. Call me dramatic, but I feel it reimagines the future of the game without touch, possibly played by robots, extending our ability to avoid one another in the digital world into the physical. The game’s trademark sound, that thrilling thwap, requires someone on the other side to send it back.
The following week, I returned to the weekly tournament at the humble Brooklyn Table Tennis Club, the room already alive with eight simultaneous rallies. Amid the crowded playing field, 9-year-old Daniel in the club’s custom T-shirt was zeroed in, striking the ball the instant it hit his side of the table. “Move and smash, move and smash,” Nison Aranov, could be heard off-center. “This is table tennis, not ping-pong!”
Joshua LevkowitzJoshua Levkowitz has written for The New York Times, Foreign Policy, and The Guardian. He lives in New York.