great find from a-game...

anything pong related will be on the blizzy. almost time for another fredeeky invitational no?



For more than 60 years, Marty Reisman, also known as "The Needle" because of his ultraslim physique, has played high-stakes table tennis from Broadway to Bombay. Even today he has $5,000 on the table for any world-class player willing to challenge him. A match comes with one condition, however: His opponent must drop the commonly used sponge paddle in favor of an old-school wooden racquet covered in a thin, pimpled layer of rubber. Reisman hates the new paddles. In 1998 he lost $10,000 by a nose against twentysomething up-and-comer Jimmy Butler. "That cursed sponge racquet was the culprit," he insists.

Against nonpros, Reisman goes out of his way to level the playing field. "Just get them to the table is my philosophy," he says as he recounts the time he beat a professional bodybuilder with a 20-point handicap while sitting down. Other victims have included the president of the Philippines, the maharaja of Baroda, Montgomery Clift and Kurt Vonnegut.

Playing money matches, Reisman inadvertently became one of the best table tennis players in the world, but many believe he could have been better. "He was suspended or simply 'not picked' as a consequence of disagreements over gambling, expenses or just decorum more frequently than was good for his career," writes Jerome Charyn, author of the Ping-Pong epic Sizzling Chops and Devilish Spins. "Officialdom stood in the way of Marty's destiny."

Charyn tells the story of how at age 15, Reisman was escorted by policemen out of a national tournament in Detroit for trying to bet $500 on himself. Still learning the ropes of being a sportsman and a gambler, Reisman mistook the head of the United States Table Tennis Association for a bookie and counted the notes one by one into his palm, a mistake that six decades later the hustler still finds no humor in.