January 5, 2026

Tips of the Week
Since I’ve been a way for a while, here are my tips going back to Dec. 1. That way you can read all five of the "Coaching Yourself" tips together!

Marty Supreme
[NOTE - I've made some corrections/updates based on emails from John Olsen and Scott Gordon.]
What a great movie for table tennis, Marty Supreme! Even though table tennis actually made up at most 20 minutes of the 150 minute running time. The rest showcased numerous escapades of “Marty Mauser,” very loosely based on the real-life table tennis champion Marty Reisman and his autobiography, The Money Player. (Note that this autographed copy is selling for about $2,000! I have two copies, one signed.) The movie is getting both literary and popular acclaim.

Timothée Chalamet stars as Marty, the table tennis champion, hustler, and general scoundrel. But as noted, this was only loosely based on the real Marty Reisman. I knew Marty very well for many years, even visited him at his house in New York City once where he showed me his microscope collection. (He loved to find things to look under the microscope, often scooping up water from outside to see what microorganisms were in it. It was apparently a lifelong hobby.)

As I’ve blogged about previously, I got started in table tennis because of Marty. I was on my high school track team as a miler and went to the library to get a book on Track and Field. I just happened to look to my left, and there was The Money Player under Table Tennis. I’d played a little bit in basements in our neighborhood, and on the spur of the moment checked it out, and discovered USATT (then USTTA). Many years later I told Marty the story, and he said, “Great. Another life I’ve ruined.” Yep, that was Marty – always ready with a quip!

I was glad they did not mention the 1997 US Nationals Hardbat final, where I lost to Marty. (I was the defending two-time champion.) I am tired of pointing out that one of Marty’s minions apparently stole my racket just before the match, and I had to borrow one at the last minute, which played completely different! The racket was anonymously returned to me a few months later at the 1998 Eastern Open, which I ran. (I normally play with sponge, but do hardbat as well.)

The Marty in the movie was basically a real jerk. While some would think that of Marty due to his many battles with table tennis officials – many referees, umpires, tournament directors, and those who worked for USATT/USTTA hated him for causing them hassles – most found him incredibly entertaining. He was always the center of attention. He’d take every opportunity to do so – and that often meant major altercations with table tennis officials, which Marty loved to flamboyantly escalate. If you walked into a playing hall, he’d be the one surrounded by fans, while off in a corner quietly by himself, perhaps reading, might be Dick Miles, ten-time US Open Men’s Singles Champion and the greatest US player in history – but the exact opposite of Marty in personality. However, if you treated Marty well, he’d generally treat you well. I once wrote that if you treated Marty like a god (as some did), he’d treat you like one as well.

Marty was a narcissist, but in a relatively good way. Unlike certain modern leaders (no Larry, don’t go there here...), he wasn’t a malignant narcissist, which is very different. He liked being the center of attention, and often earned it. He was always ready with quips and loved to entertain. He was perhaps the most flamboyant top player in US history.

There are a lot of articles reviewing the movie – Google it. Here are a few of interest. I was interviewed and quoted repeatedly in the Rolling Stone and Smithsonian Magazine articles.

Now, on to the movie!

How can any serious table tennis player NOT see this movie? The critics are raving about it. It’s won and will continue to win numerous awards. Timothée Chalamet will almost for certain get nominated for an Oscar as Best Actor, and the movie will likely get nominated as well. It’s already won and been nominated for numerous awards, including Best Picture and Best Actor. It’s currently at 94% at Rotten Tomatoes. And it’s about Table Tennis! Go see it! It’s already made about $60 million (on a budget listed as $60-70 million), and will likely keep going up.

I didn’t take notes when I watched the movie, or when I reread Reisman’s book a few weeks ago. But the differences between the movie and the reality were rather striking. Here is a short list of major changes. The following has numerous minor spoilers.

  1. The ball was put in by computer. This was because there was no way Timothée Chalamet could do the rallies needed, and they thought this would be better than trying to use a double. According to some from outside our sport, it seemed to work. To anyone experienced in real table tennis, it was obvious – the ball simply didn’t behave the way it should.
  2. There were a lot of lobbing points. In reality, that’s rare in hardbat, where players in trouble chop, not lob.
  3. Everything in the movie that made it rated R was made up. Marty did date a girl in South America for a few weeks, then decided he needed to focus on table tennis. He was married twice and had a daughter. The movie has him having an affair with a married woman (a famous film actress), then have a baby with another girlfriend, but that’s all made up for dramatic purposes. I’ve never heard anything about Marty ever cheating on his wives or any of the other sexual escapades in the movie.
  4. The businessman married to the film actress above was made up, including every scene he or the actress was in. Throughout the movie Marty is trying to get this man to finance his trip to the Worlds. In reality, Marty got the US military to fly him there in return for doing exhibitions. The part about Marty stealing and trying to pawn the movie star’s necklace is made up.
  5. Marty’s nemesis in the movie is the Japanese player Koto Endo, inspired by the real-life Hiroji Satoh. Satoh was the first top player to use sponge – but it was nothing like what we use now. It was 3/4 inch thick foam rubber, with no rubber on top as we do now. I didn’t think they showed that in the movie, but I checked a video later and saw that Endo’s racket indeed had thick sponge, perhaps 3/4 inches. Also, Satoh was small, seemingly unathletic, wore thick glasses, and looked more like an accountant than a sports star. The Endo in the movie was normal-sized, highly athletic, and didn’t have glasses. (He was played by Koto Kawaguchi, a professional Japanese player who is also deaf, and has won numerous Japanese and World titles for deaf players.) They had Endo play penhold, as Satoh did. It's extremely unlikely Marty missed so many of Satoh's serves, as show in the movie. The movie also didn't really explain well how big an equipment advantage sponge was. Here's the video Hiroji Satoh - The man who revolutionized table tennis, (4:12), which includes video of him. He doesn't look that good, but his sponge racket drove everyone nuts and gave him that huge equipment advantage. 
  6. The sequence of events in the movie is way off from reality. They have Marty losing to Koto Endo in the final of the British Open in 1952. He then struggles to get funding to go to the Worlds in Japan. When he gets there, he’s told he’s too late and can’t play in Worlds. But the businessman who sponsored him agreed to do so only if Marty would lose on purpose to Japan’s Koto Endo again in an exhibition. Marty does so, but then announces it was fixed and challenges Endo to a “real” match. Endo accepts, they play, Marty barely wins. None of this happened. In reality, Marty lost to Satoh (Endo) in the round of 32 at the Worlds, which were in Bombay, India, not Japan. (As shown in the movie, he and his opponent did play an exhibition point where they kicked the ball back and forth and did other trick shots, but it was the first point of the 1949 final between Marty and Viktor Barna, which Marty won from down 0-2 in games, his only British Open title. Satoh wasn't at the British Open any of those years. Here’s video from the movie showing the exhibition point.) Marty then traveled to Japan where he defeated Satoh in a close challenge match, the first non-Japanese player to beat him. (It was actually part of a USA vs Japan team match, with USA winning 3-2.) The movie shows them alternating attacking and chopping. In reality, Marty discovered early on that his normal attack didn’t work against Satoh, who effortlessly blocked them back with his sponge. Instead, Marty wins 21-18 in the third (two out of three to 21) by mostly chopping and carefully picking balls to smash. Doug Cartland coached Marty in the match. 
  7. Everything about the dog in the movie was made up, including the shootout. So was the falling through the floor in a bathtub. So were all the scenes where guns and shootouts took place. The scene where Marty uses a gun to force someone to give him the money he’s owed is made up. I can’t imagine Marty doing that!
  8. Marty moving to a more expensive hotel and charging it to the English Table Tennis Association did happen. But in the movie he charges it to the ITTF. He was suspended for this, as accurately depicted in the movie. What isn’t shown is that fellow US players Dick Miles and Doug Cartland also did this and were also suspended.
  9. They made Marty out to be a real jerk and scoundrel. While that’s not completely off, they rather exaggerated it. He did hustle people for money in table tennis, but most often his opponents knew he was a top player and played him for money – often with a spot – just for the honor of playing him and the chance of beating him with the spot. However, the scene where he hustles players at a bowling alley and they then chased after him really did happen.
  10. They showed Marty training at Lawrences Table Tennis Club, which is accurate. But they show him training in a sleeveless undershirt. Marty was a dapper dresser – I doubt if he ever set foot in a club dressed like that!
  11. In the movie, Béla Kletzki was both a rival and playing partner for Marty, including with the Harlem Globetrotters. But he seemed primarily based on Poland's Alex Ehrlich (3-time Men's Singles Runner-up at the Worlds), but also on four-time World Champion Richard Bergmann, and a top US player, Doug Cartland. Bergmann was the defending champion at the Worlds. Ehrlich was the Holocaust survivor (Auschwitz, saved when a German guard recognized him), who really did cover his body with honey to feed others (as shown in the movie), while Cartland was Marty’s primary traveling companion, practice partner, and Globetrotter partner. In the book, Cartland has a much bigger role as they spent many years traveling the world together doing exhibitions. Marty did make the semifinals of the Worlds in 1949 at age 19, losing to Bergmann. If not for sponge, he likely would have been a dominant player for many years to come, and might have won the Worlds.
  12. The movie briefly covered Marty’s smuggling. In reality, this was a major source of his income in the 1950s. He often traveled about Southeast Asia doing exhibitions and smuggling, especially gold and women’s silk stockings (the latter often in England as well). Marty was given a special vest to wear under his clothes that allowed him to carry forty pounds of gold. Those hiring him made money because of the different exchange rates in different countries, and so paid Marty $1,000 to $2,000 each time – that’s $10,000 to $20,000 in modern money.
  13. Marty really did tour for years with the Harlem Globetrotters, usually with Doug Cartland his partner. They did play with pots and pans, playing Mary Had a Little Lamb. (I'm told he also did this with Ehrlich.) But I don’t think they every played against a walrus! The movie shows Marty being embarrassed to tour with the Globetrotters, but it was the reverse - he enjoyed and was proud of it. 
  14. I believe Marty once told me about arguing for orange balls, as depicted in the movie. 
  15. In the early 1960s (ten years after the events of the movie), Marty did work for a few weeks at his uncle’s shoe store, the only “real” job he ever had, other than delivering newspapers as a kid. In the movie, the uncle blackmailed Marty if he stopped working for him. In reality, Marty was always up late playing at Lawrences, often to 4AM, and so was constantly late for work at 9AM. They mutually agreed to part, and that’s when Marty began running his own table tennis club for a living.
  16. The cigarette trick that I think Marty did in the movie is for real. (Someone told me they don't remember seeing this in the movie - since I didn't take notes it's possible I was thinking of the following video, which I'd linked to in my previous blog.) Here’s video (75 seconds) of him doing it numerous times! There are two keys to this trick. First, you have to have a powerful and accurate smash, which few can do. Second, Marty explained that the real key was to bake the cigarettes in an oven until they are dry and brittle so they’d break when hit. But he still had to hit them! (I do a similar trick at my club all the time, but I use a water bottle balanced on the far edge of the table and knock it off, almost always on the first try – a bigger target than a cigarette.)

Weekend Coaching
I had a busy weekend, coaching six group sessions for ten hours. I spent a good portion of two sessions as a practice partner, where I mostly blocked. I’m still trying to get over the various injuries from recent play, in particular the muscle injury to my side, which is still a major problem. My knee and shoulder issues seem okay for now.

The focus on several of the sessions was on balance and on returning to ready position when blocking. Balance is one of the most under-rated aspects of table tennis. When you can’t get to a ball, most often it’s not because you’re slow – it’s because you were off balance from the previous shot and so got a slow start. Meanwhile, far too many players, when blocking in drills, return to a backhand or forehand position after each block (depending on which side they are blocking on) instead of a neutral position, as you would in a game. If you don’t do this in practice, you’ll have trouble doing it in a match. (I’ll likely do a Tip on this, though I might already have done so.)

We also had our annual party. I brought in numerous rackets for the kids to try out – hardbat, sandpaper, mini, oversized, etc. I also put together two “long courts,” where we put two table together as one long 18-foot table. For the net, we use a barrier between the tables, with a chair on each side to hold it up. I also brought out the mini-table.

US Open
It was in Las Vegas, Dec. 22-27, which seems like ancient history now. Here are complete results. I was initially entered in nine events. But due to the injury to my side, I dropped all but six in advance. But in my second match, I both badly aggravated the side injury and re-injured my knee. Hobbling about and adjusting for the injuries, I made it to the semifinals of Over 60 Hardbat Singles, but then had to default, as well as defaulting my other five events. Since I was mostly free after that and didn’t have many coaching duties, I spent much of the time in my room and at a local Panera’s writing a science fiction story about the World Table Tennis Champion (human) playing a teleporting alien in the final of the Galactic Olympics! (A lot more happens, including a big twist halfway through.)

2026 Classic Table Tennis World Cup
The 2026 Classic Table Tennis World Cup will be in Três Coroas, Brazil, Jan. 18-25, 2026, with various events for hardbat, sandpaper, and wood. (So, no sponge.) Lots of prize money! I’ll be competing in the Over 60 events in all three categories. (I just hope my ongoing injuries don’t hamper me too much...) I leave on Jan. 15. Afterwards I’m spending three weeks touring South America, returning Feb. 12. (I’ve been to 25 counties; the below will bring it to an even 30. I plan to bring my sponge racket as well, and may visit some local clubs at the various major cities. Sightseeing includes:

  • Três Coroas and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
  • Buenos Aires, Argentina
  • Montevideo, Uruguay
  • Lima, Cusco, and Machu Picchu, Peru
  • Bogotá, Columbia
  • Plus a two-hour stopover in Panama, which I’ve been to before

PongSpace and Major League Table Tennis Announce Resolution of Disputes
Here’s the press release. There’s been an ongoing disagreement and legal battle between the two over the rights to “Major League Table Tennis.” But they’ve reached a settlement.

USATT Ratings
They seem to have been down for about five days. (I emailed them about this on Friday at noon, no response yet.) This is likely due to the switchover from Simply Complete to JustGo. But they still have the links to Simply Complete on the Ratings Page, so people going there find it’s a bad link. I wish they’d either put in the correct link (assuming there is one) or put up a note explaining it’s down and why.

Table Tennis History Magazine January 2026
Here it is!

100 Years of Table Tennis in 100 Seconds
Here’s the video (1:53) from ITTF.

Coaching and News from All Over
Since I’ve been away for three weeks, rather than try to list every interesting article, here are links to some of the main news and coaching pages that have been active in that time, and you can pick and choose.

Pips-Slapping
Here’s the video (13 sec)!

Monica Supreme: The Table Tennis Champion
Here’s the video (5:10) from Friends!

This Racket Should Be Illegal...
Here’s the video (27:20) from Pongfinity!

Mostly Non-Table Tennis
I have two new short story collections out, and a new short story that you can read online. They are:

  • Cats and Bats: Ten stories – five featuring Cats, five featuring Baseball. “In Larry Hodges’s wonderfully unhinged world, a president’s pet saves the world, enhanced cats conquer humanity, and baseball players sell their souls for stardom, and mathematicians and a mummy take over baseball. Equal parts sci-fi, fantasy, satire, and sheer lunacy—these Five Cat and Five Baseball Stories will have you laughing, cringing, and wondering what on earth (or beyond) comes next.”
  • Amazingly Even Yet Still More Pings and Pongs: “Here are 25 more stories from the Insane Mind of Larry Hodges ... A rat in her cubicle hates her job - a million years from now ... Can Mad Molly get a cake to Paris before DC gets nuked? ... Who are those people screaming prayers in an alien’s head? ... An alien invasion from a cat’s point of view ... What if mathematicians completely took over baseball? ... Snake-like aliens arrive and give us one hour to vacate Earth ... A small, pathetic dragon is determined to back his gold ... Everyone in the world is suddenly turned into frogs ... After searching the galaxy for the Holy Grail, Galahad Returns ... A knight and his flying unicorn steed take on a dragon ... An autistic music-loving killer whale ghost haunts a cemetery ... The universe literally does revolve around this teenaged girl ... A paranoid hermit crab vows vengeance on the world ... The thoughts of an AI as it guides a nuclear bomb to a city ... A woman breaking glass ceiling in the field of world domination ... A human writer and an AI go head-to-head trying to sell a story ... And more!”
  • The Schrödinger's Cats Fight Back: This just came out in New Myths Magazine – you can read it online, about a ten minute read. Four cats rebel against man's inhumanity to cats, in particular their Schrödinger's Cat experiments, where the cat dies 50% of the time. The four are Schrödinger's Cat herself, Inky; the Cheshire Cat; Puss-in-Boots; and the ghost of Socks, former pet of the Clintons at the White House. The four (aided by Egyptian cat goddess Bastet) overcome scientists, the Secret Service, and the doggedly pursuing Pavlov's Dog as they invade the White House in their caper to extract revenge on humanity.

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