says
Spin and more spin.
says
Spin and more spin.
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In the first video, the club that Marty is in where he self hitting, with that red floor, that was NYTTF, Robert Chen's old club in Chinatown. That was a great club.
I will give you some stories about Marty. In the 1970s in the summers, I used to play as a kid at a tennis club. I didn't really like tennis but I liked playing ping pong. Now, I am going to use that term because I was really playing basement pong. All my friends were tennis players who also would mess around and play ping pong. But we were not using spin the way real table tennis players use it. And we were playing an all topspin game. This was in Cape Cod during my summer vacations.
One of my friends lived on the upper west side of Manhattan and he told me, "if you really want to get good you should go to Marty Reisman's after the summer. You go there you will get good." Well, I never went.
But two decades later I started playing again, and as a kid I really always loved playing ping pong. But I never was good and I never really got to play enough to get decent. In 1991, I was in a sporting goods store in NYC and saw they had really nice looking Butterfly rackets. These were fully assembled rackets. I actually got three. They were pretty expensive. One was that Klampar H racket. And the other two were both Mazinov rackets. The rubber on all of them was Sriver. So I was going to this pool hall that had tables and playing and letting my friends use my rackets. And the guy at the pool hall told me about a real table tennis club. I started going to the club. It was called Mammoth and it was on 38th Street and 8th Ave in NYC.
Everyone there was crazy good. I actually could not play with almost anyone because they were really too good for me back then. Most of what I did was use the robot that they had. I only played there for about 3 months between jobs after college. So, not long enough to get good.
Now Marty used to show up every so often and when he did, it was really a crazy scene. All the best players wanted to play him. And they played for money and guys would be asking him to spot them points and there would be a thick wad of cash on the table near the net. And Marty definitely cleaned up on a lot of these guys.
So, one time Marty showed up and there was just nobody there. And I was hitting on the robot and he came up to me and he said, "Hey, kid, you wanna play a real person?" I told him he didn't really want to play with me because I was a beginner. He said he didn't care and we hit for a while. Then he said, "you wanna play some games?" I said he didn't want to play games with me. He was too good. He said, "I'll spot you 15 points." I think he beat me 21-16 and 21-18. He got nicer in the second game. hahaha.
Anyway, he was really nice with me.
But, the big thing to understand about him, and he says it in that first video, he was the odds on favorite to win that 1952 World Championships. And in his eyes, he lost because of a magic trick not because the guy could play. But you also have to know, a lot of the time people think that he lost in the finals. Marty didn't get anywhere near the finals. He lost in an early round to Sato. And he has been bitter ever since. And the whole rest of his life revolved around being bitter that sponge was invented.
For a long time I didn't really think there was much of anything to the sponge vs hardbat thing. And, to a large extent, I still don't. The sponge game has so much more technical skill involved that makes it the amazing thing it is. Just the idea of how you contact the ball to get a loop, deep brush, thin brush. In a way it is wild.
But I was playing on a table at Spin about a month ago, and I am playing games and matches with guys who are about my level. And there were these two guys who were tennis players and they were playing hardbat. Now the ball was moving pretty slow. They are swinging hard and the ball is moving like a turtle. But every point in their matches was a long rally that moved from side to side and they would get backed up and move back to the table. And it was interesting that the ball was slow enough that they could play every point like it was one of those long rallies in tennis. And I realized that the points in the games and matches we were playing, most of them were 4 hits or less.
The tennis/hardbat guys were pretty good at hardbat. Not great. But they were definitely having rallies that were 10-20x more dynamic than the rallies we were playing with spin and sponge.
Hardbat is really a totally different game. It is not so much about spin and deception. It is much slower, so even when someone blasts the ball, you can often still get to it even when you are close to the table. It is more about rallies than about tactics that get you the opening and the advantage.
And it is okay to understand that most of what is going on for Marty was that he was seriously bitter about what happened to him in 1952 and everything he did after that was a crusade to try and get the old days back, or to humiliate guys who used sponge. Even that day when I was playing with him, he gave me a diatribe on how guys with smooth rubber couldn't play against his hardbat.
And if you think about him bragging about playing a guy like Jimmy Buttler and forcing him to use a racket he never would use otherwise. And how Buttler only won by 2 points, I mean, what would happen if Buttler flipped the scenario and played Marty and Marty had to use Buttler's spare racket? Marty would get about as many points as I got against him when I played Marty.
One time, at Spin, I was hitting with Michael Landers and this old hardbat guy asked Mike if he could hit with him. Mike said sure. After a few minutes the hardbat guy complained about the sponge. Said it was hard to play against because of all that spin. Mike said "do you have another hardbat? I can play hardbat." They played a game to 21. For the first half of the game Mike was trying to get used to the racket and was down. But he won the game despite the fact that that is not what he plays with usually.
So....hardbat. It looks like it is fun and requires different skills. But so much of the art that does come in with sponge is lost. As far as I am concerned it is okay to consider them different sports.
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