Quite out of the blue, against the spirit of the times, and in defiance of every objection from the sporting gods, table tennis is all the rage. The film Marty Supreme, starring Timothée Chalamet, is responsible for this. Table tennis, not ping-pong (you can forget that jokey belittlement from now on), table tennis, lawn tennis’s long neglected little brother — the more intellectually challenging for being played where the sun doesn’t shine, in a confined space, without the big balls, the celebrity spectators, and the megabucks.
As a table tennis player myself I’ve been waiting all my life for this to happen and now it’s too late. I’ve lost my speed around the table. I’ve lost my sharpness of vision. Worst of all, I’ve lost the will to win. Fortunately I still have The Mighty Walzer — the not-quite-autobiographical novel I wrote some years ago in remembrance of my table tennis years — to remind me of the player I once was.
“The Manchester hitter”, they called me, a compliment you have to be careful how you pronounce. Unlike Marty Reisman, the brash American table tennis player on whom Marty Supreme is based, I was shy, apologetic, introverted and, though I dreamed of table tennis greatness, knew in my heart that I would never achieve it.
This could have had something to do with my growing up in Manchester not Manhattan. Mancunians are masters of self-disparagement, a phrase Manhattans have never heard of. Manhattans have wit, but they don’t have hilarity. They don’t enjoy the freedom that comes with finding oneself preposterous. Table tennis, for God’s sake — did I really think I would ever find fame, riches and the adoration of beautiful women through table tennis? Whisper it: yes. Marty also believed he would but said so openly. And now, courtesy of the wunderkind Chalamet, here Marty is — though no longer alive to enjoy it — being talked about as an Oscar contender. While I am left with nothing but a riotous sense of my own absurd fantasies and the hope of a new reader or two.
I began to play table tennis at the age of about 12, encouraged by my mother who dreaded my being hit in the face by a cricket ball or being knocked unconscious while attempting to head a football, eventualities she needn’t have wasted five minutes worrying about since I ducked whenever either of those balls came my way. We were of one mind when it came to the table tennis ball: it could do no harm to a delicate boy who bruised easily. In fact I once almost blinded an opponent with a Halex Two Star, but I never told my mother that or she would have stopped me playing anything but tiddlywinks.
All hail, anyway, the little sphere of celluloid to which I dedicated the better part of my adolescence!
I began playing on the kitchen table with a book for a bat, a rolled-up dish cloth for a net, and an aunty for an opponent. The book was a Collins Classic edition of The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Later, when I needed something far fiercer to hit with, I moved on to Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen. Jane Austen is underrated. Take it from me: you can really belt the ball with her prose. Once I left our kitchen and began to compete in the Manchester and District League I played with a Victor Barna bat. Had there been a bat with Jane Austen’s signature on the handle I’d have used that.
The Mighty Walzer tells the story of my emergence from the chrysalis of kitchen bashfulness and diffidence into a junior champion with swagger. But more than that it tells of table tennis’s emergence from a game of intense concentration beloved of Jewish intellectuals in Prague and Vienna — chess in shorts was how I described it — to a sport altogether more suited to athletes in China and Japan.
• Read more film reviews, guides about what to watch and interviews
Technology was responsible for this. Quite suddenly, the sponge bat appeared from the East, replacing the pimply rubber I had moved on to after Jane Austen and which the great European exponents of the game had played with for decades. Faced with an opponent wielding a small foam mattress, Marty Reisman lost his confidence, failed to become world champion, and so did I. Sponge not only took the philosophical leisure out of table tennis, it took out the listening. You could no longer gauge the spin and speed from your opponent’s strokes because they had become soundless. Where there had been music and lyricism there was now only enigma. What I had loved about table tennis was the witty dialogue. It was as though sponge had all at once turned Sense and Sensibility into a silent movie.
Though sponge took the fun out of table tennis for me, I enjoyed the challenge of writing about it once I no longer played. How to describe what the game had lost?
It was on the back of descriptions such as these that Marty Reisman and I became friends and allies. He too missed the plock-plock of pimples — like the clatter of high heels on a wet pavement. Oof-plock, oof-plock was the nearest sponge equivalent, which sounded like the woman in high-heels falling into a muddy puddle of stale rainwater. So that was something else that sponge erased from the game — its elegant eroticism.
• What Will Survive of Us by Howard Jacobson review: still sex-mad and verbose
I suppose I’d better warn anyone planning to read The Mighty Walzer that it has more sex in it than might be expected of a novel about table tennis. I wouldn’t say it is ribald, but I wrote it 20 years ago when there was a touch more latitude around the subject of a woman’s looks and a boy’s desires. Take Lorna Peachley, the all-moving body parts siren of the Manchester and District Table Tennis League, whose flexuousness around the table so beguiles my hero, Oliver Walzer, that he hits a lot more balls into the net when she is around than when she isn’t. Conquest of Lorna Peachley, it must be said, is the last thing on Oliver’s mind. All he wants, when he encounters her across the table and observes her breasts shudder and her belly quiver when she hits the ball, is for her to conquer him.
Oughtn’t such passivity exonerate Oliver, and me come to that, from all charges of salacious sexism? I thought so, anyway, but I can also see that desire, even when it’s passive, is still desire, and with desire you can never be too careful.
Chalamet in Marty Supreme
AP
Whatever the rights and wrongs of it, The Mighty Walzer is a coming-of-age novel and a boy can’t come of age without his imagination occasionally leading him astray. Masochism! Naturally. You can’t attain manhood without nosing into a bit of that. I’m not even sure that table tennis itself — at least as played in the Manchester and District League, in the 1950s — wasn’t a species of masochism in action. Not to have reached into some of the darker elements of the game would have simplified not only my hero but the game itself. The Marty of Marty Supreme is riven as much by desire as ambition — indeed it is sometimes hard for him to distinguish the one from the other — and we Manchester boys who laughed at the grandiosity of our ambitions nursed, nonetheless, longings that table tennis alone could never satisfy, not least the warped, sinister longing to lose.
With Lorna Peachley, such a longing to get beaten up by a Halex Two Star was the last word in teenage voluptuousness. But there was another sort of wanting to lose which could better be described as weariness with contest. “Here,” Oliver Walzer would sometime long to say to an opponent in the middle of a match, “if you want to win that much — then, here, have, with my compliments, win!” whereupon he would deliberately hit the ball off the table.
Call it the table tennis death wish.
I doubt Marty Reisman ever went there. Winning for him was everything. His seminal loss to a player wielding the first sponge bat he had ever seen rankled with him for life. Thereafter he would tell and retell the story of that loss — barefaced robbery he called it — and would have taken the sponge bat itself to court had that been possible.
• Howard Jacobson: ‘I go through life more or less blind to anything outside myself’
My story was quite different. For me, failure to become a world-class player was of the essence of the sad comedy of it. I wanted beautiful women to fall at my feet for what? For the sight of me on my hands and knees in a church hall, scrambling to find the Halex Two Star that had rolled under a bench or fallen down two flights of stone steps at the bottom of which, with luck, would be Lorna Peachley dressed in a nurse’s outfit. The joke beat the ambition. Better to get the laugh than life aloft the silver cup.
To this day, 20 years after The Mighty Walzer was published, people stop me in the street to thank me for telling their story. They are not all table tennis players. Many just recognise the obsession with a game or minor sport and the absurd longing for recognition that went with it. Most of us, it seems, have felt the ridiculousness of attaching great ambitions to small pursuits. Not Marty, though. Well into his seventies he was still chalking up every win as though they were Olympic titles. He would ring me from New York in the middle of the London night to tell me he had just beaten Steve. Steve who? It didn’t matter. A win was a win.
You pays your money and you takes your choice. You see the funny side of life or you become a sportsman.
The Mighty Walzer by Howard Jacobson (Vintage £10.99 pp400). Streetwalking with Howard Jacobson