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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
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?<\/p>\n
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 \u2014 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 \u2014 its elegant eroticism.<\/p>\n
\u2022 What Will Survive of Us by Howard Jacobson review: still sex-mad and verbose<\/a><\/p>\n I suppose I\u2019d 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\u2019t say it is ribald, but I wrote it 20 years ago when there was a touch more latitude around the subject of a woman\u2019s looks and a boy\u2019s 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\u2019t. Conquest of Lorna Peachley, it must be said, is the last thing on Oliver\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n Oughtn\u2019t 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\u2019s passive, is still desire, and with desire you can never be too careful.<\/p>\n Chalamet in Marty Supreme<\/p>\n AP<\/p>\n Whatever the rights and wrongs of it, The Mighty Walzer is a coming-of-age novel and a boy can\u2019t come of age without his imagination occasionally leading him astray. Masochism! Naturally. You can\u2019t attain manhood without nosing into a bit of that. I\u2019m not even sure that table tennis itself \u2014 at least as played in the Manchester and District League, in the 1950s \u2014 wasn\u2019t 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 \u2014 indeed it is sometimes hard for him to distinguish the one from the other \u2014 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.<\/p>\n 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. \u201cHere,\u201d Oliver Walzer would sometime long to say to an opponent in the middle of a match, \u201cif you want to win that much \u2014 then, here, have, with my compliments, win!\u201d whereupon he would deliberately hit the ball off the table.<\/p>\n Call it the table tennis death wish.<\/p>\n 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 \u2014 barefaced robbery he called it \u2014 and would have taken the sponge bat itself to court had that been possible.<\/p>\n![\"Timoth\u00e9e](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/\/68b5fa6b-f21e-40f7-aad3-eb03d18e4ea3.jpg\")
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