Meet the real Marty ‘Supreme’ Reisman and his wife of 40 years

Like the character in the film, Marty was born in New York City. He was Ashkenazi Jewish and grew up on the Lower East Side with his older brother David. When Marty was just nine-years-old, he experienced a nervous breakdown.

To cope, he started playing table tennis because he found it soothing. Four years later, Marty became the city junior champion. 

A throughline between Marty’s life and the film was his expertise in hustling. When he was young, he started hustling for money at Lawrence’s Broadway Table Tennis Club on 54th and Broadway. He would lose the first few games, double the stakes, and then defeat them.

When Marty was 15, he placed a $500 bet on himself during a national tournament in Detroit with a man he assumed was a bookie. Unluckily, he was actually the head of the United States Table Tennis Association who turned him in to the police.

During his 56-year-career, Marty won 22 major table tennis finals, including five bronze medals at the World Table Tennis Championships. After his run at the World Championships, Marty ran the Riverside Table Tennis club on the Upper West Side which had several famous patrons like Dustin Hoffman and author Kurt Vonnegut.

Marty was the most well known table tennis player of his time, even appearing on the Late Show with David Letterman. He wore flamboyant outfits, bright clothing, and was never without a fedora or a Panama hat.

Though the movie focuses on Marty’s younger years and fictional romances, the real Marty eventually found lasting love with his second wife.

After divorcing Geri Falk – with whom he had a daughter – he married Yoshiko Reisman in 1982. Yoshiko does not appear as a character in the film, as the story takes placer decades before they met.

It’s not clear how they got together but, while filming the documentary Fact or Fiction between 2009 and 2012, Marty told the filmmakers he and Yoshiko had been together for 32 years, meaning they started dating anywhere from 1977 to 1980.

While Yoshiko lived a very private life, Marty revealed to documentary filmmakers that when she was younger she was a model and an actress. He lovingly said: “She was gorgeous.”

As she aged, she stepped away from the limelight, but she continued to support her husband’s career. Yoshiko was a constant presence at his matches. “[During] my playing career, she was very enthusiastic about my game and what I was doing,” Marty told the Fact or Fiction directors. “She was also, strangely enough, my table tennis coach during the course of a match. She lived and died in every shot that I made.”

Yoshiko and Marty were dedicated to each other. They didn’t have any children together, but they raised their cats and spent meaningful time together. While filming the documentary, Marty revealed that he was caring for Yoshiko, who had fallen ill.

“She did everything for me. I couldn’t imagine life without her. She’s very important in my life,” he said. “She fed me well. She cooked for me. She tended to all my necessities.”

In 2012, just as Fact or Fiction wrapped, Marty passed away at the age of 82 due to heart and lung complications. It’s unclear if Yoshiko is alive or not, but what is clear is the love between the couple.