Part 49

"I feel I'm moving with the times," he remarks, late one evening at the center. "When from an athletic professional point of view some people would think about retirement, my career is on the point of fresh blossoming." He is referring to the fact that his autobiography, The Money Player, published in 1974, is now being converted into a movie script. And other things are happening. Several months ago his table tennis parlor was the scene of a unique recording session -- a piece of music titled Tournament Overture for Flute, Cello, Synthesizer, and Two Ping-Pong Players, composed especially for Reisman. The event was followed by a regular tournament. And this fall Marty has a long-range exhibition tour lined up.

"I started playing on the Lower East Side, about 1942," he says. "A year later, at the age of 13, I was the New York City Junior Champion. ... At 17, I represented the United States in the World Championship which was held in London, at Wembley Stadium. There were 10,000 people watching. I lost in the quarterfinals. ... The next year I made it to the semifinals and received a rating of number three in the world."

That year, 1949, was probably the peak of Marty's career from a purely athletic standpoint, although he was good enough to win the U.S. Championship in 1958 and 1960. What distinguishes him from other players, however, is the variety and richness of his experiences in the world of Ping-Pong. For three years he toured with the Harlem Globetrotters as their star attraction at halftime. He spent several years in the Far East as well, and was in Hanoi when the French were defeated at Dien Bien Phu. Altogether he has played in 65 countries, and has picked up such titles as South American Champion, Canadian Champion, and British Champion.

He once taught the game to a chimpanzee; the chimp managed to return the ball up to four times in a row. "But the most astounding thing about him," recalls Marty, "was his short span of attention. When the ball was about an inch from his racket, he'd turn his head away and get smacked in the face."

As the title of his autobiography indicates, Marty has also been known to place a wager on occasion. "I've hustled when I've had to," he confesses. "But it hasn't been my way of life. I don't misrepresent myself. I play against the best players in the world, all over the world. Wherever I am, I create the drama, the action, the excitement, because of the large sums of money I bet." In one of his biggest hustles he flew to Omaha, Nebraska, under the guise of a baby crib salesman, to help a man who had been hustled himself. Reisman played for $1,000 a game and emerged from the contest 14 games ahead.

West 96th Street has long been a hotbed of table tennis activity. A Ping Pong parlor opened there in 1934, and Marty took it over in 1958. Today, many of the world's great players stop by for a game when they visit New York. Dustin Hoffman, Walter Matthau, Bobby Fischer and Art Carney have played there also. Marty's regular customers range from 8-year-old boys to a man of 83 who plays twice a week. The center opens in the afternoon and doesn't close until 3:30 in the morning, seven days a week. "I live on the West Side and so do most of my friends," says Marty.

A man has been standing nearby during the interview; Marty introduces him as Bill, his former manager.

"Manager?" snorts the man with a gruff smile. "He can't be managed. Human beings can be managed, but Reisman is something different. If he says 'I'll be there at 3 o'clock' he might show up at 4 -- the next day. But," he concedes, "if Marty didn't have those idiosyncracies, he wouldn't have those rare talents."

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WESTSIDER RUGGIERO RICCI World's most-recorded violinist

3-3-79

It was Sunday, October 20, 1929. Four days later, on Black Thursday, Wall Street would be rocked by the biggest losses in its history and the nation would be plunged into its greatest crisis since the Civil War. But October 20 still belonged to the Roaring Twenties, and on that date the most highly publicized event to take place in Manhattan was a violin concert by a 9-year-old wunderkind named Ruggiero Ricci, who delivered a flawless performance of the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto and was lauded as a genius by the city's leading music critics. That concert made Ricci's career; in the 10 years that followed, the boy virtuoso earned an annual salary higher than that of the president of the United States.

The story might have ended there, but unlike most prodigies, who burn themselves out early, Ruggiero Ricci has continued to grow in stature as an artist. Since the 1940s he has been considered one of the greatest living violinists, and, with more than 500 recordings to his credit, he is the most-recorded soloist, instrumental or vocal, in the world today. Especially in demand abroad, he has made five trips to Australia and three to the Soviet Union, where he was obliged to play nine encores at his debut appearance. Twenty of his concerts in West Germany were sold out a year in advance, and more than a dozen of his South American tours have been sellouts as well.

"I travel most of the year, except maybe a month off in the summer," says Ricci, a short, good-humored man of 60 with large, sparkling eyes, jet black brows, and a soft, slightly accented voice that sounds as if he were born in Europe. He sits curled up in a corner of the couch in his magnificent Westside apartment. "I dislike to travel. In the old days, there were a lot of airplane breakdowns, and we were always hung up in airports waiting for them to fix the plane. Today they have all these hijacking searches. You have to go through the machines; they have these enormous lines. And when you get to the hotel, there's a line a mile long."

He believes that Russian audiences are "the best public in the world. They don't applaud between the movements, like they do in New York. ... It's always interesting to visit a place for the first time. I don't want to go to Russia so much anymore. We found out it's boring. There's nothing to do. And it's not much fun. There's no tipping, so the hotel service is very bad. It takes an hour to get breakfast; you can sit there and be completely ignored by the waiter. To make a telephone call: it's easier to go to the moon."

Ricci's repertoire, which includes more than 60 concertos from the 17th to the 20th centuries, is the largest of any violinist's now before the public. This calls for a lot of practice. "When you're a kid," says Ricci, "you hate to practice. And when you're a grownup, practice is a pleasure. It lets you escape all the other junk. ... I don't have any trouble practicing in this building, because the old buildings have heavy walls. But if you want to practice in a hotel, that's hard. Sometimes you can use a mute. Or you turn on the television. Then they don't complain. If they hear a fiddle, they complain."

Ricci has two major concerts in New York this year. The first will take place at Carnegie Hall on Saturday, March 3, when Ricci will join such celebrities as Andres Segovia, Yehudi Menuhin, Jose Ferrer, Jean-Pierre Rampal, and Peter Ustinov for a historic musical program to commemorate the 15th anniversary of Symphonicum Europae, a foundation whose aim is to promote international understanding and cooperation by sponsoring performances in every country.

Ricci's other New York concert will mark another anniversary. It will be on October 20th -- 50 years to the day since he took the city by storm. "The early concerts I remember very well," says the maestro, who was born in San Francisco to a family of Italian immigrants. "For most prodigies, the problem is the parents. My father just wasn't every smart about how to handle me. Nowadays they don't have prodigies anymore because there isn't any profit in it. In the old days, a kid could get $2,500 to $3000 dollars a night. Everybody had their kid study."

None of his five children has turned out to be a prodigy, but three of them are already professionals in the performing arts. Ricci's slender, attractive wife, Julia, is an active participant in his career. Westsiders for many years, the Riccis enjoy such local restaurants as La Tablita, Alfredo's and the Cafe des Artistes.

Asked what he likes best about his career, Ricci says it is making recordings. "It's more leisurely. You don't have all the headaches. ... The newest development is direct-to-disc records. The music goes straight from the mike into the cutting head master, and there's no way to erase. If it's a 20-minute recording and you make a mistake on the 19th minute, you have to start over. I just finished recording the Paganini Caprices on direct-to-disc. It's coming out this month. The caprices are very rarely performed in public, because they're so difficult."

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WESTSIDER BUDDY RICH Monarch of the drums

1-5-80

"Mediocrity has no place in my life," says fast-talking, hard-driving Buddy Rich, wrapped in a bathrobe at his luxurious Westside apartment. "Anybody who is expert at what they do, I admire, whether it's drumming, tennis, or whatever. If they do it at the top of their form, constantly, I become a fan."

Dragging deeply on his cigarette, the man whom critics and fellow jazz artists have frequently called the greatest drummer in the world -- perhaps of all time -- dismisses such labels with something approaching annoyance.

"I don't think anybody is the best of anything in the world. Babe Ruth's record was broken, Joe Louis was knocked out. ... I'd rather not be the world's greatest anything. I'd rather be what I am, which is a good drummer."

It is an unexpected statement to come from a bandleader and drummer known more for arrogance than modesty, but in an hour-long interview, Buddy's complex personality unfolds itself in all its richness, and he proves to be far more than a flamboyant, free-thinking musician who pulls no punches.

In Buddy's hands, a snare drum comes to life: it whispers, shouts, purrs, snarls, chuckles, gasps or roars, as the mood of the music strikes him. He began playing in 1921 at the age of 4, when his parents -- vaudeville actors from Brooklyn -- included him in their act and then made him the star. By the age of 7 he had toured the world as "Traps, the Drum Wonder." At 15, he was second only to Jackie Coogan as the highest-paid child performer in America. He began recording in 1937, joined bands headed by Artie Shaw and Tommy Dorsey, and finally formed his own band in 1946. Over the next 20 years, as both a drummer/bandleader and as the highest-paid sideman in the business, he made hundreds of recordings with some of the biggest names in the history of jazz -- Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Oscar Peterson, Lionel Hampton, Count Basie, Harry James, Thelonius Monk.