Do not call it the Marty Supreme effect: Table tennis is a growing sport in the US, in part because of a new professional league giving the parlor game an ultra-competitive edge.
Founded three years ago by tech entrepreneur Flint Lane, Major League Table Tennis (MLTT) is now home to several players in the global top 100, including Amy Wang and Lily Zhang, who represented the US at the 2024 Paris Olympics.
At a weekend MLTT match in Princeton, New Jersey, about 100 spectators watched Kotomi Omoda secure victory for the Portland Paddlers against the Florida Crocs.
Photo: EPA-EFE
Nikhil Kumar, who also plays for the Paddlers and competed in the 2021 Tokyo Olympics, said he was “a little bit skeptical” when he first heard of MLTT.
Now that the league has been around for a few years, “there’s been a lot of progression for us in terms of the level of the play and the players that are coming to play stronger,” he said.
The Olympic sport’s growing US fandom is evident in MLTT ticket sales, which are up 50 percent compared with last year, founder Lane said.
“I don’t know if I would be a season ticket holder, but I’m killing a Saturday afternoon,” said Richard Kurland, a spectator at the match. “It’s something different. I’ll have stories to tell my friends for the next few weeks, some photos. I would definitely come back.”
Despite the league’s professional status, MLTT players hold day jobs to support themselves.
“I hope one day that it could be enough,” said Kumar, who works as an engineer at a New York tech start-up. “I’d love to play table tennis as a living.”
MLTT ranks among the top professional leagues in the world, although it still trails the Chinese, Japanese, French and German leagues, Lane said.
“But we’re not competing against them either,” he said, comparing it with Major League Soccer, the US soccer league that generate billions of dollars without being among the top leagues globally.
To grow the US audience for the sport, MLTT launched its own streaming channel in September last year, Table Tennis TV. It also created a ranking system, Spindex, with the hopes of making it a ratings scale similar to golf handicaps.
USA Table Tennis, the nonprofit governing body for the sport in the US, had about 14,000 members as of late last year. PingPod, a chain of table tennis venues in the US, reported it had 160,000 registered users.
“Having a well-funded, well-organized professional league in the United States is a good tailwind, a good boost for the sport, both in terms of participation and spectatorship,” PingPod coCEO David Silberman said.
The sport also came to prominence in popular culture with the release of the Oscar-nominated film Marty Supreme, in which Timothee Chalamet portrays table tennis player Marty Mauser in 1950s New York, based loosely on real-life player Marty Reisman.
The film grossed almost US$100 million in the US, becoming the top-grossing picture for independent film distributor A24.
“The buzz about Marty Supreme, the way that I talk about table tennis at work or at the store in public, is completely different with the movie,” said table tennis fan Revan Raguindin, who supports the Princeton Revolution MLTT team. “I think there’s so much more recognition of the sport this way, and I am really grateful for it.”
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