Sport

Give the basketball to such diverse talents as Julius Erving, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Walt Frazier, Rick Barry, George McGinnis, Dave Bing, or Bob McAdoo, to name a tiny fraction, and you get dramatically distinctive styles of dribbling, passing, shooting, and defensive play. There is great room in basketball for demonstrable physical artistry that often can be compared to serious dance.

So there I was in 1967 leafing through the sports section of a newspaper one day (I still read that section first) when I came across the name Earl Monroe. I had never heard of Monroe, knew nothing of his daily rookie brilliance nor ever heard of his astounding feats at Winston-Salem. I just liked the name, free-floating, three syllables, and euphonious to me. Earl Monroe. The name worked. (Years later, when I did a film called Sleeper, I named myself Miles Monroe. On me it was kind of a funny name.) I came across Monroe’s name again every few days as I glanced over the basketball box scores in a casual, disinterested way and noticed that he invariably led the scoring column.

Monroe 34, Monroe 36, Monroe 24, Monroe 28, Monroe 40! I was impressed by the consistent high numbers and repeated his name every now and then like it was a mantra. It still sounded musical. Earl Monroe. I think I even recall seeing a picture of him on the cover of Sports Illustrated that year and thinking he was very interesting looking. I was, and I don’t know why, aware of Monroe in some special way. Although I didn’t follow his sport much then, if someone had awakened me in the middle of the night and said, “Quick, name your favorite basketball player,” I’d have snapped back: “Earl Monroe.” This was probably his first working of magic on me, though I had no real idea of what Baltimore Bullet fans were witnessing and feeling each night when they saw him play and referred to him as the Pearl or Black Jesus.

The first time I saw Monroe, an actor friend said, “Come with me to the Garden tonight. I want you to see this guy. You’ll like his style. It’s real herky-jerky.” That was in 1968. By then I was more interested in basketball and had begun following the Knicks a little. They had made the playoffs and had captured the imagination of New York. I went and saw Monroe score 32 points against Walt Frazier. This is Walt Frazier, mind you, who played the guard position as perfectly as it has ever been played and who was to be voted on the all-defensive team seven years running. Thirty-two points and Frazier said, “I had my hand in his face all night. He shoots without looking.”

I went the next night too and while the Knicks double-teamed Monroe at every turn, he tore the place up with a buzzer beater that he flipped in as he ran across the midcourt line at halftime, and he kept running right into the locker room.

My impressions of Monroe then? I immediately ranked him with Willie Mays and Sugar Ray Robinson as athletes who went beyond the level of sports and sport to the realm of sports as art.

I met Mr. Reisman when I read the manuscript for his memoir, which I unsuccessfully championed. He cut a distinctive figure, walking around the Lower East Side in vintage Panama hats, tinted aviators and custom-made pastel pants. He always had a cigarette hanging out of his mouth.

I hesitate to call him a mentor. After all, Mr. Reisman was, by his own account, friends with members of Meyer Lansky’s Murder Incorporated gang, a self-declared Ping-Pong hustler who, paddle in hand, had, he told me, taken money off everyone from Montgomery Clift to the president of the Philippines.

I remain useless at table tennis and lose bets to my 7-year-old, but Mr. Reisman taught me that if I wanted to make it, I’d need to cultivate my own kind of con. He showed me how to reinvent. To self-mythologize. To stop apologizing and start throwing elbows at the Barneys Warehouse Sale. To order an off-menu roast duck bowl at Mee Noodle Shop.

It’s easy to feel as if you’re going to get eaten alive when you first step out into the world, especially in a place like New York City. It’s a fake-it-till-you-make-it kind of place, where it seems as if most of the people you meet were born on third base. Anyone who’s ever tried to weasel inside or work her way above her station knows that a certain amount of hustle — even con — is required. It’s why we love Jay Gatsby and Don Draper and have welcomed the woman known as Anna Delvey back to Fashion Week.

Mr. Reisman did this in the most florid way. Known as the Needle because of his slim physique, he was born in New York in 1930 and grew up on the Lower East Side. He told me he picked up table tennis in Bellevue Hospital after he had a nervous breakdown at age 9. And damn, if Mr. Reisman didn’t cultivate his talent and the Reisman myth to travel the world and get into rooms he was never meant to be in. […]

Mr. Reisman used to tell me about the characters who frequented his splendid Gothic establishment, Riverside Table Tennis, on 96th and Broadway: Freddie the Fence, Herbie the Nuclear Physicist, Betty the Monkey Lady, Tony the Arm, Dustin Hoffman, David Mamet and a group of violinists from the Metropolitan Opera. “No one knows why,” he said.

As a man in a USA trucker hat rose to ask the board about their pigeon lobbyist (yes, even they have one), the hundreds of airborne pigeons were locking on to the exact coordinates of the home lofts—scattered in backyards and garages within a fifty-mile radius of this hotel—where they had been raised. As they soared over cube-cut farmland, scanning for hawks with their orange eyes, they had no idea that fifty thousand dollars were at stake, that the humans that raised them were anxiously waiting for them to swoop in, or that they were competitors in the convention’s main event: the yearly ARPU combine. No, they were just trying to get home.

Commercial fishing on the Kaw was a viable profession not only because of the size and abundance of the fish but also because of the now-illegal methods used to harvest them: Abe and Jake were both known to drag giant nets, sometimes trapping 300 pounds’ worth of carp, buffalo, and catfish in a single outing. More daringly, they would dive for their quarry: They’d swim to the base of the dam, or under the wooden floor of an old flour mill, feel around for a big cat, snag it with a gaff hook, and wrestle it to the surface. One summer day in 1902, according to the Lawrence Weekly World, Abe hauled in catfish of 35, 60, and 104 pounds “by diving and stabbing them.”

If that sounds life-endangering, it was. Around Lawrence, it’s generally been understood that either Abe or Jake (or maybe both) died that way—drowned in pursuit of a bewhiskered leviathan. I’ve been hearing versions of this tale for years. Some folks say that the drowned man was never seen again; others, that he washed up on a sandbar downriver, still locked in a death embrace with the big one that didn’t get away. Fascinated by this story and bemused by its fishiness, I decided to take my own deep dive.