Marty Supreme, starring Timothée Chalamet, didn’t just win Oscars and Golden Globes. With over $150 million in box office sales, the movie, centered on ping pong, has brought the sport to national attention. Maybe seeing Chalamet claim victory over his opponents with forehand loops, spinning and speeding up the ball, and backhand chops, which manipulate the spin, has inspired you to learn more about ping pong. Here’s everything you never knew about the sport at its highest levels. 

You’ve probably first played ping pong in your basement or garage. That’s no coincidence. In the 1950s and 60s, with a boom in suburban housing, more homes began to include recreational rooms, often with ping-pong tables to fill the space, according to Proremodeler. Ping pong was originally seen as an easy after-dinner activity for American households, according to Play Point Table Tennis, which is how many people still see it today.

Many current perceptions of the game stem from the sport’s business-oriented growth. Jaques of London, a British sports equipment company, pioneered its development in the 1880s and dubbed it “Gossima.” In the United States around this time, the Parker Brothers, a popular American game manufacturer best known for games like Monopoly, acquired the trademark for the name “ping pong” and marketed it extensively, enforcing its use at clubs and tournaments, according to the International Table Tennis Federation (ITTF). 

Bishop’s students play ping pong casually at home, during F days at the Bishop’s Table Tennis Club (BTTC), or, for seniors, in the senior rec room. BTTC member James Lila (‘28) noted, “Ping pong is a very engaging sport where you can have fun with your friends without being good at the sport.”

But not everyone plays just for fun. After ping pong soared in popularity, the ITTF was created in 1926 as a governing body to standardize competitive rules. They also hosted the first World Championships in London that year. In the first 40 years of ITTF’s creation, the U.S. secured over 20 medals. Some of the most successful early American players include Dick Miles, Ruth Aarons, and Marty Reisman, who all won at least one medal according to ITTF’s records.

The 2025 movie Marty Supreme is loosely based on Resiman, following Marty Mauser, an aspiring table tennis professional, as he hustles his way to compete at the World Championships. The movie takes place in 1952, and the style Marty plays, a style popular before 1952, involves a lot of pushing and is very passive. In fact, at the 1936 World Championships, a rally lasted over two hours with this style of play. In 1952, sponge rackets were introduced and helped ping pong become a much more intense and fast-paced sport.

Table tennis, a more formal name for the sport, is much faster and involves much more spin than most people understand. Professional players can hit the ball upwards of 120 miles per hour during intense rallies, according to World Table Tennis (WTT), giving very little reaction time, considering that a regulation-size table is only 2.74 meters or nine feet long, according to ITTF. Shots hit by professional players can spin at a rate of around 130 revolutions per second. That’s almost four times faster than NASCAR wheels spin. 

Table tennis rackets go by many names, as they’re sometimes labeled rackets, bats, or paddles, with many people having played with wooden or plastic rackets with thin layers of rubber. High-level table tennis equipment, however, is much more developed. Top players play with rackets that consist of three customizable parts: a wooden blade and a sheet of rubber on each side. These sheets of rubber have a layer of sponge underneath each sheet and slightly sticky surfaces, which creates friction and spin.

Whether you call it table tennis or ping pong, the sport at the highest level is much more difficult than casual players may understand. Although the culture around the sport in America — built up over 100 years of playing — may be hard to change, the next time you pick up a racket, you may be able to look past the simple, leisure game and tell your friends about the intensity of table tennis.