For a measure of the frustrations of a professional table soccer player, one had to search no farther than the sports section of The Denver Post on the Tuesday following Labor Day. A few miles from the newspaper office, in the purple-carpeted ballroom of the Denver Regency Inn, a couple of fellows named Dan Kaiser and Ken Rivera had just won the table soccer open doubles national championship. After six days of intense competition their share of a $113,000 pot was $20,000, but the Post, and almost every other journal in the world, failed to chronicle the feat. If Kaiser and Rivera were searching for national recognition, they might as well have played in the back room of Major Goolsby's bar in Milwaukee, which is the sort of place most people expect to find the game. That is, if they have ever heard of it at all.
"Table soccer? Oh, yeah. I understand they're going to have a Hall of Foam."
"The pros put out a disabled list the other day and everybody on it had cirrhosis of the liver."
"I met one of those guys. His best shot was an ounce of rye with water on the side."
The table soccer people have learned to live with the bad jokes, if not the anonymity. There is, for instance, Billy Sumption, a chunky 27-year-old redhead out of Minneapolis, who, with Karin von Otterstedt, won this year's mixed-doubles championship. Sumption used to be a bank examiner, but he gave it up to become part owner of a table soccer distributorship, though he has found that he pours more profits into the promotion of the sport than he takes home.
"When you first look at the game you think it's some kind of a toy," Sumption says. "The first time I saw it I thought it was funny—little plastic men on a rod kicking a ball around. Then in college I met this German girl who had been playing the game since she was eight, and she killed me. It bent my mind. I took another look."
What Sumption saw was a table, 2'2�" by 3'10�", with the markings of a soccer field and 11 five-inch plastic figures on each side. Each player (or doubles team, doubles being more popular) has a row of five men, fixed on a long rod, in the middle, plus a rod with a forward line of three men, one with a defensive line of two men and a goalie. The object is simple enough: to kick a solid plastic sphere the size of a Ping-Pong ball into the opposite goal. The first side to score five times wins. In professional tournaments, which are all double elimination, it takes three games out of five.
Simple? Yes, but first you had better learn the Louisiana shuffle defense, which really came from Texas and was designed to stop the Texas pull shot, wherein the middle man of the three forwards passes to himself and slams the ball at the goal only slightly slower than the speed of light. This last has driven more than one goalie to, well, drink, and there are also the push, the kick, the slice and the pin shot. Not to mention a recently devised goalie bank shot, which has added yet another dimension to a sufficiently complicated sport.
"To me the game is as real as blood," says Sumption, whose competitiveness made him a legend in South Dakota high school football circles. As a 148-pound linebacker, he suffered three brain concussions. When one doctor would fail him in a football physical, Sumption would find another. He became so infamous that when he was called up for the draft they made him 4-F without even giving him a physical. "Table soccer gives me the same excitement as knocking down those big runners," he says.
This is something the Germans have known for a long time. The game is said to have been developed in France 150 years ago, but it did not become popular in Europe until after World War I, when the Germans used it to rehabilitate wounded veterans. Nor was it immediately popular in the U.S. Eddie Zorinsky, now the mayor of Omaha, used to own a string of amusement arcades with his father Hymie, and 17 years ago they brought the game to this country.
"Table soccer? Oh, yeah. I understand they're going to have a Hall of Foam."
"The pros put out a disabled list the other day and everybody on it had cirrhosis of the liver."
"I met one of those guys. His best shot was an ounce of rye with water on the side."
The table soccer people have learned to live with the bad jokes, if not the anonymity. There is, for instance, Billy Sumption, a chunky 27-year-old redhead out of Minneapolis, who, with Karin von Otterstedt, won this year's mixed-doubles championship. Sumption used to be a bank examiner, but he gave it up to become part owner of a table soccer distributorship, though he has found that he pours more profits into the promotion of the sport than he takes home.
"When you first look at the game you think it's some kind of a toy," Sumption says. "The first time I saw it I thought it was funny—little plastic men on a rod kicking a ball around. Then in college I met this German girl who had been playing the game since she was eight, and she killed me. It bent my mind. I took another look."
What Sumption saw was a table, 2'2�" by 3'10�", with the markings of a soccer field and 11 five-inch plastic figures on each side. Each player (or doubles team, doubles being more popular) has a row of five men, fixed on a long rod, in the middle, plus a rod with a forward line of three men, one with a defensive line of two men and a goalie. The object is simple enough: to kick a solid plastic sphere the size of a Ping-Pong ball into the opposite goal. The first side to score five times wins. In professional tournaments, which are all double elimination, it takes three games out of five.
Simple? Yes, but first you had better learn the Louisiana shuffle defense, which really came from Texas and was designed to stop the Texas pull shot, wherein the middle man of the three forwards passes to himself and slams the ball at the goal only slightly slower than the speed of light. This last has driven more than one goalie to, well, drink, and there are also the push, the kick, the slice and the pin shot. Not to mention a recently devised goalie bank shot, which has added yet another dimension to a sufficiently complicated sport.
"To me the game is as real as blood," says Sumption, whose competitiveness made him a legend in South Dakota high school football circles. As a 148-pound linebacker, he suffered three brain concussions. When one doctor would fail him in a football physical, Sumption would find another. He became so infamous that when he was called up for the draft they made him 4-F without even giving him a physical. "Table soccer gives me the same excitement as knocking down those big runners," he says.
This is something the Germans have known for a long time. The game is said to have been developed in France 150 years ago, but it did not become popular in Europe until after World War I, when the Germans used it to rehabilitate wounded veterans. Nor was it immediately popular in the U.S. Eddie Zorinsky, now the mayor of Omaha, used to own a string of amusement arcades with his father Hymie, and 17 years ago they brought the game to this country.