Back from the dead, foosball taking flight
LEXINGTON, Ky. — Sweat drips down Chris Marks' forehead as he leans over the foosball table. Mouth slightly open, right hand delicately turning the rod handle, the 26-year-old German insurance broker is a portrait in concentration.
@BodyCopy:Back and forth. Back and forth. Marks gracefully passes the polyurethane ball up and down the line, from one yellow plastic man to the next, looking for an opening as his opponent nervously wiggles his two defensive rods.
Not that it matters. Marks is simply biding his time.
One quick flip of the wrist and it's over, the ball moving so fast you don't actually see it. The ball makes a tinny "thwack" as it hits the back of the goal.
Marks celebrates with a triumphant "whoop." Arms raised, he flips the final bead across the scoreboard, digs into his nearby backpack and takes a slug of Gatorade as he pulls off his yellow-tinted sunglasses and wipes his brow.
This is why he flew nearly halfway around the world from Frankfurt, Germany, to a crowded ballroom in a nondescript hotel in the middle of Kentucky in the middle of January.
"I really like the head-to-head," Marks says, slightly out of breath. "There's no other game where your opponent is like 2 feet away from you across the table. It's like, 'Who's better?"'
There are few in the world better than Marks. And some of them are in this same room, playing in the 13th annual Super Bowl of Foosball, one of the most popular regional foosball tournaments in the country.
Twenty feet away sits 22-year-old Billy Pappas, considered the top American player. Across the room, 22-year-old Rob Atha from England practices doubles with a teammate.
Watch the world's best players, and you realize this isn't the game you grew up playing after school in your buddy's basement or at the neighborhood bar.
The ball flies across the table as their hands jump quickly from rod to rod, their heads hunched over the table as they plot out the next pass, the next shot, the next win.
This isn't just a game to the players, it's serious business. Well sort of.
While the $35,000 prize money available to the winners in the Super Bowl of Foosball is hardly pocket change, most of the players know they'll never get rich rolling a ball between plastic men from one end of a 4-foot table to the other.
Still, it hasn't stopped foosball from developing a cult following.
There are nearly 40 regional tournaments held annually in the U.S., with dozens more in Europe, where the sport is so popular that 1,500 people watched from bleachers during a World Cup of Table Soccer tournament in Hamburg, Germany, last summer.
Not bad for a game that seemed destined for oblivion after a $1 million professional tour went belly-up about 25 years ago. While there was still enough money for the very best players to scratch out a living, sponsorships evaporated and kids moved toward video games, leaving many tables bought in haste in the late 1970s gathering dust in thousands of garages and basements across the country.
Recently, however, things have changed. Joey and Chandler on the TV show "Friends" had a foosball table in their apartment. The game has been spotlighted in Coke and Pepsi commercials and developed a following on the internet.
"I think some of it is sort of a backlash," said Jim Stevens, owner of Insidefoos.com, an online site that produces foosball videos and does live Webcasting from several high-profile tournaments a year. "It's an anti-video game thing. It's a real sport. It's a real game. You're not pushing buttons playing with digital figures. It's real."
Perhaps real enough to be included in the summer Olympics one day. Seriously.
The International Table Soccer Federation, the sport's governing body, is meeting with International Olympic Committee officials this spring. The goal is to have foosball become officially recognized as a sport by the IOC. It's the first step in a process that could one day lead to the game being selected as a demonstration sport.
"At least having the goal in mind creates a certain amount of professionalism," Stevens said. "I don't think it's out of the question."
