H i everyone just wondering who first started the snake shot ? a few of us were talking about it last week and just wondered who started and how it was made a legal shot ect!!! some one told me a german was the one who started this shot is this true ? anyone knows more? thank you. 
Scott Haltom from North Carolina is usually the name I hear associated with it in the US. He shot it on Tornado tour for the first time in 1987 (at the Pasadena, TX tournament) but had used it for a few years before then. Scott called it the "wrist-rocket", and that (or the shorter "rocket") are still common names for it in North Carolina and other parts of the east coast, although the northeast took to calling it the "snake" in the late 1980s..
John Smith from Texas saw Scott shoot it at the Pasadena event and was the first major proponent in Texas, a major foosball hotbed, so he's sometimes incorrectly identified as the originator. Terry Moore was the first to really start winning majors on a regular basis with it (John Smith won at least one I think, not sure if it was Dynamo or Tornado).
Smith is primarily a pull shooter, but at the time there were 2 World's, one on Tornado and one on Dynamo; he shot the pull on one and the snake on the other to avoid messing up the timing on his pull by shooting it on different tables. Indeed, John looked down on the shot and was the first one to call it the "monkey". It was with the rise of west coast shooters in the early 1990s (esp. Terry) that the term "rollover" came about, I'm not sure who came up with that.
But Scott's the first one who actually used it as a legit shot and brought it on tour for the first time. John Smith saw him do it and became the first one to win a major, and Terry Moore brought it to a really high level.
[But it's kind of wrong to say that Scott "invented" it. I've heard of others shooting _similar_ things ranging from a palm-roll front-pin (not wrist) going way back the early 1970s to Shoji Shinoda shooting a shot that set up like the snake but only used cutback options in the mid-1980s. It's probable that other people had shot the snake just fooling around earlier.]
But for the German connection:
In Germany it is named after 'Jet' aka Hans-Friedrich Kircher, who is reputed to have invented the shot in the 1970s. He was still active in 2003 (and may still be), so someone over there could ask him about it. Boris Atha (Rob's dad) also might have info on this, I'll ask him if I see him at World's this year.
EDIT: According to David Raddack, it was also called a "forearm toe" in the early days in Texas. I've never heard that before, all the other ones I've heard before and I've only been playing since about 2001.
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