Reprinted with permission from the CITY PAPER from Baltimore MD. March 27, 1996

Best Foot Forward,

For Regular Players,Foosball Is Serious Fun

By BRYAN WALPERT
A Free-Lance writer who regularly works for Small Business News can be reached at .
sbndc@aol.com

Having a Ball: Wayne Welsh (right) is Maryland's top-rated foosball player; his friend Zain Rugh is ranked third.

I've been hustled before," Frank Cwik confides.

The 28-year-old stands in Looney's pub in Canton on a Tuesday evening, tournament night-22 people pumping quarters into table-soccer machine, music blaring over the crack of plastic and metal, the occasional ball flying into an eye or banging an air vent. And Cwik, waiting his turn, patiently explains how a foosball hustler works.

He doesn't annihilate you from the beginning," Cwik says. He lets you have a point, he takes a point. When it's 4-4, he uncorks his shot.... `Where did that come from?'"

You could say the same thing about Baltimore's foosball scene, an unheralded but passionate clique of players that has emerged over the past few years largely through the work of two men: Jim Waterman and Don Mayberry, who formed Tornado of Maryland six years ago and now organize league nights, weekly tournaments that pay out $70 to $120 in prize money, a state championship, and a 500-circulation foosball newsletter.

Even with 80 to 120 regular league players-the most fanatical of whom drive through the night to play in tournaments in Atlanta or Charlette and purchase foosball tables to hone their game at home- most people still think of foosball as another stupid bar game," according to Mayberry, a 31-year-old financial analyst from Linthicum.

Foosball, the tabletop game in which players twist rods which run through clunky-footed four-inch-tall men in order to knock hard little urethane-compound balls into goals, had its heyday in the 70s; at that time, millions in prize money was reportedly available in foosball tournaments nationwide. (The name is a bastardization of Fussball, German for soccer.) By some accounts, the sport fizzled due to financial problems on the part of table makers and the growing popularity of video games. "Now it's coming back," Clay Gump says. Gump, 27, a telecommunications engineer from Laurel and foosball history buff, runs a foosball site on the World Wide Web (http://dcs.umd.edu/~clay/foosball) .

The game has changed in one major respect, though. Gone, at least in competitive circles, are the Tournament Soccer brand tables of old, replaced by newer, higher quality tables such as Tornados. This Texas-based brand is the only type of table you'll see at Looney's, which has become Baltimore's foosball central. Waterman, 31, claims Mayberry brought the first Tornado table to Maryland.

Waterman himself later bought one used and they set the two tables up at the Baltimore Original Sports Bar six years ago. Since then, it's been an upward swing, more or less, as one player recruited another. "Once I started playing, I couldn't stop playing," 25-year-old Ray Der, who tests education-related software for a company in Calverton, says.

Aficionados have foosball down to a science, shunning the wild spinning used by amateurs trying to hit the ball-there's no accuracy that way, the pros say, and the table can be damaged. Regular players master a host of skills, and along the way they develop a vocabulary that renders conversations incomprehensible to the uninitiated: pull shot, snake shot, aerial shot, crank shot, angle shot, brush pass, hack. (Hacking is scoring from the five-man middle rod, and it's the subject of some debate; in certain circles, it's considered a cheap refuge for players who can't pass.)

Players say the key is concentration: finding a lane and sending the ball through it so fast that a spectator will jerk involuntarily at the crack of ball hitting goal before he or she even knows it's happened. "Ninety-percent [of the game] is in your mind-blocking out the pressure," Mayberry says.

Wayne Welsh-Maryland's top-rated player according to the United States Table Soccer Association (USTSA)-is a case in point. In mid-game, standing with one leg forward as if he plans to run through the table or jump over it, he seems oblivious to the noise around him. His body tense, he lowers his face until it's inches from the table. When he finally slams one home, he yells, "Yeah, baby!"

Tornado of Maryland is a microcosm of a national circuit that holds five national tournaments and regional and state competitions that have drawn some 10,000 people over the past few years, according to a USTSA database. Traveling is part of the foosball addict's life. Welsh and his friend Zain Rugh, the number-three player in Maryland, tick off the cities they've played in: St. Louis, Atlanta, Cleveland, Charlotte, Dallas.

Foosball may be a passion, but money is at the heart of the circuit, which is driven by the table manufacturers. The $10,000 total prize pot at Maryland's most lucrative tournament, a 1991 event organized by Mayberry and Waterman, is chump change compared to the money on the national circuit, where major tournaments pay out as much as $100,000 (prizes are paid from entry fees). In 1993, an 18-year-old walked away from the world championships with $13,000 in his pocket. USTSA, which ranks players nationally and organizes tournaments in the United States and other countries, is run out of Tornado Table Sports Inc., in Fort Worth.

Tornado sells its coin-operated tables to dealers such as Waterman and Mayberry, who promote the game and split the proceeds with the bars. (They have about 20 tables in roughly a dozen locations from College Park to Bel Air, down by about half since 1992.) Before giving the bars their cut, Waterman and Mayberry's organization brought in an estimated $50,000 to $(iO,000 last year. Their business is profitable, though Waterman and Mayberry will not divulge details and downplay the financial aspect of the operation; they say profits are a side benefit. "The reason we got into it was the passion for the game," Waterman says. "I only call it a business because the tax guys say I have to call it a business." They claim they could make a lot more money if they promoted the sport harder and diversified into pool tables, jukeboxes, and other barroom staples. Instead, they've recently scaled back their foosball-related activities, in part to concentrate more on their day jobs.

Even with the lower level of promotion, the game is growing. The number of nationally ranked players in Maryland-you have to play in a USTSA-sanctioned tournament to be eligible for ranking-has jumped from a handful six years ago to about 150. Still, Waterman and Mayberry want more people to get involved, and they're not alone. Even Cwik, who's been known to hustle an opponent for a beer or two, says he generally takes it easy on newcomers to help boost the game's popularity. "If you're playing someone starting to get into the game, it's not good to smash on them," he says. "You discourage them from coming back."

Players often have a hard time explaining why the love the game, but not how much. "It's like an addiction," Ty Ming, a 32-year-old Laurel resident and Looney's regular, says. "You want to do it all the time. Something draws you to it." Some regular players cite the camaraderie they find gathering with peers in smoky bars on weekday evenings. "I'm a numbers person," Mayberry, who has a master's degree in finance, says (the game does seem to attract a preponderance of math, science, and computer types). "My numbers skills are better than my people skills- except around foosball."

Another attraction is that foosball is an equal-opportunity sport; because the game requires skill and concentration rather than strength, male players have no physical advantage. (About 25 percent of subscribers to Mayberry and Waterman's newsletter are female.) That doesn't stop men, expecting easy prey, from challenging women at bars to games, only to get whipped.

I don't think I could repeat most of the things they say. I've been called a lot of names," Barbie Airey, a 25-year-old Linthicum resident and former recipient of Tornado of Maryland's award for female player of the year, says. "One time, a guy called us lesbians because we beat them. Some guy asked me if I was on steroids because I beat him."

"For me, it's the competition," Welsh, who away from the table turns out to be a mild-mannered, almost shy systems engineer, says. That seems to be the best explanation most players give for why they love foosball, although Welsh mentions another, one that may contribute to people not taking the sport too seriously "You can play it and drink beer."

BRYAN WALPERT