A cobra may strike faster. The blast from a rifle is probably more ear splitting. But not by much.
When Spokane's Laurette Gunther decides to rip out an enemy's heart, her right hand moves with impossible speed.
First you see the little red ball sitting on the foosball table. Then you don't .
Swoosh. Ker-BLAM!!
That's the explosive noise of the ball slamming with rocket force into the back wall of my goal. At the sound I double over and grimace like Lee Harvey Oswald in the Dallas Garage. "Oh, that hurt," I groan between clenched teeth.
"I saw an opening," explains Gunther, almost apologetically.
So did Hitler when he took Poland.
Who would take this soft-spoken, 36-year-old woman who works in the trust department of Washington Trust Bank for such a ruthless warrior?
Gunther is, in fact, a professional foosball player. She started playing the game in 1978 and is now one of the obscure sport's top women in America.
She practices hour after hour on a $1,600 foosball table in her basement apartment. She travels across the nation, pitting her skills against the creme de la foos.
At this point some of you readers are no doubt muttering: "Foosball? National tour? Huh?"
Yes , Foosball-that squatty, multi -paddled table soccer game familiar to bars, bowling alleys and family rec rooms. The game is delightfully simple. The ob-ject, like hockey or soccer, is to thwack a ball through a hole. First one to five wins.
This is as serious as the NFL to 4,000 rated foosers scattered across the land.
Alas, there are no million-dollar con-tracts for the humble foosballer. A thousand bucks is a good prize at most sanc-tioned events. Only when you witness the mastery of a Laurette Gunther do you appreciate how skillful this simple game can be.
If the Olympics have room for silly pursuits like synchronized swimming, can gold medal foosball be far off?
Actually, says Steve Murray, some-one is working on getting foosball into the Olympics. Murray, a 17-time world champ, promotes the sport for the com-pany that makes the Tornado foosball ta-bles used on the pro circuit.
The Texan says the foosball world is still marveling over the accomplishment of Gunther and her partner, Moya Tielens of Canada.
They were the first women's team to ever dare enter the male dominated Open Doubles division at the $100,000 World Foosball Championships, held in Dallas earlier this month
Gunther and Tielens blanked the No. 3 seed, Steve Beine and Don Swan, S-zip in the last game of an epic five-game battle. They went on to finish 13th overall.
'They played in the bad boys' division," adds Murray. "For two women to excel at that level against the best players in the world is just unbelievable."
This was the Cinderella story of the Tournament, attracting huge, hooting crowds. An ESPN camera crew followed Gunther and Tielens around and will feature the two sometime in December.
Few know that I actually was once a foosball wizard.
My family called the game Oops.
Back in the 1950's, my old man got some plans and started building plywood Oops tables. It was the same as foosball except far slower and more subtle. Players hit a ping pong ball with paddles screwed to wooden rods.
I started playing at age S and became a monster, vanquishing adults as I grew. Bank shots. Cut shots. Power shots. I had them all.
Then one day my friend, Gary, told me excitedly that an Oops game just went into the Silver Lanes bowling alley. "A shark like you can make a fortune chal-lenging suckers," he said.
Licking my chops, I went to the lanes only to find a clunky, quarter-fed machine with heavy metal handles and a hard, fast ball.
My game was suddenly as irrelevant as Bjorn Borg's wooden tennis racket. I never played foosball again.
Doug Clark - The Spokesman Review