Whatever my other unseemly habits — spitting, streaking, breaking twenties in church offering plates — I’ve never been one who pretends to greatness. Sure, I have some great qualities: Kids love me, supermodels adore me, enemies cower at my cool assassin-like manner. But beneath the high-gloss veneer of the $ 10 haircut and the five-figure salary beats the heart of just a man, one who rests content in the shadow of greater men.
Even as a youth, I suffered from a sense of also-ran-ness. In Indian Guides, a sort of tom-tom-beating Cub Scouts, I missed earning an eagle feather after refusing to sing a mandatory duet with my father (Dad, or Red Hawk, as he was then called, was all set to go with “Now That the Buffalo’s Gone”). In Little League, I was an all-star alternate — on standby should an actual all-star pop a hamstring while carpooling to the ballpark.
Red Hawk was never one to infuse us with false hopes. He took to calling us the “The Runner-Up Family,” an obvious jab at me, and perhaps my sister, who’d been voted the third grade’s second-most outstanding student. Dad liked to say, “Find a niche, no matter how small, and dominate it.” So I followed his advice on both counts. I became a foosball virtuoso.
There is perhaps no niche smaller than that reserved for the expert foosball player. Not that I am merely expert. I play foosball (also called “table soccer”) as Marciano fought and Pollock painted: as a sense-bending cyclone of barely contained chaos. If you see me at a foosball table, flee. If I don’t rout you outright, I will toy with you, leading you through a Habitrail of humiliations before packing your gizzard off in a go-cup.
I indulge in this shameless display of braggadocio without fear of recriminations, because chances are, you couldn’t care less. Foosball is the ideal sport — more primal than Ping-Pong, more cerebral than air hockey — but it has fallen into obscurity since its zenith 20 years ago. Once stationed in every frat house and bowling alley, foosball tables have been consigned to the slag-heap of ’70s kitsch. People now play the game ironically, the way they eat fondue or sit in bean-bag chairs — as a smirky, postmodern nostalgia trip. Consequently, my God-given gift has been shrunk to an exotic talent, like yodeling or sock-puppeteering. Or worse, I’ve become a freakish curiosity, like my second-grade classmate Ricky, who on a dare, would eat anything off the floor of the bus — a great ice-breaker, but then what?
When I learned the game as an Air Force brat in West Germany, foosball was more than a diversion, it was a matter of national pride. Failing to assimilate in our small farm village, we Yanks didn’t have much use for the Teutonic ingrates our fathers were paid to protect. They made fun of our gas-guzzling Oldsmobiles. We made fun of their mothers’ bushy armpits and their country’s hosting the Holocaust. Tensions boiled over in winter ice-ball fights, where a Texas-transplant like me was completely outmatched. We Americans likewise met ugly ends playing soccer, which Germans blasphemously call “football.”
But in foosball, as in lovemaking, it is all in the wrists. And ours were Gordian cables, thick and nimble from years of dribbling basketballs and throwing pigskins. As we ritually sacrificed Germans, listening for the sweet kerplunk of the polyurethane ball descending into the throat of the goal, we’d doff our caps with felicitations like, “Hey Fritz, remind you of the Dresden firebombing?” (Kids are cruel.)
Two decades later, I still have one of the deadliest pull-shots on the planet, which I rediscovered when my in-laws bought me a foosball table this past Christmas. It sits tastefully beneath a chandelier in my formerly unfurnished dining room. I expected this would improve family relations. In the past, I welcomed unannounced visits from relatives by hiding till they tired of knocking. Now, I insist they come over — which they’ve stopped doing altogether. I don’t know why. It may be because of my singing when racking up points on the squeaky abacus, or because of my shirtless, sports-bra-less victory romps through the living room, or because as a gentleman sportsman, I rank somewhere between Albert Belle and the Great Santini.
In any case, I’m down to playing the neighborhood children, whom I recruit vigorously, despite their mothers’ looking at me as if I’m luring the little dears with sweet-meats to take snapshots of them in the basement. So far, my only return customer is the 7-year-old next door. She’s tough kid. Her wrists are like twigs, but she rarely cries when I taunt her. The other day, however, I had to rattle her baby teeth with a gourd-thumping monkey shot.
She deserved it — she’s no better than the Germans. She claimed she had to leave early to go to soccer practice.
MATT LABASH
