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"You suck at that game," Dale told me, as the waterbed jiggled beneath our weight.
I beamed. "Yeah, I know."
I wish I had been the kind of girl who played pick-up football with the guys on the front lawn, who tugged on her cap and joined the coed softball game. My older cousin was like this — a sexy tomboy, a seductive bruiser. But as long as I can remember, I have avoided running in front of the opposite sex. In front of anyone, really. Even as I grew more mature, and bolder, bar games were more my speed. Well, any game wherein you could dangle a cigarette from your lips was more my speed. And the nice thing is that erotic tension can't help but develop, especially when a pitcher of beer is handy. Consider the things you learn about a partner while playing foosball: Hand strength, coordination, graciousness, patience, endurance. As we know, these things matter.
So on a recent Tuesday night, I visit Down the Hatch, an underground West Village bar crammed with Christmas lights and classic rock. It's the weekly meeting of the New York City Foosball League. Yes, it exists.
"Foosball as seduction?" asks Joe, a twentysomething who's played with NYC Foosball League for about six months. He's a cutie, this Joe, but I can tell he's trying to let the journalist down easy. "I just never thought of it like that. This is like my guy's night, like my bowling league."
A couple girls play in the NYC Foosball League — and they're cute! — but Joe has a girlfriend. And she doesn't play foosball. "Not if I can help it," she says, rolling her eyes. She treats it the way some girlfriends treat addiction to PlayStation or role-playing games. With love, and humor, and confusion. "He plays in his sleep," she tells me.
"That happened once," he says, returning to the conversation. "You told her that?"
One of the men behind the New York City Foosball League is John Bank, a fortysomething
Talking to the New York Foosball League about hook-up games is a bit like talking to ComicCon attendees about Batman's tights. I mean, they're the torchbearers. |
tournament champion from Long Island who's played in anywhere from 50 to 100 tournaments. Gets blurry after a while. "One of the coolest things about this game is that men and women can play equally," he says, wiping his brow from a heated bout with his wife. They didn't meet over foosball, but he knows couples who have. John's wife is named Andrea, and she's a foosball master in her own right. I try out my foosball-as-foreplay theory on Andrea. She kind of buys it. After all, that's why she started playing in the first place. She fell in love with John.
"And another great thing about foosball," I continue, "is that it's a quick learning curve."
Blank stare. Incredibly polite tone. "Well, it's easy to play, but hard to master."
Hmm. Talking to the New York Foosball League about hook-up games is a bit like talking to ComicCon attendees about Batman's tights. I mean, they're the torchbearers; it's not like people play foosball anymore. In fact, when I first set out to do this story, I cold-called a dozen sports bars in New York looking for a table before stumbling onto NYCfoosball.com. They list about a dozen, one of which (Fat Cat's Billiards) is currently closed for renovation.
If anyone knows the reason for this, it's John Bank.
"What happened to foosball?" I ask.
He sighs. "The million-dollar tourney folded in the late '70s. And then what killed it was video games."
That's what I recall, as Galaga and Ms. Pac-Man edged out foosball in the corner of basements and game rooms, as tables were sold off at garage sales and abandoned on street corners. That's where John Bank found his first foosball table, in fact; it was 1986, and someone had just left it on the curb. But as anyone who has owned a pair of platforms knows, style is a fluctuating term.
"I just helped install another table recently," says Bank. "I'll tell you what. Foosball is coming back."
n°
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| ABOUT THE AUTHOR: |
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Sarah Hepola has been a high-school teacher, a playwright, a film critic, a music editor and a travel columnist. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, The Guardian, Salon, and on NPR. She lives in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. |
©2007 Sarah Hepola and Nerve.com |
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