By 1974, the beloved sportscaster Marv Albert was delivering tense play-by-play narration as thirty-one regional champs jockeyed for a cash prize of five thousand dollars and the undeniably radical title of “Best Air Hockey Player in the World” at the sport’s first championship tournament, held in New York City.īy the late nineteen-seventies, the game’s popularity had peaked. With Brunswick’s backing, thousands of tables were made and installed in arcades, pizza parlors, community-center basements-anywhere with a stretch of faux-wood panelling and a proximate crew of wan, beanpole kids. A fourth man, an ice-hockey enthusiast named Bob Lemieux, is also credited-legend has it that it was Lemieux’s insistence that kept the patent from languishing, unused-although the precise details of his involvement are foggy. Its 1969 patent cites three men as its creators-Phil Crossman, Bob Kenrick, and Brad Baldwin-all employees of Brunswick Billiards, a maker of pool tables. This is known as the Triangle Defense, and it is essential.Īir hockey is, in the most basic sense, a delightful amalgamation of billiards and ice hockey. If your opponent attempts some sneaky, look-at-me move-a rapid bank shot pinging off the left side, say-you can easily zap back to either corner of your goal, efficiently thwarting entry. Instead, the most efficient place to position your mallet is eight to ten inches directly in front of your goal, where you can head off oncoming shots without the kind of hysterical lunging that might otherwise land you belly down on the table, legs akimbo and abdomen bruised, as if you were attempting to dislodge an errant ort from your windpipe by self-administering the Heimlich maneuver. It would be funny if it didn’t so handily encapsulate the way we tire ourselves out, trying too hard to get what we want. This can go on for a disturbing and senseless amount of time. The harder you smack it, the harder and faster it returns to you. Anyone who has ever sauntered up to a table and dropped a little coin has seen something like this happen, or maybe even been a victim of it: for a brief period, the puck makes contact with neither the goal nor your opponent’s mallet, but merely ricochets back and forth between your own flailing hands and the far edge of the table. In air hockey, this means the hope that you might be able to lock your partner in a helpless volley against himself-the singular devastation of many great athletes. I’m reminded of this now, as we watch hungry young competitors from around the world chase victory at the Summer Olympic Games, in Rio de Janeiro: it is unsportsmanlike, perhaps, but psyching your opponent out is just as crucial as harnessing your own greatness. Had the cups been previously used to hold fistfuls of tokens? Never mind!Īir hockey, like most high-stakes human ventures, is as much a game of mind as one of body. To soothe the nerves, my playing partner and I merged a small flask of whiskey with a twenty-ounce bottle of Coca-Cola, a bit of impromptu mixology that required pilfering two small plastic cups from the dusty summit of the token machine. FunSpot (“. . . the spot for fun!”) is the largest arcade in the world, and appropriately unmooring. My interest in air hockey was rejuvenated last summer at a joint called FunSpot, a rambling entertainment compound in Laconia, New Hampshire. The quickening of your own heartbeat as you bend into a goaltending crouch, clutching a little resin sombrero. The whir of the internal fan as it grinds on, shooting puffs of air through a grid of tiny holes, generating that low, levitating cushion, the animating magic of the game. Frankly, the whole game is symphonic: the rattle of a copper token as it tumbles down a rickety chute. I can say with some certainty that the most beautiful sound I know is the wobbly clink of a dinged-up air-hockey puck dropping into goal. Fans of air hockey like to lament the game’s marginalization, as if air hockey is the vinyl record of arcade fixtures: romantic, and with depth to spare, but too clunky to endure as anything other than a vaguely pleasing artifact.
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