I spent a lot of time playing pinball as a kid, a lot of coins too. One holiday in Ballina, the surf too murderous for a boogie rookie, I poured a life’s worth of pocket money into a bronchitic machine called Nags.
Video games were lame interlopers at this stage, the early ’70s. Give me the bumpers, the ramps, the drop targets any afternoon. As a game, Nags was ingenious. Where modern tweens struggle with strawberry-scented vapes, my addiction lay in six tin horses locked in glass.
Conquer chaos, that was the mantra. A randomiser allocated your horse before each game. Finagle that steed first past the post, and you earned a freebie. And so on, all week pretty much, with a few hamburgers for sustenance. Somehow, whenever your ball bashed a bumper, a corresponding horse inched along the home stretch.
Should pinball and darts be grouped in with netball and cricket?Credits:Steven Siewert
Such memories awoke last week when chatting with Dr John Cosson, a maxillofacial surgeon who lives just north of Ballina. Like me, John invested his boyhood into pinball, his obsession manifesting into a rumpus room full of machines, from Lethal Weapon 3 two The Twilight Zonewith its cool rocket kicker and magnetic field.
Our radio conversation explored the pursuit’s unique dialect, from SDTM (Straight Down The Middle) to drainbow (a ball’s lethal arc from table to abyss), from pinligamy (playing several machines at once) to chimp-flip (“how beginners hit the flipper buttons continuously, like a wind-up chimp playing cymbals”).
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Meanwhile, a cat’s paw, alias a dead bounce, is that Messi-like knack of taking the sting off a flying ball with one deft ankle feint or a flipper’s feathering in the parlour. Lance Armstrong, by contrast, is winning an arcade showdown with a single ball. Cruel but long hours indoors, staring at posts, pegs and gobble holes can take their toll.
But then our chat took a twist, Dr John releasing his own curveball. “So what’s the difference between a sport and a game?” Money was my reflex hunch, but that didn’t add up. If quasi-athletes can slide bishops or throw bullseyes to service their mortgage, then can we pigeonhole chess and darts with netball and cricket?
Perhaps. All four disciplines demand skill, as does Jenga, backgammon or Rat-A-Tat Cat, a card game my daughter dominated for years. Referees could prove the difference, although a sport like Ultimate Frisbee relies on players’ integrity to adjudicate. Could uniforms act as a yardstick, where Messi in Paris Saint-Germain blue opposes Ronaldo’s Man U red?