Fan-tastic

Some funny excerpts from Patrick Hruby's ESPN.com article on grown men reliving their youth, via old-style electric tabletop football games.

In Electric Company

... "He's gonna take over," he says. "People think this is just guys running in circles. But you do this six, seven hours a day, and you learn how it works."

Revels devotes an entire spare bedroom to the hobby. He's in there five hours a night, sometimes 'till 2 a.m., drawing up counter-gap plays. No one else is allowed in the room. Not Valerie, not his kids. Al Davis is less paranoid. ...

"It's tighter than Area 51," Revels says with a grin. "I'm serious, dude."
Like Revels, Redmond once treated the game like a part-time job; now, he's down to five or six hours of play a week. His secret? An index card flipper, thick with formations and game plans.


"I used to keep it all up here," Redmond says, pointing to his head. "Now, I play smarter."

Redmond can relate. His basement is a veritable shrine, the Santiago de Compostela of electric football. Think Astroturf carpet. Walls painted Denver Broncos orange and blue. Framed pictures of Rod Smith and John Elway. NFL mini-helmets. NFL wrapping paper. Fifteen championship trophies. Fifteen thousand figurines, including Redmond's retired teams.

Yep. Retired teams.

"Once a team wins a tournament, I retire them," he says. "I don't want to tarnish their legacy."

Electric fans were the lost tribe of football gaming. How many were still out there, wandering in the desert? Landsman didn't know. He did have a mailing list, the names and addresses of everyone still ordering figurines and game boards. So in the fall of 1994, he sent out a letter. We're holding a convention. Come join us.

The next January, Landsman rented out the main room at Michael Jordan's Restaurant in Chicago. He put up a banner for his company, Miggle Toys. Called it the Super Bowl of electric football. Landsman hoped to attract two dozen fans. Two hundred and fifty people showed up, all sharing the same slack-jawed sentiment.

I thought I was the only one left.

Revels tells a typical story. He sells comic books and baseball cards for a living, and once owned his own store. eBay made that part of the business obsolete. In June of 2003, he was online, putting some Roger Staubach rookie cards up for auction. On a lark, he decided to search for electric football.

Goosebumps. Revels ran around his house, hooting and hollering.


"Dad. Dad, what's wrong?"

"Go look at the computer screen! Go look at the screen!"

"The Internet saved our life," Landsman says. "If not for it, I don't know where we'd be."

Game image in various places online.