Alvord: Ah, the buzz of the electric football game
Friday, December 19, 2008 11:16 PM PST
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E-mail this articleColumn by Rick S. Alvord
Sports editor
There were four things I wanted when I was 12 years old.
I wanted the new Olivia Newton-John album so I could impress my wanna-be girl friend, a certain Miss Ellen Richards, because, well, she was sort of foxy and had brown eyes as big as pizza pans.
I wanted a decent ball glove and a steady supply vanilla milkshakes from Hump’s Restaurant in downtown Clatskanie, where my mom worked.
And, above all else, perhaps even more than a warm bed and running water, I wanted an electric football game.
A shiny, spanking-new, out-of-the-box electric table-top football game, complete with a metal vibrating field.
They had one right there at the Coast To Coast store on Nehalem Street, next to the Food Land market. And when I say they had one, I mean they had ONE.
For several weeks, I sprinted to the store nearly every day to see if anyone had forked over the $14.99 to purchase the prize toy, thus crushing my entire reason to exist on the planet.
With Christmas Eve a week away, is there a 12-year-old out there with the perfect gift dancing around in his pointy little head?
Nowadays, no 12-year-old would be caught with a metal vibrating football field in his room. How lame.
It’s Madden ’09 or bust. It’s multi-dimensional action on a hi-def screen, complete with improved stadium models, new weather effects such as snow, rain and “movie weather,” new lighting models, new realistic player models, field-goal nets and clear helmet visors.
Madden ’09 was released for the Nintendo DS, PlayStation 2, PlayStation 3, PlayStation Portable, Wii, Xbox and Xbox 360 consoles.
Suddenly, I feel very, very old.
I’m not here to tell you how technology has ruined the universe. If you’re dialed in to these games, ones that demand a surgeon’s touch with the joystick (do they even call them joysticks anymore?), then good for you.
Play on. You’re going to enjoy the next 60 years.
For those of us who can barely operate a cell phone, set off alarms every time we attempt to “self checkout” at Fred Meyer and still wake up to a real jingle-jingle alarm clock, we prefer to think of our childhood toys as morally superior.
Why? Because our toys — the Slinky, the Wheelo and Stretch Armstrong among them — didn’t require a $300 “console” to operate it.
The table-top electric football game, for instance, required only a person bright enough to push the electric cord into the wall. But first, my mother had to purchase it.
After constant pestering and the promise to pick plums off the trees, that beautiful slab of metal was mine.
I distinctly recall plugging it in for the first time, that low “hmmmm” noise seizing my attention. The first page of the operator’s manual said something about being safe and not shocking the eyebrows off your face.
My older brother helped put the tiny decal numbers on the jerseys of each plastic miniature football player, along with the logos on the helmets. The decals didn’t stick very well, so later we resorted to drawing on the numbers with a felt pen.
This particular game featured the Kansas City Chiefs (red jerseys) vs. the Baltimore Colts (white). Most of the tiny plastic players were white guys, as we called them, but there were a handful of African Americans tossed in for good measure.
Yes, this was an equal opportunity toy of the ’70s.
After both teams were properly dressed, we set out to play a game. I was disappointed to discover that the “football” in our little game was actually a tiny shred of cotton, which we shoved under the arm of the running back or quarterback.
Once the cord was plugged in and the teams were lined up, there was only one thing left to do — turn that baby on!
To this day, I’m not sure what I expected from my new table-top electric football game. Did I think the players would actually run up and down the field? Did I think Johnny Unitas would throw 40-yard touchdown passes to Raymond Berry?
What I didn’t expect was for the Chiefs and Colts to simply vibrate in place and fall over. Some of the plastic palookas did manage to vibrate their way downfield, but the guy toting the cotton typically traveled in reverse.
That was pretty much it. Fifteen bucks of my mother’s hard-earned waitress money wasted on a toy that her youngest child just had to have.
So when you’re tugging at your mom’s coat this Christmas, remember that the gift you desire now could turn out to be the massive pile of manure over in the corner on Dec. 26.
Maybe a warm bed, running water and an endless supply of vanilla milkshakes wasn’t so bad, after all.
Soon to be WSU Grad wrote on Dec 17, 2008 12:06 AM:
Q wrote on Dec 17, 2008 5:24 AM:
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