Owing partly to the 2004 Canadian television
premiere and subsequent rebroadcasts of Table
Hockey: the Movie, a new energy and burning
commitment to the sport have been rekindled among North
American players. Leagues, tournaments, associations and
federations for table hockey are mushrooming all over the
map – and great new talents are emerging on the scene.
To someone like me, who has been playing table hockey for
almost 50 years now (does time ever fly on a board!), it
is simply wonderful to behold the burgeoning activity, and
to anticipate bright futures for our beloved sport.
As a player with a leading role in the table
hockey movie, I am enormously grateful to many people. But
I especially want to thank Thor Henrikson for his outstanding
artistic vision in directing that film. In addition to the
television version, Thor also made a full-length director’s
cut, which has yet to see the light of day. Let us hope
that the producer, Peter d’Entrement, will not withhold
it indefinitely.
I also want to thank my fellow table hockey
players for their generosity of spirit in supporting my
pioneering efforts, and for the respect and friendship that
they have accorded me ever since the film was aired. I have
had the pleasure to meet and play – competitively
and socially – some outstanding talents among North
America’s new generation of classic players. The list
includes Burt Brassard, Kenny Dubois, Junior Gelinas, Martin
Labelle, and Roger Owens among others. There are many other
talents still “out there” – Carlo Bossio,
for example – who await their opportunity to play
me, and perchance or perforce to defeat me.
For table hockey is an intensely competitive
sport. Step away from the board, and brotherhood reigns
among the players. But once we grasp the rods and the puck
is dropped, we take no prisoners. Table hockey is a bloodless
and deathless contest of skill and concentration. Like chess
and tennis, it ends with handshakes and good will. But on
the board, it’s a fierce competition that elicits
our best efforts to score goals for, to prevent goals against,
and to win as many five-minute games as possible. Five minutes
on the board is like an hour on the ice.
So after the table hockey movie was shot
(2000-2001) but before it aired (2004), I decided to hit
the comeback trail. I had been out of the game for 20 years.
In 1981, I won my third consecutive Canadian Open singles
championship (as well as the doubles with Ron Chesick),
then moved on to many new and different life experiences.
But I never lost my passion for the game; it merely lay
dormant for a couple of decades, until Thor and his crew
re-animated it.
In 2002, I practiced solo for a couple of
weeks, then entered a Quebec City tournament organized (and
eventually won) by Burt Brassard. I finished fifth out of
twenty-seven players in the first round, then lost in the
quarter finals to Pierre Bechard, who later confessed, over
dinner, that I had made his fondest dream come true. And
what was that? Ever since seeing the movie, he had wanted
to play me and beat me. I’m glad he got his wish;
it was fairly modest and easy to grant. (Some of my fondest
dreams are quite another matter, I assure you.)
I’ve seen more than enough Westerns
to know how this script plays. Legendary gunslinger straps
on his gunbelt again, after a hiatus of twenty years. Why?
For all the usual reasons. There’s a quest he must
complete, and a few karmic errands he needs to run in order
to complete it. In the process, he may even be able to settle
an old score with the cosmos. Always fighting the good fight,
of course. He’s a white knight. Naturally he has a
dark side; everyone does. Shedding light on darkness is
part of the quest, no matter where the darkness lies. But
meanwhile, a lot of young guns have heard that the legendary
gunslinger is toting iron again, and they want to slap leather
with him. I’m not the only one in this position. Other
legendary players from my generation are making comebacks
too – like Steve Bernstein out of Boston, and Ron
Marsik out of Chicago. I’ll bet that plenty of youthful
table hockey masters are gunning for them too.
I’ve played quite a few people since
2001, in both friendly and competitive matches, mostly on
Coleco and most recently Labelle. (Thanks, Martin, for crafting
such a beautiful board!) Thanks to Roger Owens and his extensive
collection, I have also played a bit on Benej, Stiga, and
many vintage or eccentric boards from every era. Thanks
to the influence of Stiga and Benej, which didn’t
exist in my Munro-Coleco dominated era, the game has changed
– and has also evolved in some significant respects.
Let me mention two.
First is the transposition of certain Stiga
plays onto current Coleco and Labelle (“classic table
hockey”) boards, by players who have attained high
levels of proficiency on both boards. Second is the evolution
of the game itself, which has now produced at least one
900-level player: Kenny DuBois. He is the only player, since
Mike Clarke in 1977, to defeat me in a best-of-seven series
on a classic board. Yes, I had a lengthy “winning
streak” (and an even lengthier retirement), but that
changed decisively in September 2006, at John Power’s
Original Six Classic tournament. Kenny swept me 4-0 in the
finals. No-one had ever done that to me before. I salute
him. He put on a table hockey clinic.
Back in the late 70s and early 80s, I was
dominant on the Coleco 5380 board, and there were a lot
of talented players on the circuit. I was never able to
win a Munro tournament in the USA, not least because Ron
Marsik always managed to score more flip shots on me than
I scored on him. After Munro went out of business, Coleco
was the last great surviving board of the era. During that
period, there were very competitive Canadian leagues in
Montreal, Toronto, Burlington and Boucherville, as well
as out West. In 1977 I joined the Cartierville Table Hockey
League, founded by the talented Mike Clarke. Mike defeated
me in the finals that year, but I turned the tables on him
in 1978 and thereafter. When Mike retired, my late brother
Sid and I founded the MTHL, or Montreal Table Hockey League.
We had great players like Mitch Ettinger and Sam Anoussis.
Sid Marinoff held his own against them too.
left to right: Alex
Anoussis, Sid Marinoff, Sam Anoussis, Lou Marinoff, Ron
Chesick
This MTHL contingent placed 4 players among the top 6 in
a field of more than 100,
in a Boucherville
tournament held in 1981
My cumulative regular season
record, from 1977 through 1981, yields an average winning
percentage of .856. That’s based on more than 500
regular season games. Every year for five years, my winning
percentage was in the 800s, and that was good enough for
four consecutive league championships, and three consecutive
Canadian open championships. If there had been any 900-level
players around back then, they would have beaten me as Ken
did in 2006 – or they would have obliged me to try
lift my game to the 900 level, if that is possible.
| year
|
games
|
won
|
lost
|
tied
|
goals
for |
goals
against |
average
for |
average
against |
rank
|
winning
% |
|
'77
|
100 |
74 |
13 |
13 |
380 |
95 |
3.80 |
0.95 |
2 |
.805 |
|
'78
|
86 |
69 |
8 |
9 |
342 |
83 |
3.98 |
0.97 |
1 |
.855 |
|
'79
|
96 |
78 |
7 |
11 |
411 |
107 |
4.28 |
1.11 |
1 |
.870 |
|
'80
|
120 |
101 |
10 |
9 |
545 |
129 |
4.54 |
1.08 |
1 |
.879 |
|
'81
|
104 |
87 |
11 |
6 |
418 |
89 |
4.02 |
0.86 |
1 |
.865 |
|
total
|
506 |
409
|
49 |
48 |
2,096
|
503
|
4.14 |
0.99 |
1 |
.856 |
Lou Marinoff: CTHL
& MTHL, Vital Statistics 1977-81
Now here are the first-round
standings of the eventual finalists from John Power’s
recent 2006 tournament. In actual fact, my stats on that
day are about the same as they were 25 years ago: winning
percentage in the 800s, average goals for and against pretty
much the same too. But here’s the difference: the
emergence of a supremely gifted table hockey player named
Kenny DuBois, who racks up a winning percentage in the 900s,
and with more goals for and fewer against than I ever managed.
His statistics represent a level of proficiency that I had
never before encountered, and – like some of the Stiga
moves he has imported into classic table hockey –
that simply did not exist during my era.
TEAM |
GP |
W |
L |
T |
PTS |
GF |
GA |
% |
GFA |
GAA |
| Kenny DuBois |
14 |
13 |
1 |
0 |
26 |
84 |
10 |
.929 |
6.00 |
0.71 |
| Lou Marinoff |
14 |
10 |
1 |
3 |
23 |
67 |
19 |
.821 |
4.79 |
1.36 |
Original Six Classic,
2006. Top 2 players after first round
For
complete results, click here
Of course numbers alone never
tell the whole story. For example, Roger Owens finished
third in the first round, and handed Kenny Dubois his only
loss that day. Roger also extended me to five games in the
semi-fiinals, but he later lost the bronze medal match to
Greg Scoma. So Roger was the only player to win games against
the top two players, yet he finished fourth overall. Like
all talented players, Roger can beat anyone on a given day.
Original Six Classic,
Breezy Point, NY, September 2006
left to right: Lou Marinoff (Silver), Kenny Dubois (Gold),
Greg Scoma (Bronze)
All this leads me to draw two
conclusions. First, the current generation of table hockey
players is more gifted and more advanced than the previous
one. This is definitely a good thing. It demonstrates that
the game has the capacity to evolve, and therefore also
has the potential to survive and thrive. Second, one of
my next personal challenges in the quest is to find out
whether I am capable of raising my proficiency to the 900
level. If so, I may be able to win a game or two against
Kenny. If not, I will still continue doing everything in
my power to promote table hockey, secure in the knowledge
that its future lies in more capable hands than mine. Either
way, it’s a win-win scenario for the game and sport
that that we all care about so deeply.
That said, let me thank John
Power and Greg Scoma for their fine organization of the
Original Six Classic. It was a real eye-opener for me, a
chance to meet and play some great competitors, and maybe
a stepping stone on my comeback trail. Only time will tell.
