Infinite Foosball

Toward the bottom of the right column you will see the Infinite Foosball Tournament standings. For Christmas, G’diddy gave TB one of those 9-in-1 game tables. Some of it is worthless, but much of it is quite fun.

On top, it has a regulation sized foosball table. Beneath that is a mini ping-pong table, which is ridiculous. Ever tried playing on a 54 inch ping-pong table? It is darned near impossible to keep the ball in play. Flip that over for checkers, chess, and backgammon. Then there is a thin laminated sheet that has baseball on one side and football on the other. Baseball is pretty cool, because you just smack this little marble with a tiny bat and if it lands in the right circles on the field you get singles, doubles, triples or home runs. Not much to it, but it’s a fun time waster. We haven’t even touched football. All you do is flick around a little plastic triangle. It’s less sophisticated than Chinese football at the grade school lunch table.

Beneath that is a wee little pool table. It’s fun, but the action is unpredictable. The board is only a quarter inch thick, so whenever you line up your shots, balls roll all over the place because you are skewing the level of the board.

Then there is air hockey below that. It works pretty well, but for some reason they decided to make the score tally thing bright red plastic with bright red raised numbers. We just use a chalkboard, because I can’t even see the numbers on this thing. It might be readable by touch, but not by sight.

I’ve seen a couple versions of this table, including one of high quality wood. Ours has thin plastic legs and the cabinet is primarily compressed particle board. So, it’s the cheap one. I went to put it together about 11:00 PM Christmas Eve, and it was hopelessly damaged. LBB called the store the day after Christmas, and they agreed to bring a replacement. Fortunately, in a way, TB wasn’t feeling well on Christmas day, so this was not a huge disappointment. But when the second table was also a shattered mess, he was not a happy boy.

This time, the store didn’t have any more in stock, so we had to wait a week or so to see if one would show up “on the next truck”. Well, thank goodness, it did. It was delivered, and it was intact. It is a bit flimsy, though, so I’m constantly reminding TB that he and his friends can’t lean on this thing or it will collapse beyond repair.

By far, foosball has been the favorite. As you can see, the boy and ol’ Dad are about even, and he’s kicking the crap out of his momma every time. We are getting beat mercilessly by a 5-year-old! He has to stand on a little stool to see the board clearly, so I’m thinking about shortening one of the legs so he has to play on a tilt.

I’ve told him repeatedly that it’s more fun to play than to obsess about winning or losing. It’s perfectly fine to strive for victory, but I cannot abide any sore loser nonsense. He makes me proud, because he plays with intensity, but he doesn’t gloat in victory or sulk in defeat. The biggest lamentation I hear is, “It’s not fair!” But that’s only when he accidentally puts the ball in the wrong goal. Well, sorry, that is unfortunate, but it’s fair.

Honestly, though, if I can’t string together a few victories and take the lead in this tournament, I might have to grease down his handles with olive oil or something.