Extra, extra, read all about it.....

[RavennaAl]

http://www.cleveland.com/plaindealer...490.xml&coll=2


The press just keeps on getting better all the time.

[WEIRDWOLF]

Here is the article. The actual paper included a photo of Corey and John Martin playing a game. I am trying to get a few copies of some of the 1000 photos she took. There are a couple of misquotes but the majority of the article is correct.

Miniature-football enthusiasts vibrate with excitement

Enthusiasts may be few, but they're focused
Sunday, August 03, 2008 Jim Nichols
Plain Dealer Reporter

New Philadelphia -- Just up the road, where the NFL Hall of Fame legends gather, the gridiron greats and the ghosts of champions know the sacrifices that a coach like Adrian Baxter makes to win.
Those men paid glory's price -- Brown, Halas, Landry, Lombardi. They would understand the hour upon tedious hour of repetition, exasperation and painstaking detail that Baxter invests, every day, in his relentless quest to turn a squad of trembling players with no heart into champions.
Brothers in that rarified coaching fraternity would appreciate.
Or maybe not, if they could see Baxter's team. His players are about an inch tall. Their uniforms are painted on. And they're plastic.
Baxter's little quaking men are the wee warriors of the world of electric football, or miniature football, as adherents now call it emphatically. (Electric Football is actually one game maker's registered trademark.) Their arena is a vibrating field of sheet steel the size of a newspaper page, and only slightly more anachronistic.
Back in the era when the Browns still dominated real football, the miniature game dominated the wish list of practically every boy, and some girls. Most have long since forgotten it. But Baxter and a subculture of other die-hards have never hit the off switch.
Fifty or more of them, middle-aged men from all over the country, made a pilgrimage to a Hampton Inn here in Amish Country this weekend for the inaugural convention of the Miniature Football Coaches Association.
That’s a year-old umbrella group for 33 regional leagues with from a dozen to a few dozen members each.
They came from as far away as California to find kindred souls. During the convention, they will play a series of games, crown a miniature- football champion and induct players into the Miniature Football Coaches Association Hall of Fame.
The more crazed the better

The group chose New Philadelphia because it was the closest they could get to Canton, where the Pro Football Hall of Fame is inducting players this weekend.
No one here need feel odd over spending four hours or more to paint a single toy man, or hours per week — even hours per day — perfecting their control of tiny figurines. None need to whisper about dropping $500 or $600 on a custom-made playing field, or spending thousands of bucks a year on game pieces and tournament travel. At this convention, the more crazed a guy is (all are men, save for a few pre-teen sons) about the game, the more he is admired. Baxter, an accountant from Forestville, Md., said his girlfriend is even less understanding.
“She thinks I’m obsessed, and she doesn’t like it,” Baxter said. “She feels threatened, almost like I’m cheating.”
Fortunately, Baxter says he’s getting burned out. He has spent only five weekends this year at out-of-state tournaments. And he really tries to limit his practice time to two hours a day, or maybe seven at most.
Back in the electric- football heyday — the mid-1950s through the mid-70s — seven hours would have been a realistic estimate of the total use any given kid might have gotten out of his game. Patience with its noise, uncontrollability, randomness and utter chaos could run out in half that time.
Down the field, or maybe not
Those of midlife-crisis age remember it well. When the vibration began, the plastic guys would quiver like wind-chilled chihuahuas and veer about slowly and uncontrollably until, inevitably, all would coagulate into stagnant clots.
Then the real humans would start to shake, shouting at the deaf-mute toys to quit holding, or to turn, turn, turn, darn it, before you go out of bounds. After about an hour and maybe four scoreless plays, someone would quit in a huff.
But only here. George Diamond, 49, of Harrisburg, Pa., is a legend in the game’s small circle — a seller of customized playing pieces, a tournament organizer and a member of the association’s first Hall of Fame class. But he said that when he kissed his wife goodbye on Friday, she told him to “have fun at the nerd convention.”

Games that were actually fun to play — from Mattell’s hand-held Electronic Football to today’s Madden NFL ’08 — drove the buzz boxes into history’s storage shed like linemen on a blocking sled.
But not for the hard-core. Adherents like Kelvin Lomax, a health-care production analyst from Silver Spring, Md., kept playing enough, usually alone, to discover the secrets — the geometry of it, and the physics, too.
They learned to “tweak” the figurines’ little plastic bases with heat and razors, trimming and curling the downward-protruding fingers to enhance speed and predictability of movement. Now, tweaking is the game’s most powerful black art: Competitors have been known to pay $25 for a running back with that extra gear.

Instead of turning it on and having mayhem and a lot of do-si-do going on, now you have guys doing what you want them to do,” Diamond said.
Then there’s the game’s version of doping. Juice a figurine with enough coats of paint and you can transform a scrawny 2.5-gram lineman into a bulked-up, ’roided-out 4-gram behemoth who bullies through opposing blockers as though they were mere . . . toys. So weight limits, and electronic gram scales, are part of every match. Still, cheating isn’t unheard of: With a little sleight of hand, a devious coach might try to swap a light guy from weigh-in for a heavier, identical player.
“Boys will be boys,” Diamond said with a smirk. “Everybody wants to win.” That’s why fanatics also invest incalculable time perfecting their control of the game’s “triple threat” quarterback. Those are monstrous players that, in relation to the others on the board, stand two stories tall and have one springy leg and a protruding, catapultlike arm. In a good coach’s hands, that arm can fling a pill-sized felt football downfield with stunning accuracy — “flicking the booger,” the coaches call it. Hit your receiver for a completion and the foot race is on. Football figurines get special attention
Some coaches relish the figurines more than the competition. Lynn Schmidt, the MFCA’s president, prizes his Super Bowl champion 1969 Kansas City Chiefs. Schmidt, a graphic designer, painstakingly re-created grass stains, eye black and even shadow and light on little Lenny Dawson and the rest.
Al Dunham brought one hand-painted team with him from Grand Rapids, Mich., that particularly fit the local environs: players wearing painted-on denim overalls, straw hats and glued-on fuzzy beards — the Amish. In a bit of irony, the coaches who shunned computerized football games eventually found each other by computer, said Schmidt, 49, of Kansas City, Mo.
“The Internet saved the game,” he said. “I didn’t know there were other guys still playing. I figured there was no one else like me out there. And then I came across chat rooms, which led me to all these other guys.”
Not that there are all that many. Diamond estimates the total enthusiast universe at 600 to 700, and the new association’s top priority is to grow. Schmidt says he and some mini- football colleagues are getting close to finalizing a televised tournament deal; that, he hopes, could do for this shaky little game what TV did for Texas hold ’em.
“I want my kids to experience the one-on-one competition we had when we were kids and the kind of camaraderie we have here,” Schmidt said. “And to do that, this game has to be there.”
To reach this Plain Dealer reporter: jnichols@plaind.com, 216-999-4578

[kotixblack]

Great stuff!

[jeff]

Great stuff .
Did they include a link to this web-site in the article ?