Freedom Footbags

I started this blog with the intention of answering what seemed a simple question…

What does it take to really get good at footbag?

… But as I began to answer this seemingly simple question, I realized that there was far more to it than I had originally anticipated. The following story outlines some of the highlights of my footbag career from its inception to the day I was inducted into B.A.P. (the Big Add Posse, which is another story for another day).

I’ve been in this sport for a long time now and I’ve seen or heard this question, “What does it take to get good at footbag” (or some version of it) at least a hundred times. The answer to this question isn’t exactly simple, but I’d like to dispel some of the common myths around it, as well as offer my best advice. In order to understand my particular standpoint on this issue, I feel that it’s pertinent to elaborate on my history in this sport. So if you’re looking for a quick answer, let me say that for everyone it’s going to be different. I’ll have more specific advice to offer another blog coming soon, but for now, here’s the beginning of my story…

I’ve been playing footbag since I was in high school, though I don’t remember the exact year I started. It was a long time ago: I’m 35 years old now and I graduated from high school back in 1989, so that makes me about a 20 year veteran. Back then, the term “footbag” was hardly known, and rarely used. We mostly used the 2-Panel Hacky Sacks back then, and the only reason I’d even heard the word footbag was that the Hacky Sacks all said “Official Footbag” on them. I always wondered, “Official footbag of what?” To this day I still can’t answer that question! Back then I played almost exclusively with my three best friends, Mike & Shawn Ennis, and Scott Barker. I think it’s safe to say that all three of them were probably at least twice as good as I was, and we all played just about as much. I remember at one point Mike had a record in the mid 100’s when mine was around 10. I didn’t have would some would call “natural talent” by any stretch. In fact, at the end of my junior year in high school I had straight A’s, that is, except for my B in gym class. I’ll elaborate more on this later, but I wanted to lay out my background with respect to this whole natural ability issue.

As a senior in hight school, I have another clear memory of walking past a hack circle and being far too shy/embarrassed to join, thinking that I wasn’t good enough to play with them. I basically believed that I sucked at footbag, and hence, I did. Even though I was never the best at it, I always really enjoyed playing with my friends. I’ll never forget the day I finally got 14 basic kicks. Something finally clicked, and for the first time ever I felt that I was starting to get it. I guess I’d probably been playing at least two years at this point. I’d had some (albeit minimal) skills that I’d learned playing soccer in my younger years, but not much. Thanks to me, that bench stayed really warm for the other players.

I got those memorable 14 kicks sometime towards the end of my high school days, and then took my hack with me to college. I attended the University of Colorado at Boulder where I studied Structural Engineering. When I first started college, I got pretty heavily into the partying scene and just barely managed to avoid being one of the 40% of the students that are kicked out of engineering school for not maintaining at least a ‘C’ average.

The next major highlight of my footbag career that I will never forget took place while I was practicing outside my dorm room in college. I’d been playing for hours I finally managed to land my fist outside stall. I was using an (yes) official Hacky Sack, and Nike Air shoes (these shoes have some huge outsides and insides, but a rather poor toe). This first stall wasn’t anything like my stalls today. It’s a tricky transition from kicks to stalls, and this first stall was more like a half-delayed kick than a deliberate stalling motion. I can still picture that hack sort of bouncing into place and settling on my outside. More often than not, the bag would just roll off my foot after the stall, because I found it difficult to hold my leg in such an awkward position. I probably managed to get the outside stall five times or so that fateful day.

That first (right) outside stall was during the fall of my freshman year of college. In between partying and school, I did a lot of kicking. Boulder Colorado was a hot spot for the sport, and it was usually pretty easy to find a hack circle outside the dorms in the spring. By the springtime, I could get 10 or so kicks fairly consistently and learned my left inside stall. (I’m a Sideways stance player). There were a few players that I ran into that were pretty good (one guy I remember could land a cross-body flapper stall), but I never ran into anyone exceptional that year.

The next summer in 1990, I spent a few months living just outside of Old Orchard Beach, Maine. We scraped by living in a dump (literally, I remember having to scrape the dead squirrel off the floor under a rotting mattress when we first moved in) and working at the local amusement park. We kicked practically every day, usually for several hours. We were the best players in that tiny town, but my friends were still a notch above me. I remember learning pendulum and flying clipper. Particularly I remember the only time I’ve ever injured someone kicking. We’d often kick right outside our dump, err… shack, and there always seemed to be little kids running around our circle. Time and time again we warned them not to come around our circle because they would be kicked, but of course they never listened. I ended up trying a pendulum one time and didn’t realize there was a kid (maybe 5 years old) standing right behind me. I back-kicked him pendulum style square in the chest and knocked him on his but. There was no serious or permanent damage, but the kids stayed away after that. The last pertinent highlight of my summer in Maine was the day I got my new personal record of 174 kicks. I was using a Koosh ball at the time. That was a great personal accomplishment.

I got back to Colorado in towards the end of that summer. Somehow I learned that the World Footbag Championships were coming up withing a week or so in Golden Colorado. Coincidently (?) this was only a half hour away from my parent’s house in Westminster. I had been practicing pretty solidly since the end of high school (about a year and a half now) and had a maybe a hundred or so hours under my belt. I was starting to think I was getting good at footbag (though I still called it Hacky Sack at this point). As fate would have it, at the end of that summer I was in for a big surprise.

Golden Colorado is just West of Denver and nestled right in front of the foothills of the Rockies (it’s about a 1/2 hour drive south of Boulder). It’s a pretty small town, so figuring out where the World Championships were didn’t take long. We (my friend Shawn was with me) found a parking spot a hundred yards or so away from where the competition was, and started walking across a small park. In the distance I could see there were several hack circles. As we got closer, I truly couldn’t believe what I was seeing. I realized much later that the person I fist saw was Dimitri Kavouras and he was busting and linking moves like barrage and barfly within strings of tricks. I was utterly blown away, and have never looked at footbag the in the same way since that day. World’s has always (at least since then) been a week long event and we kept going back every day. I remember meeting Steve Goldberg there for the first time and having him teach me osis. An a side note, it wasn’t until a few years later that I learned just how much Steve had done for the sport of footbag. There are a lot of people that have really been instrumental in helping bring this sport to the masses, but to me Steve has had the greatest influence. Since I brought it up, I wouldn’t be sitting here right now if it weren’t for Mike Marshall and John Stallberger who invented the original Hacky Sack. Thanks to all of you.

Now back to my first worlds in 1990. I don’t really remember much from the routines, but I remember the circle shred. In particular I remember Rippin’ Rick Reese trying a (backside) symposium blur. I had no idea what the trick was, but blur sounded hard enough as it was, much less symposium blur! I’m pretty sure he was the first person ever to hit that trick. I also remember that the atmosphere there was almost electric. Everybody was kicking and having a great time. For the most part, the circles were open to anyone who wanted to join, though it just didn’t feel right to step into the circle of the top players in the world when I couldn’t even follow what they were doing. Nevertheless, there was always a circle that would welcome me, and there was always someone there willing to teach and explain how to do the tricks they were trying. I really learned a lot, but I’d only scraped the tip of the iceberg. I also remember being exposed to “Team Freestyle” for the first time. Back then, you could have 2-3 players on a team, but this changed to only two players within a few years. It’s hard enough for the judges to follow a doubles routine, much less follow what three different players are trying. Up until this point I’d never even considered doing anything like team freestyle. It’s really something that words fall far short of explaining, but it’s someone once told me watching team freestyle is like watching a four-legged monster freestyle.

At Worlds I also remember meeting Joey Schaeffer for the first time and picking his brain about footbag. I later came to learn that B.A.P. was Joey’s brainchild. He was the first person I ever saw do a dragon stall, and it really struck me as a cool move. I later adapted it to my own style, and subsequently Jon Schneider learned it from me and took the move to new heights, incorporating it in a wide variety of moves. I remember learning that Joey was also one of the few people in the world at the time that could land a mobius, which at the time was about as difficult as any move that had been hit (right up there with symposium blur).

I spent the rest of my summer practicing the new moves I learned like mirage and osis, and I remember really struggling to learn “the magic hop“. My friend Shawn who’d gone with me to worlds seemed to learn these moves and concepts relatively easily. The summer ended and it was back to Boulder for my sophomore year.

It was fall of 1990 and at this point I was totally hooked on footbag. I continued to practice nearly every day and improve my skills. I was getting more sold at basic kicks, and could do a few 1-2 add moves with some consistency. I still found a few players with some skills, but I was extremely rare to find anyone with skills like what I had witnessed at the World Championships a month or so earlier. My roommate Will played a bit as well, and one fateful day he brought me some of the best news could have possibly heard. He knew I was an addict, and he’d finally run into some pros! It turned out that they played every week at the Friday Afternoon Club at the University Memorial Center. I’ll never forget his excitement when explaining to me how good these guys were… They didn’t just do kicks, the would do “Stall, stall, stall, stall” and I said something to the effect of, “Yes, I have to see them!”

The next Friday came and I was really eager to go to FAC at the UMC. There was a live band and they sold beer, though at 19 years old I wasn’t old enough to buy it at the time. I got there ready to meet these pros, and I was definitely not disappointed. There were two guys, Paul (?) and Dan Zonner. They simply blew me away with their skills. Sure nowadays they’d be considered low-level intermediates, but back then they were kings. I remember a lot of sole stall passes, and Paul’s spinning osis (4 whopping adds!). I don’t think I missed a single Friday afternoon, but there was a break during the winter months, since it was an outside event. I soaked in as much as I could from those two and learned a lot.

That next spring I remember having a serious pro show up on campus. His name was Eric “Bart” Bartholomay. I vividly remember him landing a symposium whirl and thinking it was one of the coolest moves I’d ever seen. I remember practicing for many, many hours trying to hit this trick myself. I finally (thought that I) succeeded in landing it, but I was later somewhat disheartened to learn that I actually wasn’t even close, as the move I had hit was only a butterfly. (The dexterity of the butterfly is out to in, whereas on a whirl it’s in to out - I also didn’t notice the subtleness of a symposium move vs. a non-symposium move.)

The next summer in 1991 was spent in California in Redwood City where my parents had recently moved. I was such a shy person that I really didn’t make many friends there, and I kicked almost exclusively alone in my back yard. I practiced and practiced for hours on end. By the end of the summer I could do a few cool moves like mechan-osis (osis from a squeeze behind the knee) and after many, many hours of practice I could get a few catches juggling two footbags. I learned a few years later that I was only minutes away from the Stanford Footbag Club in Palo Alto. If only I had known I could have really improved a lot that summer, but as it was, I was basically on my own and getting better slowly but steadily. I was really eager to get back to Colorado at the end of the summer, because I knew that I would be attending both the (now defunct) Intermountain Championships in Ft. Collins and the World Championships in Golden.

Back in 1991, the Intermountain Footbag Championships in Ft. Collins were basically considered a warm-up for Worlds by most of the top players, and I believe the events were scheduled with that in mind. I was really excited to go because this was going to be the first time I had ever actually competed at a tournament. I competed in the intermediate division and I think I got 3rd or 4th place. Once again however, it was really all about hanging out in the circles, not so much the competition itself. This tournament holds my first distinct memory of seeing Peter Irish (Five Time Singles World Champion) shred it up on the sidelines. I always thought that he should have been called “The Gardener” rather than “The Executioner” since he was so amazingly good a rakes and cross-body rakes, linking variations of them effortlessly. I also had the opportunity to kick with Rippin Rick Reese for the fist time, and he taught me paradox mirage. I already could do mirage and clipper stall fairly easily, so learning paradox mirage was easy - particularly with such a good teacher.

A week or two later brought me to my second World Championships in Golden. Again, I soaked in more and more new tricks and had an awesome time just shredding it up in the circles. I competed in intermediate and remember my routine highlight of linking butterfly, whirl, butterfly, whirl, butterfly.

Once again, after ‘91 worlds it was back to CU Boulder, with a healthy mix of school and footbag. By this time my partying had significantly diminished and I was more focused on doing well in school. I finally got myself a Tricks of The Trade, Vol I, and it was definitely the best thing I did for my game at the time. I watched the video, and kept rewinding it dozens of times, not believing what I was seeing. It was one thing to see the moves done at full speed, but seeing the moves in slow motion opened up a whole new world to me, because I honestly really couldn’t fully grasp what was happening at full speed. To the untrained eye, most footbag moves really look a lot the same. Nowadays, it’s hard for me to remember what it it is like to see footbag from that perspective: Not be able to really follow what was going on (I often tend to forget that this applies to some 99% of the general populace). It was shortly after watching this video one day that I reached a personal milestone, landing torque for the first time.

By this time, as a Junior in college, I was playing 2-3 hours a day nearly every day of the week. I often played in the middle of campus at the fountains in front of the UMC. I had a good friend that used to play nearly as much as I did, named Pete Kendall(?). We were the best two players on campus at the time and helped to push each other along. I always felt he was one step ahead of me, even though I practiced more than he did. He’s one of the few people I know that could do a sole stall while standing straight up and holding his stalling leg (with his hands) in front of him just above his head (ouch).

1992 Worlds, and all the fun and new tricks that went with it, came and went. Another year passed with more school, and more footbag. 1993 marked the last year Worlds was held in Golden, Colorado. My senior year in college stretched to a year and half on into ‘95. During this time I continued to play 2-3 hours a day consistently. While in school, I became good friends with Jonathan Schneider, and Jane Jones, and we had many a session.

It was sometime in the spring of 1995 that Benjamin Job walked up to a circle I was playing in. He could do a few simple moves like around the world, but I could instantly tell that this guy had serious potential - his feet were lightning fast. I learned that he was a semi-pro skater before he really started getting into footbag. He quickly became a regular in the circles, and within six months he could land more difficult tricks than I had managed to learn in the last six years, with moves like pogo paradox da da curve.

Ben Job (who’s name is almost always pronounced incorrectly, it rhymes with “robe”, not job) was instrumental in developing a notation for freestyle footbag, now referred to as Job’s Notation. It’s still the standard today. I recall him bringing me the original list of moves that his computer program (based on the notation) generated. It contained page after page of nearly every possible combination of one and two dex moves that could be conceived of. In retrospect, it was by no means a complete list, as there are many concepts that were not incorporated into the original list. Still, this notation was and is a true breakthrough in communicating the complexities of freestyle moves.

By 1995 I was back living in my parent’s basement (they’d moved back to Colorado after living in California for a few years). After several months of being unsuccessful finding gainful employment as an engineer, I opted to get into the Graduate program at CU Boulder as a Civil Engineer with emphasis in Structural Engineering. Outside of school, I was consistently kicking with two (at the time) hard-core footbag addicts that were both about my same level, Dustin (?) and Richard (Rick) Bushu.

It was some time around here in ‘95 (perhaps ‘94) that I finally mustered up the courage to do what would eventually prove to be the best thing I ever did to improve my game. Rick Bushu, Dustin and I somehow figured out how to get a hold of Rippin Rick Reese, who coincidentally (?) lived in Ft Collins, a mere hour drive from Westminster (which is a suburb of Denver) Colorado. We meagerly called him on the phone, thinking the whole time “We’re not worthy,” and asked him if he would kick with us. He gracefully accepted our invitation and offered to meet half way between the two cities. It was an incredible evening of kicking, to be sure. There aren’t a whole lot of sports where you can call up a former (and future) world champion and have them drive a half hour to come play with you! We were quickly humbled and it took several weeks of practice before we again mustered up the courage to ask him if he would kick with us again.

Anywhere else that we kicked, we were the best players around. But whenever our egos got the best of us we could always pick up the phone and schedule another humbling with Rippin. I learned so much from him that I don’t think I’ll ever be able to properly repay him for how much he helped me. It wasn’t just that he could teach us tricks, it was the attitude he took - not one of superiority, but one of openness and encouragement. I truly believed that I wasn’t worthy. I came from a background of being geek and a nerd that was constantly picked on in school. I never really thought I had an ounce of athletic ability until I discovered footbag. Even then I never thought I could really be that great at it. For some reason though, some how, Rippin convinced me otherwise.

Over the next year I made the drive to Fort Collins many, many times. Rippin also came down to kick with us in Denver or Westminster from time to time, when his busy work schedule allowed. One fateful day in 1996 we were kicking at Capitol Park in Denver (between the capitol and the court house). All this time kicking with Rippin had really honed my skills, and I was starting to gain a lot of confidence in my game. One of my favorite moves at the time was paradox torque. I could hit it with some consistency on both sides, but at the time no one had hit it back to back. (Due to the nature of the move, in order to hit it back to back it has to be hit on both sides). Rippin was particularly impressed with me even attempting such a difficult combination of tricks (5-add to 5-add). In fact, he was so taken by this combo that on the spot he proposed that he would unilaterally induct me into the B.A.P. on the spot if I landed the combination. Thoughts of “I’m not worthy” immediately crept into my head. At the time, there were only 13 members in this group of players considered to be the best of the best. The original seven members had voted in the following six, and a unilateral vote was unheard of. But, Rippin was after all Rippin, unquestionably one of the best players at the time, even among fellow B.A.P. members, so he had a lot of pull and say in the matter.

After somewhere between fifty and seventy five tries, I finally managed to land paradox torque to paradox torque for the first time ever in recorded history. It was a day I will never forget. It was Rippin that came up with my nickname. “Genzu, like the Ginsu knives” he said. (The knives were fairly popular back in the day). The “Blades” part came later, but I think I’ve rambled on long enough for now.

Peace.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 21st, 2007 at 3:48 am and is filed under Genzu's Journal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.