US Open: Great TV Coverage
As most everyone knows, footbag is an underground sport. Media coverage of footbag events is rare. There have been times in the past where the media has flat out mocked footbag, but we need not go into the details here. In contrast to some coverage, the television spotlight of the US Open Footbag Championships was surprisingly positive and definitely among the best I’ve ever seen of an event.
The footage was taken by Fox 12 News in Portland, and you can download the footage (right click and ’save as’) or watch it directly on the Soul Purpose website.
I’ve seen a lot of coverage of events where the camera crew takes great shots of some amazing shred and then ends up showing all of the easy tricks or weird camera angles where you can’t even tell what tricks are being landed. This footage was a happy change from those clips.
For the record, it is slightly misleading in that you hear Ethan “Red” Husted (The Sole Purpose Freestyle Director and the event’s freestyle emcee) announcing the “Intermediate Big Three Competition” and they go directly into showing the “Open Big Three Competition”. The fist footbag clip on the video is a Big Three performed by none other than the US Open Champion, Jim Penske landing a “beast (6 add, 6 add, 6 add) combo” followed by a Justin Dale doing one or two tricks and then landing his own beast combo.
I was quite surprised to see that I was probably the most featured freestyler in this video. You can spot my trademark open toed “shandles” in many of the clips. I had several decent runs, including a nice shuffle run and my Sick One trick, a triple around the world (done pixie muted style).
Though the sport’s news anchor couldn’t help from calling the sport called the sport “Hacky Sack”, he did mention that the real name or “generic” name is called “footbag”. They also did nice features on both Kenny Shults (the “Michal Jordan of footbag”) and John Stallberger, the inventor of the original Hacky Sack. For the record, Kenny actually has over 40 World Titles in footbag (not 19), and to the best of my knowledge the sport was invented in 1972, not 1973.
