By Julia Feldmeier
Special to The Washington Post
Thursday, May 5, 2005; HO12
The perfectly manicured soccer fields were situated in neatly aligned rows at Patapsco Middle School. Around them, players from across the globe jockeyed intensely for position, deftly moving the ball with their hands. Their hands? Yes, the game is Subbuteo, otherwise known as table soccer, and the sport's catch phrase is "Just flick to kick." The fields are scaled down, cloth-covered versions of the real thing -- 48 by 30 inches, proportional to regulation soccer fields -- and on Sunday, 14 of them filled the school's cafeteria for the 2005 International Table Soccer Open. The event, the largest international Subbuteo tournament held in the United States, drew 36 players, including top-ranked competitors from Wales, England and Austria. Invented in England in the 1940s, Subbuteo has long been popular among schoolchildren in Europe, particularly in soccer-crazed nations. At its peak in the early 1980s, the game numbered nearly 7 million fans in more than 50 countries. In the United States, however, the game has been overshadowed by air hockey, electric football, foosball, and in the past decade, video games. In Ellicott City, at least, the sport is just getting hot. Paul Eyes, a native of Manchester, England, and a Columbia resident since 1992, unfurled his childhood game set three years ago at Patapsco, where he teaches sixth-grade science. "As soon as I started to get it out, the kids were crazy for it," he said. The after-school Subbuteo club Eyes launched in 2003 now boasts 45 members, out of Patapsco's 700 students. Last year, Eyes garnered enough interest among adults to launch the Maryland Subbuteo Club. It's easy to see why both kids and adults find Subbuteo so captivating. A one-on-one game, each competitor has control of his team -- 11 miniature, hand-painted plastic figures standing on bowl-shaped bases -- for two 15-minute halves. The figures pass, dribble or run when they are flicked by a player's index fingernail, gliding smoothly across the velour surface. Any figure in possession of the ball gets three consecutive flicks before another figure takes possession. For each offensive flick taken, the defender gets a corresponding flick to try to intercept the opponent's pass or block his players. The offense maintains possession until the ball is missed, kicked out of bounds or into a defending player, or a foul is committed. Ideally, play alternates, but it doesn't have to. Players such as Eyes are known for making short, fluid moves before their opponent can slide a defender into position. Skilled play necessitates nimble fingers, but "there's a big tactical awareness to the game as well," Eyes said. "It's very similar to chess -- you can know how to move the pieces, but it's the order in which you move them that dictates how well you will do." Brains trump brawn in Subbuteo. "Physical strength isn't an issue," Eyes said. "And it really doesn't matter how old the person is." Early on in Sunday's tournament, Eyes, 41, squared off against Nick Trainer, a 14-year-old student at Patapsco who is a member of the school club and the Maryland Subbuteo Club. "I'm definitely at risk of losing to [Nick]. He'll probably beat me this year," Eyes said before the match. "It'll be a fairly even game -- I will not be nice." (The challenge still stands: Sunday's match went 6-1 in Eyes' favor.) For this group, at least, Subbuteo is not merely a default for the athletically disinclined. Most of the kids play soccer, and many of the adults are still active in the sport. Nick plays soccer, and his father, Rob Trainer -- a recent Subbuteo recruit -- coaches and referees in a youth soccer league. Eyes coaches the girls varsity soccer team at Howard High. Rick Wilcox of Alexandria, the 2002 U.S. Subbuteo champion, is the boys varsity coach at Episcopal High School in Alexandria. That Wilcox, who also plays in a spring league, skipped his soccer game on a warm and sunny Sunday to compete in the tournament is testament to Subbuteo's allure. "I like the competitive aspect of the game," Wilcox said. "It really is a thinking man's game. It takes good dexterity and skill -- and you have to be thinking tactically about it." Other notable aspects of the game are camaraderie and sportsmanship. Subbuteo, with its tiny American following -- there are only 100 ranked players in the United States but more than 500 in England -- evokes a kind of old-boys network among followers, though girls are welcome, too. (Eyes said there are a few females in Patapsco's after-school club.) With the small numbers comes a relaxed intimacy: The Maryland Subbuteo Club meets weekly in Eyes's garage. "We call it 'the Shrine,' and my wife is very patient with me," Eyes said. The four tables in his garage displace cars, he said, "which is the natural way of things when you like Subbuteo." In Virginia, Wilcox and Gregg Deinhart, a seven-time national Subbuteo champion, teamed up in 1994 to form the Washington Tuesday Subbuteo League, flicking away inside Deinhart's Alexandria townhouse. In July, they will host the national tournament at Episcopal High School. Outside the area, there are scattered Subbuteo enthusiasts -- Connecticut and Michigan have especially strong clubs. Players from across the country chat via the American Subbuteo Association's Web site. And, of course, there's the European contingent. "I've got [Subbuteo] friends I've stayed with in London," Deinhart said. "And if I want to go to Spain or Italy, I make a phone call or send an e-mail, and someone I know will say, 'Yeah, you can stay at our house -- bring your teams.' " The courtesy extends both ways: Will Holliday, a 17-year-old Subbuteo prodigy from Wales, made his first trip to the United States to attend Sunday's tournament. He flew into Pittsburgh, where Mike Benkart, a Subbuteo player from Pennsylvania who had met Holliday at a tournament in Italy, retrieved him and delivered him to Ellicott City. But the handshakes and friendly demeanors don't mitigate competitiveness. Subbuteo aficionados play to win. They put their favorite custom-designed teams on the table (Nick Trainer favors a red, white and blue USA set; Deinhart's players have seven stars across the base, one for each tournament he's won) and fastidiously polish the bottoms between games and at halftime. They dance around the table, bending over it, hand poised for the quick flick. Referees officiate. At the tournament's close, the Europeans prevailed: In the under-19 finals, Holliday, who is ranked 18th in the world in that bracket, shut out Nick Trainer. In the quarter-finals, Eyes fell to the eventual champion, Austria's Wolfgang Haas. Shorab Jadunandan, an English player, secured second place and Deinhart came in third. No one seemed particularly chagrined by the results. As Maryland Subbuteo Club co-founder Ed Morgans said earlier in the day: "There's nobody who'll win today that the rest of us will be like, 'Ah man, I can't believe that happened.' We'll be genuinely happy for whoever wins." Not a bad mantra since the limited field means players are recycled throughout tournaments. But if the Patapsco program keeps rolling, the game may soon have a new squad of champions. "Kids get much more practice than any of us do," Morgans said. "They don't have jobs and all that good stuff."