Columnist Ron Kantowski: How one Las Vegan netted an impressive collection of table hockey games

Monday, Jan. 16, 2006 | 8 a.m.

Ron Kantowski's column appears on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Reach him at ron@lasvegassun.com or (702) 259-4088.

It was roughly 10 years ago when Las Vegan Jeff Mancini purchased a table hockey game -- you know, the one with the slots and the little tin players that every grown-up who was raised in an "Original Six" city played as a kid -- for his son A.J.

Mancini envisioned using the game as a tool to bond with his son and that's just what has happened. Although given A.J. Mancini was only 4 at the time, it can be assumed he probably would have had more fun playing with the box.

The box from that modern game probably would have been OK. The boxes from the old hockey table game sets that Mancini would come to acquire based on that purchase are another matter.

"I've paid as much as $40 for an original box," he says without flinching.

Jeff Mancini is the proud owner of what is believed to be the biggest collection of original table hockey games -- and the metal players that are used to play them -- in the United States. There are 20 games, each double-boxed and each manufactured between 1956-71, in the rafters in his garage.

Last week, he pulled them all down and set them all up at the Stiga Las Vegas United States Table Hockey Association tour stop at Paris Las Vegas. It took him about the same amount of time -- three hours and a couple of intermissions -- as it does to play a real hockey game.

It was the first time Mancini had set up all the games at one place at one time. Unless you've got a den the size of Maple Leaf Gardens, setting up 20 table hockey games in the same room is pretty hard to do.

But Mancini said the reaction he got from the tournament players was worth the time and effort.

"They've all been over to look at it," said Mancini, who owns a local bill collection business. "The older guys seem to like it more."

Most of Mancini's games were built by the Eagle Toy Company of Montreal, and Coleco, an American company that purchased Eagle in the late 1960s.

Coleco began mass producing the games when the National Hockey League expanded from those Original Six cities -- Montreal, Toronto, New York, Chicago, Boston and Detroit (where Mancini grew up) into six more U.S. markets (Philadelphia, St. Louis, Minneapolis, Pittsburgh, Los Angeles and Oakland).

Today, Stiga, a Swedish firm, has cornered the market on table hockey games, which go for about $90.

There were basically only two table hockey companies during the 1950s and '60s with Munro, named for Don Munro, who made the first table hockey game out of wood in his Toronto home in 1932, being the other. The Eagle games, which now go for upward of $1,000 when you can find one, were more popular because the company had a license to produce players in NHL colors and uniforms.

Mancini also has more sets of players than you can shake a curved stick at. He keeps them in handmade wooden boxes, which, if lined up chronologically, basically tell the story and lineage of the NHL, from the Original Six to the addition of the next six in the 1960s and all the way up to the sprawling 30-team league of today.

He even has a set of Kansas City Scouts, who lasted only two years before they became the Colorado Rockies and later, the New Jersey Devils. And be careful with those L.A. Kings in the old purple sweaters and the green-and-blue Oakland Seals set. Those are as rare as the Chicago Blackhawks sipping from the Stanley Cup.

Using the Internet, Mancini has assembled a network of what he calls "pickers" who poke around basements and garage sales looking for old games, players and missing parts for games he already owns. But he doesn't anticipate his collection getting much larger, because he already has acquired most of what interests him.

His favorites, mostly because of the workmanship and the graphics on the game cabinets, are Eagle models made in 1960, '61 and '62.

"The metal that was used and the rounded corners really capture the essence of the Original Six era," Mancini said. "Those were high-quality games."

So, I'm told, was the 1962 Face-Off model made by Eagle. When I walked into the exhibit hall and spotted a pristine copy of the first of three table hockey games I had owned as a kid, it was as if the last 35 years of my life had never happened.

Now, if I can only find a guy who collects electric football games and slot car sets, I might never have to grow up.