Player’s talent on display at tourney

Monday, Jan. 16, 2006 | 8:42 a.m.

He is called the "Wayne Gretzky of table hockey," and like the The Great One himself, Jacob Lindahl doesn't look very imposing.

But put him behind the rods and levers of a table hockey game, and he is instantly transformed into the King Kong of his sport.

Born in South Korea and raised in Umea, Sweden, where table hockey ranks right up there with Ann-Margret and a Volvo with all the options, Lindahl says he's retired now. But that didn't preclude him from winning the Stiga Las Vegas United States Table Hockey Association tournament tour stop at Paris Las Vegas in his North American debut.

Watching him deftly flip the little plastic puck from the tiny 3-D wingers on the tabletop onto the stick of his center "iceman" for a goal that happens so fast it almost doesn't register, you instantly ascertain that Lindahl's skill is in the wrists.

But it's in the brain, too.

"It's got to be the speed of his brain, more than anything," said Chicagoan Jim Rzonca, the tournament director and a pretty fair table hockey player himself. "It's like Wayne Gretzky, who could see two or three plays ahead. That's how Jacob is."

In big-time table hockey, games are five minutes long and played with a running clock. In the one I watched, Lindahl trailed 1-0 after two minutes. Upset in the making? Not a chance. It wasn't long before Lindahl started thinking two or three plays ahead and flicking his wrists, which he did five times for an easy 5-1 victory.

If there's a secret to Lindahl's success, he's not giving it away.

"Hard work and practice," he said with a Peter Forsberg accent. (Although he feels a bigger kinship with fellow Umea resident Patrick Sundstrom, the former Vancouver Canuck and a pretty fair table hockey player himself, according to Lindahl.)

Lindahl, who has been playing table hockey since he was 5, said it won't be long until he hangs up his ... well, whatever table hockey players hang up in lieu of skates. His job as general manager of the Virgin Cove Resort in steamy American Samoa, where table hockey isn't exactly king, doesn't leave much time for flipping the little plastic puck around the miniature rink.

"Basically, I have quit," he says about what brought him out of semi-retirement. "But when I get close to a game, I still feel the addiction."