Ron Kantowski rushes in on a pair of tournaments few would confuse with athletics - foosball and air hockey

Monday, April 2, 2007 | 7:12 a.m.

There still hasn't been invented a sport or game in which a 50-year-old man like myself can win state, or least be competitive.

But a trip Saturday to the Riviera convinced me I'm getting a little closer.

On one side of the convention hall, players were gearing up for the start of World Air Hockey Championships. On the other, the Hall of Fame Classic Table Soccer Championships - better known as "foosball" - already was in full swing.

Had there been a pinball machine in the corner and a used book store down the hall, I would have sworn I was back in my college's student union building.

There was more action at the foosball tables, but it was much louder in the air hockey parlor.

Click, click, click. WHOPP! The sound of pucks striking sombrero shaped mallets and then the back of the net - actually, a narrow slot on either end of the air hockey table - was creating quite a cacophony. That is, until Michael Rosen, the tournament director and the United States Air Hockey Association's top-rated player - at least according to his business card - started talking.

Then you could barely hear the click, click, click.

"We got those foos across the hall. They come in here and they're jealous," said Rosen, a New Yorker who calls himself Ricochet. I presume he earned the nickname for his bank-shot ability, but the way his bombast is bouncing off the walls, I can't be sure.

"You don't need to go across the hall," Rosen chides me good-naturedly. "Those guys are foos. The athletes are in here."

Those guys may be foos, but there are more than 400 of them whacking the foosball around on 80 tables. There are only eight air hockey tables on this side of the convention hall, and a late-arriving player carrying what has to be the biggest equipment bag for a "sport" that requires virtually none makes 66 players.

Rosen explains the discrepancy in entries by telling me that air hockey has only been around since 1972 while the foos have been at it much longer. Considering table football patents from Spain and France exist as far back as the 1890s, he might be right.

Or it could be that his tournament is offering $10,000 in cash and prizes while the guys across the hall are playing for more than $75,000 in foos' gold.

If you watched the series finale of "Friends," the one where Monica destroys the foosball table, then you probably know what one looks like. Most tables contain eight rows of "foos-men," four per side, mounted on horizontal rods.

It's actually a tedious game, until the ball is "passed" to the front rod or row of attackers. The attacking player will "trap" the ball under his middle man, thus beginning the one-on-one gambit that decides most matches.

The defending player moves his goalie and defending rods back and forth, sometime twirling them, to block the attacking player and/or throw off his strategy,

The attacking player will wait wait wait for just the right moment. Then BAM! He cranks his wrist like Fernando Valenzuela throwing a screwball, and the ball whistles past the "goalie" and into the back of the "net."

It all so happens so fast you almost need super slo-motion to see it. Sort of like a frog zapping lunch with his tongue.

Tournaments like the one at the Riviera attract some of the world's best players, as well as some of its most eccentric. In a doubles match I watched, one of the players wore batting gloves and a nasal strip across the bridge of his nose. During timeouts, his teammate consulted a card in his pants pocket between sips of Dr. Pepper.

"That's my playbook," Eric Dunn, a 39-year-old computer software developer from Victoria, B.C., would tell me afterward. "I like to script my shots, sort of like Bill Walsh scripting plays."

For a while Dunn and 48-year-old partner Gregg "Breathe Rite" Perrie are in synch like Joe Montana and Jerry Rice. But in the end, they lose a competitive match to Fernando DaRosa and his partner, Louie Cartwright of Las Vegas.

Cartwright is a meter reader for Nevada Power and one of the country's best foosball players.

"You don't want to play me for money," he says with an expression that says it's a matter of fact, not a boast.

I take him at his word. Because if there's one thing I learned from the hustlers at the student union building at my college, it's that foos and their money are soon parted.