My flight departs at 6:55 am on Thursday morning and of course I push it. Of course I was forced to scramble and sprint to be one of the last to board. How else was this weekend supposed to start? This is the weekend, of course, that I fly to New York to compete in the Brewskeeball National Championships.
Skeeball. The game that is most commonly associated with Chuckee Cheese restaurants for west coasters, or Cony Island for east coasters. It’s a game that is most likely associated with faint childhood memories.
You're five. You’re with your friends at your friend’s birthday party. You’re stuffed with pie and sugar. How does this experience get even better, you ask yourself. That’s when you see them. There they are, lit up on the other side of the restaurant, begging to be played. You see the tickets and the toys. You’re dying to play. You run over to your mom and ask for some quarters, please, please pleassseee… You get the quarters and you roll the balls up the lane, off the ramp and into the numbered pockets. The joy, the excitement, it’s all consuming. You and your buddies pinky-promise to have every birthday party here, forever.
The birthday parties come and go. You lose track of some friends, and you gain new ones. Less and less of the parties take place at Chuckee Cheese, unfortunately, as was initially promised. Twenty years later and you have all but forgotten about those childhood endeavors. Instead, more recent memories have all but taken their place, leaving just a flicker of nostalgia about an innocence lost. Then, in the most unlikely way, and during the most necessary of times, that lost innocence is found, at the bottom of a pint glass at the Buckshot Bar and Gameroom in San Francisco.
I had just started my first few days of law school at USF. I had moved from Southern California to a tiny studio apartment in the Richmond District of San Francisco. I didn’t know anyone. I was very excited, but equally nervous.
The first friend I made in San Francisco was a guy named Dave. He was a few years older than me and bore an uncanny resemblance to Matt Damon. We had all the same classes together, we noticed. We first met out in front of the school. I went outside in between classes to make a phone call. I noticed Dave was also outside. It was just the two of us. I saw him look over. I decided to forgo the phone call and introduce myself to Dave. After a few moments of awkward conversation, I realized we could be friends. (I have a thing for Matt Damon.)
Over the next few days of school, Dave and I hang out a lot, sitting next to each other in practically every class. With the weekend approaching, we set some plans. I tell him that my Dad recommended a bar near my apartment named the Buckshot that is supposed to be good fun. (My Dad had learned of this bar from one of his 30 year-old colleagues who used to live in the Richmond District.)
We meet at the Buckshot on a Friday night. Neither of us had ever come across a bar like this. Deer heads lined every slab of the walls. Stuffed birds hung from the ceiling. The few small TV screens played Japanese horror films. The kitchen served burgers and chicken fried bacon. The smell of garlic and beer permeated throughout.
We sit at the bar and order a drink. Our drinks are downed before we know it. We swivel around on our barstools so we can take in the whole bar. A pool table, a shuffle board table, and, and… on the right side of the bar, two glimmering skeeball machines. We both laugh, unable to contain our smiles. “Wanna give it a shot?” one of us asks. “Yea, why not.”
The Buckshot became of a staple of our weekends during that first semester, especially as we gained more friends and brought them to our promise land. In particular, our new law school friends, Nick and Ryan, instantly became infatuated with the bar and the skeeball fun. There was rarely a weekend where we didn’t at least stop by for a drink and roll a game of skeeball. It was our refuge, our Mecca. But as I sit aboard the Virgin Airlines flight to New York for the Brewskeeball National Championship, with Nick a few rows behind me, Ryan a few flights behind us, and Dave already in New York, I think it’s fair to say that none of us could have imagined what happened over the next two and a half years.
It wasn’t until our friend Robin brought it to our attention, during our second semester of school, that there was a “skeeball league” at Buckshot. Laughter was the unanimous response. But Robin, after having a few stellar performances on the skeeball lanes one weekend night, wanted to take her skills to the next level and join the league. “Brewskeeball” is what the league was called, Robin explained. In order to enter to league, you had to form a team of three (or more, if you want alternates, but only three can compete in a match), come up with a witty team name, and $60. We decided we would join.
The six of us—Dave, Nick, Ryan, Robin, Ted, and I—formed a team and became the “Notorious Skee.I.G.” We decided to be a team of six so we wouldn’t have to show up every Sunday night, but could alternate instead—three per match.
[This is as good a time as any to explain how the game works. It’s a rather simple game logistically, but it can get confusing if not explained properly. And in order to understand the more “technical” language later, it is necessary to start with basics and move from there…
Step 1: Walk up to the lane and put a dollar bill into the slot. Down the chute on the right side of the machine come nine wooden balls—bigger than a baseball, smaller than a softball.
Step 2: Roll the ball, one at a time, up the lane, off the ramp, and into a numbered pocket—preferably the 40 or 50 pocket, but we’ll get to that later.
Step 3: Repeat step 2 until you’ve rolled all nine balls.
Step 4: Find your score being shown in bright red numbers on top of the machine. The higher score the better. This score is called “a frame”
Step 5: Find teammate (or skeemmate) and record score on scoresheet, leaving the lane open for your competitor to try his hand.
This is essentially how a skeeball match takes place. One team of three against the other team of three. The highest team score at the end of ten frames wins.]
Our team, Notorious Skee-I.G., had a shaky start. Some of us performed better under the strictures and pressure of league competition than others. Some of us looked forward to each Sunday;, some stopped showing up altogether. A couple weeks into the “skeeson,” and we were down to four—me, Dave, Ryan, and Nick. This is when our scores started picking up. The four of us started getting pretty good, all the while appreciating how ridiculous this whole thing was. We won some matches and, at the end of the eight-week skeeson, we qualified for the playoffs.
We won our first playoff match, and then our second. Before we knew it we were in the semi-finals against the defending champs, “Skee-Unit.” Putting up our highest score ever, we stunned everyone and beat Skee Unit, advancing to the finals against the powerhouse “Big Johnson’s Skeeball Team.”
In the finals, we battled “Big Johnson” throughout the ten frames and were neck-and-neck. At the end of the tenth frame, we thought we had won. We celebrated. We hugged, embraced, and took photos. But due to a miscalculation on our part, we learned that we didn’t win, but had tied. Since there is no such thing as a tie in Brewskeeball, there needed to be a “roll off.” Overtime. Each of their guys would roll a game and each of us three would roll a game—highest team score total wins.
But it wasn’t meant to be. We ended up losing in the roll off. But while we didn’t get to chug from the Brewskeeball Mugs, that night lit a fire in our bellies. We could almost taste the Mugs, but the rug was pulled out from under us. Sure, we wanted the mugs and we couldn’t wait for another attempt, but more than anything we realized that we had fallen for this game. It wasn’t just some silly thing we did. It became more than that. It channeled those faint memories of childhood, of being with your closest friends and making new ones. It was good, fun competition. The weekly matches forced us to get together, even if we truly didn’t have time for it. And in the end, as a law student, being pulled out your room and out of your head can be life saving. Being pulled out of the bubble of law school and into the world of teachers, artists, consultants, designers, and carpenters was sanity preservation. We became hooked.
The last two years have rolled by quickly. We continued to pursue the mugs and strategized all sorts of ways in which we could finally grasp them. After investing only God knows how many dollars bills into the machines, the four of us have become scary good at the game, or sport, as I’ll refer to it from here on. We consistently put up some of the top averages for the San Francisco league. Along the way, Nick won the BROTY (the Best Roller Of The Year tournament). I set a San Francisco record for most “full circles” in a skeeson at 32. (A roller gets a full circle when he or she drills all nine balls in the 40 pocket, thus resulting in a 360; hence, a full circle.) And, finally, this past skeeson we chugged from the long sought after mugs, achieving the dream.
Not only have our individual averages scored in the top 10 in San Francisco, but our numbers are also some of the best in the nation. Yes, nation. This league crosses state lines! There are Brewskeeball leagues in Brooklyn, New York, Austin, Texas, and Wilmington, North Carolina—each league consisting of about 70 or so rollers, give or take.
So that’s how I got on this flight. I’m here because we all qualified for the Brewskeeball National Championship (BBNC). This weekend we see who is the best. We are here to settle once and for all—or just until next year—who is the best team in the country and who is the best individual roller in the country. On Saturday, sixteen teams will compete in the World Mug Tournament at both Full Circle Bar and the Knitting Factory in Brooklyn. On Sunday, sixty-four individual rollers will duke it out at the same venues in the Rollers Tournament to settle who is the best skeeballer in the country.
It's absurd. It's silly. Trust me, I know. But this weekend is the final hooray. This weekend is about more than just the competition. After graduating last weekend and moving out of my San Francisco apartment and into my parent's place in LA to study for the bar, I'm not sure where we'll all end up after this. Dave took a job in Louisiana and leaves in a few months. Nick is staying in SF, and Ryan is likely to stay in the city as well, but I could end up anywhere in California after the bar. This is the last time we'll be able to do this.
At the end of this weekend, we will walk away from a (children's) game that rekindled a childhood innocence and camaraderie that I couldn't have imagined going through law school without. But before we do, there is still more work to be done...
