The play on Saturday

Saturday.

So… what is there to say about Saturday. This is the day I bring my good friend BJ along – who I’ve been telling about all the great air hockey being played and how serious everyone is and all that good stuff. Finally – I got him to come along to see what the fuss was all about. We get there a bit late.. about a quarter to 1 – and not a single person was there. Of all the days for nobody to show up – it just had to be the day that I bring someone new along. I had to deal with a couple looks where he probably thought I was making this whole “professional air hockey” thing up.

I get on the horn and call Nick and Eric… and then go into the basics with BJ… he’s 6′4″ – so getting him in the right defensive position was a challenge. He looked incredibly awkward and hunched over. I showed him how to hold the mallet and showed him the cut shot and the right wall under… and told him to hit it from as close to the center of the table as possible (easy for such a tall guy). With this basic instruction – I’m sure he’d beat most people off the street – and after Eric showed up… he even beat Eric. Eric was out of practice, and BJ found a whole lot of velocity for such a newbie (and Eric still has a terrible tendency to score on himself)… and even though I didn’t tell him he should do it.. he hit a bunch of forehands… that with a lot of stupid, dumb luck – he managed to hit accurate unders and overs with it.

It’s good – because he was having fun.

Thank God Geoff showed up, because we were playing with regular arcade pucks, paying with our own money, and I was hoping to show BJ what a good air hockey player looked like – even if it had to be Geoff. So, I hopped into a game with Geoff – and not for points… it would be a good time to practice my left wall unders and cross straight. I really focused on getting my elbow coming out – and making a more ‘punching’ motion with my left wall shots – which helped tremendously with my accuracy and velocity. I really, finally felt like I could hit a cross or a left wall shot with the same motion… I don’t think I was being deceptive enough before.

…as much as I wanted to practice my forehand shots – I tried to listen to Billy when he mentioned that the basic shots… cut/rwu are really the ones to perfect and spend time working on. Plus.. for some reason – whenever I was hitting a forehand lwu, the puck would fly off the table. I dunno what the heck was going on with that – but it discouraged me enough to ignore it.

Geoff took off after our little practice set, so we played king of the hill with Eric, BJ and I. I spotted Eric 2 points, and BJ 4. BJ actually did very well at first.. as Eric only spotted BJ 1 point – but… since he managed to score as many points against himself as BJ did on him – they were hotly contested games, with BJ usually coming out on top. BJ even go the best of me the first two times.. I dunno – I was probably trying to show off and I know I scored on myself as well. I didn’t turn the puck over too much (another thing I was concentrating on), but was probably playing a little too loosey-goosey against him… and to BJ’s credit – he was starting to scare Eric and I with his approach. He was hitting incredibly deceptive cuts and really hard wall shots to both sides.. and randomly hitting overs. It was surprising what a little bit of coaching could do. I think another thing that I wanted to do to beat BJ was to only hit straights… when we played again – I set up my shots and became king of the hill until everyone else gave up. I was playing well and really worked my crosses and left wall unders. In fact, towards the end of the day my best shot was my cross and I was able to hit left wall shots without moving my body to the right quite so much.

It was fun, but I was eager for a bigger turnout. It would have been cool for BJ to see a better matchup than me and Geoff.