I started playing Sports Games when I was a kid. Some of my fondest early memories are of playing a football game called Cadaco Varsity with my dad. You called an offensive running or pass play, rolled 3 six-sided dice, added the total and looked up the play result on the game board. It was the "Scientific Football Game," it said so on the game board itself. It looked very old. It was brown with age and its edges were worn.
As I grew older, I moved on to other games. I had several electric football games but I was never satisfied with the way most of the players careened aimlessly around the field. Often, I wouldn't even bother turning on the switch that caused the field to vibrate. I'd line the players up in their formations and on 'hike' (yes, I said 'hike' to start each play) I would push them together into a big scrum. If the player with the ball was still upright after the scrum, I would push him on toward the opponent's goal line with several defenders in hot pursuit. The outcome of the play was entirely up to my whim!
I also remember playing All Star Baseball, a game where you inserted round player cards into slots and spun a spinner to determine the result of the play off of the card. I remember Ty Cobb and Babe Ruth being pretty good! There was the Cadaco Basketball Game, where an orange ping-pong ball would roll around the game board and settle into various holes on the court that were controlled either by yourself or an opponent. If it was one of your holes, you would then pull back a lever and release it to cause a flipper to shoot the ping-pong ball at an actual wire hoop. There was some real skill involved in this one, and I developed quite the midcourt stroke!
Another game I enjoyed playing with my dad was called NFL All-Pro. It was football-with checkers! Seriously! Players were checkers with helmets painted on top. The game was a hoot! To make a tackle, you had to jump your checker on top of the checker on which the plastic football rested, and if the ball fell off your piece while you moved it, that was considered a fumble. The game's rule book provided an orderly procedure for recovering such a fumble, but when my dad and I played, fumbles usually led to a free-for-all between us to snatch the ball off the field! Player/checkers often flew everywhere! It was also something of an inconvenience lining up 22 checkers prior to the snap for every play from scrimmage, so often we just played 6-on-6 man football. Good times
In 1973, as I was fast approaching my teen years, I remember noticing an ad in a Street and Smith Pro Football Preview for a game called APBA. The ad promised I could use individual players from actual pro teams to play a game of football on the table-top. Intrigued, I mailed a request for more information to the game company and for the next several weeks breathlessly checked our box every day for a reply. I vividly remember the day my mom handed me an envelope from the APBA Game Company. Oh wow! It had finally arrived! If any of you have seen a 'Christmas Story,' then you'll understand when I say I felt just like Ralphie did when he finally received his 'Little Orphan Annie' decoder ring. I removed the four color brochure printed on glossy stock and pored over the details. Wow again! Every pro player for each team had his own card! Enclosed were sample cards of Larry Csonka and Mercury Morris from the Super Bowl champ Dolphins. They were indescribably beautiful and while I wasn't sure what those 3-columns of numbers on the front of each card meant, I knew they must somehow unlock the mysteries of the football universe!
The game and a set of season cards was $24.95, a princely sum back in the day, especially for a kid. But my parents told me they'd help pay for half if I saved my allowance for the other half and did extra chores to earn it. It took me most of the summer, but by August I had saved enough and my parents wrote out a check for me to send to APBA. When the actual game was delivered several weeks later, I was in Nirvana. I spent hours pulling the cards out of each team envelope and going through them. The learning curve was a bit steep, but by fall, I was playing like an old pro. I mostly played solitaire because others thought the game was too complicated.
I ordered additional seasons and some classic teams from the game company. I became familiar with a generation of players who had starred in the NFL before I was born. Guys like Bobby Layne, Norm Van Brocklin, Otto Graham and Marion Motely. Stats were meticulously recorded by hand on paper and then tabulated at the completion of every game. Leagues were created and schedules were drawn. During the cold winter months many a classic gridiron battle was waged. I still feel nostalgic when I think about those days.
As I grew older, games took a backseat to real life. However, as home computers became available, a whole new generation of sports games became available. Replaying entire seasons now took weeks, instead of months or years. The sometimes tedious chores of rolling dice and looking at cards and flipping charts to find results was largely automated! In fact, some of today's modern computer games allow you to dabble in nuances of the sports world that the old the old card and dice games never touched: team finances, player contract negotiations, team chemistry, and player off season training. Finally, with the graphics capabilities of today's console gaming systems and computers, sometimes it's hard to tell the difference between what is a sports simulation and an actual broadcast.
This brings me to the big question: the why? Why have I stay involved with this hobby my entire life? There's no easy answer. My love of sports is the most obvious answer, of course. There also is an element of 'if I had been running the show, things would have been different.' With me at the helm of my Dallas Cowboys in 1978, we BEAT those damn Pittsburgh Steelers in Super Bowl XIII; several times I might add! But perhaps the biggest reason is this: for a brief moment in time, all my cares and worries are gone and it's all about the game!
