Unsung icons: Lord of the games Fun and games at home

COMEDIAN DAVID SMIEDT TAKES AN IRREVERENT, BUT APPRECIATIVE, LOOK AT THE CLASSIC THINGS THAT DEFINE YOU-BEAUT AUSSIE LIFE

It all changed in 1972. That year, the top album in Australia was Cat Stevens’ Teaser and the Firecat, we flocked to cinemas to see The Godfather, and Shane Gould brought home three gold medals from the Munich Olympics. Meanwhile, in our living rooms, a revolution was taking place whose echoes are still being felt today.

For the first time in Australian history, the word pong was moved from the bathroom to the lounge. It got a capital P, some nifty hardware and the television became interactive. Fast forward a few decades and video gaming is now a multi-billion industry here.

But for all the hyper-connectivity, cutting-edge tech and burgeoning virtual reality headsets, nothing yet has beaten the games you physically play at home. To be clear, we’re not talking the board variety but rather indoor sports that practically justified the need for rumpus rooms on new builds. The undisputed status symbol of the games room/undercover patio/subsumed garage was a snooker table. But unless you inherited one and had a massive home, these mahogany monsters were few and far between. Far more common – yet still rare enough to become neighbourhood gathering hubs – were pool tables.

Most of the time they were anything but new. Rather, they were often threadbare affairs your Dad or Pops got for a steal from a bloke down the pub who was making space for these amazing new gadgets called pokies. The baize was thinner than a politician’s smile while her opponent was speaking, the legs were chipped, the netting could barely hold a ball and after playing on it long enough you realised there was a distinct slope to the left. Add a scuffed, warped cue and the table conferred a distinct advantage for home players.

Over the years, various balls were also misplaced so that abode-specific rules had to be created: the number 7 green was in fact the black, the four stripe was the white and so on, which, again, gave the home player a massive edge over visitors. As did the various ‘my table, my rules’ dogma that developed over the years: “Sorry mate, your left foot left the floor while playing that last shot so you now have to go to the shop and get us hot chips”. It was also the double whammy of suburban aspiration to have both a pool table and a pool. So James Bond.

When some engineering genius figured out how to fold a tennis table in two, these became the go-to for those short on space but big on energy. They formed suburban battlegrounds where several key lessons were learned. The first being that it’s super-easy to pop the balls by inadvertently treading on them. The second was that if you put enough hook on the ball you could make it go around the net – an act that would briefly make you a legend in the neighbourhood. At least among the kids.

The third lesson was the table’s ability to shake your world view. Sounds like a big call but bear with us here. Inevitably on a long Sunday arvo, your Dad would saunter in with a beer or two onboard to show you kids how this game was played. Shortly afterwards it dawned on you that it was possible to beat him at something. If that wasn’t astounding enough, you also got to see whether he walked the walk or just talked the talk when it came to sportsmanship. Or, he invoked an old footy injury, inferred that he took it easy on you and walked out saying slightly too loud that “It’s a stupid game anyway”. Before we get too Freudian, let’s move on by noting another boon of the ping-pong table was that you could pop up one of the sides every arvo after school so it was vertical and practise for so long that your mum busted into the rumpus room wild of eye and shrill of voice to say she could no longer hear herself think.

This trinity of fun was, of course, rounded out by the foosball table.

The goal was tiny, the ball no bigger than a marble, but spin the rods quick enough and it could generate devastating pace. What’s more, you could use rebounds to your advantage if you knew the floor sloped slightly this way or that, which provided the opportunity to embark on a lavish choreographed goal celebration designed to give the proper irrits to whoever you were playing. And, tbh, was actually more fun than scoring the goal itself. Take that, Fortnite.

“IT WAS ALSO THE DOUBLE whammy OF SUBURBAN ASPIRATION TO HAVE BOTH A pool table AND A POOL. SO JAMES BOND”