Anyone can get in on the ‘ax’
within 300 feet of any of us. He didn’t let us use a serrated kitchen knife at the dinner table until we’d been living on our own for five years. Minimum. When he taught me to shave, he held the razor and said, “If you’re not careful, you’ll cut your head off with this thing.”
I thought that’s why he taught shaving over the sink, so my head would just fall into the sink when I cut if off instead of bouncing down the steps, where my poor mother would have to say something like, “Look, if I see one more severed head come bouncing down these steps, mister!”
All right, what was I talking about? Ax throwing. I visited Valhalla on Tuesday night and, what luck, walked right into the ax throwing playoffs. The winners of the Tuesday League playoffs will soon meet the winners of the Sunday League playoffs, all of them chucking blades of sharpened steel for a crack at the $1,000 grand prize, which Valhalla co-founder Robert Jenkins says is the largest cash prize for any ax-throwing range in the world for an eight-week season.
Why would I argue? The man has axes.
As we love to point out in describing every other league, once the playoffs start, anything can happen. Admittedly, it was probably the anything-can-happen aspect of ax throwing that interested me in the first place.
At Lumberj Axes, the massive Millvale ax-throwing only stadium run by partners and Greenfield natives Corey Deasy and Jack Welsh along with Matt Peyton, the athletes sign a waiver that reads, in part, “I fully understand the inherent risks associated with the use and misuses of axes,” and further includes the word “scarring” and phrases such as “loss of important bodily functions,” “other risks not reasonably foreseen,” and, “I understand that drinking alcohol is not required for this event.”
That last provision is because Lumberj Axes is BYOB.
“Beer and wine only,” Jack told me.
So definitely leave the Wild Turkey in the car.
“Hey,” explained Corey, who opened Pittsburgh’s first escape room, another new-wave entertainment option popping up in many places. “I’ve been skiing at Seven Springs and I’ve made trips to the Foggy Goggle (lounge) and then to the infirmary. If that’s a viable business, why can’t this be?”
And viable it is, well beyond Corey’s projections when it opened last September, three months after Valhalla. From Millvale to Jeannette to Philadelphia to Chicago and all over Canada, to no one’s surprise the birthplace of competitive ax throwing, pregnant women are taking trophies right from under the beards of burly men in flannel (”Lots of flannel, lot of red and black,” Jack reported). Anyone can do it, and it’s fun because what you’re essentially throwing is a hatchet, not an ax at all. It’s in the promotion that axes are important. Hatchet throwing might not have the same allure.
That’s probably why Alicia Metz, wife and business partner of Jenkins at Valhalla, says so sweetly on the company’s phone message “we’re unavailable to answer the phone at the moment because we are training savages.”
There’s a fine line in this business, as Bill Cowher used to say, and in ax throwing it’s the line between the innocent social fun it surely is (thinking bowling or darts with more of an edge) and the not too subtle unleash your-inner-Viking requirements of prudent marketing.
“There’s something appealing about the potential for danger, whether it’s the instrument you’re using or the action, but that’s the first thing, that appeal,” said Jenkins. “The next thing is taking this potentially dangerous instrument and sinking it into a target right where you wanted to; there’s something about that sound that’s so satisfying.
“It’s hard to explain. At the end of the day, weapons come in all forms, shapes, and sizes, but we definitely don’t promote harming people or murder or anything.”
Right. There is a World Axe Throwing League and there is a National Ax Throwing Federation, but something like the American Ax Murders Association wouldn’t likely be a viable startup. One would hope.
“This is about discipline and skill-building and focus,” Jenkins said. “Everybody can do it. The youngest person to throw here was 7, the oldest 96. We had an 11year-old blind girl throw, mentally challenged individuals with careful instruction have thrown. No one gets left out. Everybody gets very personal coaching because it’s no fun if you can’t get it. Best part is that you get to work closely with so many people, and seeing people overcome their objections — maybe their friends drug them here — they’re the happiest people after they’ve tried it. If you’re scared or apprehensive and find out that you have a talent, that really sticks with people.”
The first hurdle — other than the one so perfectly expressed by a female customer to her Lumberj Axes ax throwing coach Wednesday night in Millvale — “worried? I’m terrified that it’s going to chop me!” – is getting the implement to stick in the target. As Corey and Jack explained to me during a brief coaching session I had to cut short because my rotator cuff was screaming, “Don’t you dare! Don’t. You. Dare!,” there are essentially two options on the throws, a two-handed over-the-head delivery and a one-handed tomahawk toss. The wooden targets are lined up along one wall of an old Sedgwick Street machine shop where the owners are going through $5,000 worth of lumber per month and distributing free firewood from game-worn targets that have been hatcheted into uselessness. The targets are separated by chain link fencing to control any rebounds, the rebounds being the reason open-toed shoes are discouraged if not prohibited. Scoring is based on proximity to the bull’seye and games are played in four rounds of five throws each.
In the event of a tie, particularly in a playoff game or title match, an actual ax, like the full-menace tree-felling implement Jack Nicholson deployed in “The Shining,” may be introduced for one throw.
Some ax throwing establishments don’t want you to know they have one of those big boys.
“If they know you have one,” Welsh told me, “everyone coming through the door wants to throw it.”
So don’t do that, OK? Just take your Great Lakes Variety Pack and sit over by the picnic tables until it’s your turn.
“I like it so far; I think I’d really like it with a little more practice,” said Carley Lenz of the North Hills as she worked a Bud Light and a hatchet at Lumberj Axes. “I mean, after a bad day, you know, ‘Let’s go throw some axes.’”
I think Carley drove us hard toward the essence of ax throwing right there.
“When you’re thinking, ‘what can I do for stress relief, this is a great place to do that,” said Shandra Peelman of Millvale, who still does her ax throwing in Jeannette because that’s where she started. “It’s a little bit of an escape as well because you really have to clear your head while you doing it. You really have to focus. We really have fun and it’s very much a family thing here. A bunch of us went to the championships up in Canada. We’re building a community of people around this.”
Ax throwers are filling up Lumberj Axes on Friday and Saturday nights, cheering and competing and trading in boxed wine and craft brews. Companies can book it for team-building events and such, although I noticed that that branch of ax throwers was a little more reticent, as if they were wondering what their moms would say about them being out drinking and throwing axes in the middle of the week.
One such company didn’t even want to be identified for this column.
So sure, fine. (Rhymes with Snoogle).