Pinball Wizards

by Adam Ruben

After college, Sharpe moved to New York City. “Lo and behold, there’s no pinball,” he says. “I go from feast to famine.” He eventually found where all of the pinball machines were hiding, because hiding is exactly what they were doing: pinball was illegal in the city, so the only places to play were inside, for example, peep shows.

  Sharpe is not a peep show qua peep show kind of guy. He’s the sort of person who probably legitimately read Playboy for the articles—and attended peep shows for the pinball. Yet he found himself stopping by houses of—let’s not say ill repute but mixed repute—three times a day.

  The problem with having an illegal hobby is that your obsession (sorry, compulsion) can be withdrawn at any time, and you have no recourse. One day Sharpe walked into his usual source of games and gams only to find the pinball machines disabled. “They came in and busted us,” the owner told him.

  I find all of this odd. Not just because pinball is, you know, pinball, a challenging but ultimately frivolous game. But also because it’s hard to reconcile the idea of something being illegal—and enforcedly so—yet standing so gigantic and prominent and unmissable. You know what I mean? You can sneak candy bars into movies because you can slip them in your coat pocket. But if the verboten snack was, say, a washing machine, how could anyone commit such an obvious violation for any length of time without getting busted?

  Yet that was the situation in New York City and, indeed, in much of the country. Pinball had, in 1976, been illegal in the city for thirty-five years; games of luck counted as illegal gambling, and games of skill were exempt. Pinball combines both, hence widespread confusion and disagreement.

  The November 20, 1965, issue of Billboard gives a good sample of the landscape of pinball-related hostilities across America at that time: In Kentucky, Governor Edward T. Breathitt clashed with pinball operators he claimed were running de facto gambling operations. In Alaska, the Third District Superior Court disagreed with the Fourth District Superior Court about pinball. In Snohomish County, Washington, a judge ordered five games pulled from a bowling alley, but downstate in Clark County, an attorney deemed a pinball machine no more a gambling device “than a deck of cards that is used for a game of fun.”

  “I’ve always viewed my relationship with pinball as being totally and completely different than anybody else’s,” says Sharpe. “I don’t want this to come off as being vain or egotistical, because it’s not meant to be, but there is no one else that has had the life of pinball that I have had.”

  He’s right for two reasons. First, every aficionado has a distinct relationship with pinball that no one else can replicate, whether it conjures fond memories of a beach arcade or a Fonzie wannabe at a college bar.1 But second, unlike everyone else, Roger Sharpe can boast that without his influence, pinball might still be outlawed.

  In 1975, Sharpe volunteered to write an article on pinball for the winter 1975 issue of GQ, both as a means of sharing his passion with a wider audience, and as an excuse to perform the necessary research to figure out how to buy a pinball machine for his own apartment. Only that research turned out to be more difficult than he’d imagined, as he soon discovered when a trip to the New York Public Library to research pinball uncovered a 1972 Playboy article about pinball2—and no other information.

  For a writer, it was both a good problem and a bad problem to have. It meant that Sharpe would have to do a lot of research from scratch, but it also meant that the amount of from-scratch research might overflow a GQ article, and, thus, he should write a book.

  That book became the colorful 1977 volume Pinball!, whose simple title and exclamation point accurately encompass its comprehensiveness and loving enthusiasm. “I’m standing in the center of Paris, City of Light, scene of a thousand separate pleasures,” Sharpe gushes in the first chapter, “and all I want to do is duck into a dark bar, cozy up to a Spirit of ’76 and whip it into a frenzy of flashing lights, ringing bells, and rapidly whirling scoring drums.”

  Sharpe was nothing if not committed. “Playing pinball is like making love,” he wrote. “It demands the complete concentration and total emotional involvement of the player.” It’s a description that may make some pinball players nod in understanding, but it might also make his sons, Josh and Zach—who I watched earn second and third place at PAPA17—say, “Eww, Dad.”

  So in May of 1976, Sharpe was a semipublic figure with a couple of pinball articles under his belt, a book in progress, industry contacts but no industry affiliation, and an exhaustive knowledge of the past forty years of pinball. All of these qualifications, plus his abilities as a player—to this day, he’s still ranked in or near the top one thousand players worldwide—made Sharpe a perfect choice to represent a hobby in dire need of a champion.3

  I had always pictured the relegalization of pinball as a formality. The outlawing of the game may have been prudent in the days of Bonnie and Clyde, but these were modern times, the mid-’70s, and surely all thoughtful New Yorkers could agree that the pop bumper and the playfield multiplier posed no real threat. In fact, I had always thought of it as one of those “wacky law factoids,” the kind you read about on a website of weird but real laws: “In New York City, it is illegal to play pinball! In Billings, Montana, it is illegal to raise pet rats!”4

  Yet when Sharpe showed up to testify as the star witness for the Music and Amusement Association, he found the New York City Council just as surly and suspicious as they must have been a generation previous. “The first question asked of me after I was sworn in was, ‘We understand you’re doing a book. So who’s paying for that?’” he says, mimicking a skeptical councilman. “I mean, this anger.”

  Sharpe respectfully answered their questions, but testifying in the verbal sense is the less significant part of what Sharpe had come to the City Council meeting to do. He was there as a pinball advocate, but he was also there to do something in front of the council curmudgeons that would prove, once and for all, that pinball was a game of skill.

  Sharpe was going to play pinball.

  Positioned prominently by the door sat El Dorado (1975), a cowboy-themed pinball machine Sharpe knew well. He had planned to walk the council through the various ways a player could truly control the game—catching the ball, knocking down specific drop targets, aiming at the rollover that changed which drop target was lit and therefore worth more. However, since this was an important moment for the pinball industry, manufacturer D. Gottlieb and Company had supplied not one machine but two. The second, Bank Shot (1976), hid in a corner in case El Dorado suffered a last-minute mechanical failure.

  In the fall of 2015, a much older Roger Sharpe, sitting on the floor of an unused hotel conference room outside Chicago, tells me the story of the shot heard round the pinball world. He’s still every bit as passionate about pinball as he was forty years ago, and as is evidenced by his willingness to sit for an hour on a dirty hotel carpet at midnight, he’s retained some of his old stamina.

  Sharpe wears a turtleneck under a collared flannel shirt—Chicago casual, let’s call it—and his thick mustache and sideburns are just as prominent as, though a few shades lighter than, they were during the Ford administration. He’s now not only a father but also a grandfather, to Josh’s children, and I can tell he’s at the point where he’s been asked more than once to tell this story. He’s one of pinball’s biggest celebrities, if such creatures can be said to exist; a 2014 Wired article called him “somewhere between the Michael Jordan and Santa Claus of pinball.”

  “The cameras are all set up around the game, because everybody knows that this person who’s testifying is going to play to show that pinball’s a game of skill,” Sharpe says. He took two steps toward El Dorado, and then a mistrustful councilman shouted, “Not that game! That game.” He wanted Sharpe to play Bank Shot, the backup game, because he assumed El Dorado had been rigged.

  It was meant to be a gotcha moment. What the councilman didn’t realize, Sharpe explains, was that “Bank Shot lent itself much more to the information that I
wanted to provide in terms of geometry, objectives, and game rules. The science of really laying out a pinball playfield. As opposed to El Dorado, which is a spell-out game.”

  Looking at the El Dorado playfield, one can see that its designer, Ed Krynski, basically bet the ranch on drop targets. The game has no fewer than fifteen drop targets, those little plastic rectangles that poke out of the playfield like teeth and retract when hit, which is practically a record for one machine. (Practically, but not quite—the 1971 game 2001 holds the record with an amazing tally of twenty drop targets.) So on El Dorado, the bulk of Sharpe’s game would have been a demonstration of how to shoot at, and knock down, drop targets.

  The number of drop targets in Bank Shot? Zero. What the billiards-themed game—also, incidentally, designed by Krynski—did have, however, were five parallel lanes at the top of the playfield, numbered one through five. And after a player launched the ball with the spring-loaded plunger, it had to roll through one of the lanes on its way to the rest of the playfield. Remember those lanes. They will become very important.

  Sharpe casually narrated his strategy as he played, describing the game’s objective and showing off his ability to hit whichever stand-up target he aimed for. (Unlike a drop target, which drops after it’s hit, a stand-up target stays standing up. Some pinball jargon is self-explanatory.)

  Then the time came to launch his third and final ball. Before pulling the plunger, Sharpe remembered games he’d played in a bowling alley in Skokie, Illinois—games with no plunger that could be pulled back. Instead, the games in the bowling alley had automatic plungers—you’d press a button, and the game would launch the ball onto the playfield for you. Many modern games have those, and most players don’t think much of them one way or another. But in Skokie, at least to Sharpe, automatic plungers were damned annoying. With scarcely sufficient power to launch the ball onto the playfield, automatic plungers stole one more bit of player-controlled finesse from the game and replaced it with blind chance. Sharpe calls it “pseudopinball.”

  Ironically, the reason the bowling alley’s games in Skokie only had automatic plungers was their mandatory compliance with local gambling laws, specifically the ones that somehow identified the plunger as the element of chance. Maybe it looked too much like the arm on a slot machine. Regardless, Sharpe thought about those Skokie machines, crippled by a nonsensical and unnecessary law, and he made a decision.

  “See these lines?” he asked the council, indicating the tiny tick marks painted around the plunger spring. “These are gradient lines, and there’s skill even to the plunger.” The gradient lines, like lines on a ruler, help a player pull the plunger back to the same spot each time, giving the ball a more repeatable amount of momentum. Sharpe knew that if Skokie, Illinois, and other towns restricted to automatic plungers were ever going to lose their restrictive laws, he would have to show not just that he could make shots from the flippers but also that every part of a pinball machine could be manipulated with skill.

  In the grand scheme of a pinball game, pulling the plunger is a minor task. In a single game, a player may press the flipper buttons hundreds of times each but only plunge three times. If pinball were basketball, flipping would be like dribbling and shooting combined, and plunging would be the tip-off. The tip-off is important, and it takes skill, but one probably shouldn’t spend a majority of basketball practice on winning the tip-off.

  Because it’s practiced less, and because a spring of unknown springiness gives a player much less time to acclimate to its quirks than a flipper of unknown flippy-ness, calling your shot from a plunge—declaring that the launched ball will roll through lane one, and not lanes two through five—is hardly guaranteed. But if Sharpe could pull it off, he would drive home his point that even the chanciest components of the machine could be mastered.

  “I tend to speak, 90 percent of the time, before I really think about what I’m saying,” Sharpe laughs. “Center lane happened to be lit.”

  Like Babe Ruth had done in game three of the 1932 World Series, Sharpe called his shot.

  The story of what happened next is one that fans of pinball know and know well, almost to the point of cliché. Any Buzzfeed-style listicle about interesting tales in the history of pinball is practically legally required to include this anecdote. It was even depicted in an episode of Comedy Central’s Drunk History, in which a mullet-wigged actor with a massive black handlebar mustache (not too dissimilar from Sharpe’s in 1976) reenacts the event as described by drunk comedians.5

  Carefully he drew back the plunger, feeling the tension of the spring and gauging, to the best of his ability, what might happen when he released it. Sharpe let go. The ball zipped onto the playfield, bounced briefly on a rubber rebound bumper—then fell cleanly through the center lane, exactly where he said it would.

  In interviews, Sharpe has credited luck. He’s entertained the influence of divine intervention, presumably by either a pinball-loving God or a God who left the celestial electromagnet on. These should be taken as signs not of Sharpe’s fortunate bumbling but of his general humility. “Obviously I had some notion as to how far back to pull that plunger,” he confides, now too far removed from the event to keep shrugging and saying, “Got lucky, I guess!” And besides, he admits, if the ball fell just right or left of center, he could have bumped the machine around a bit and argued that, with his influence, it at least came close.

  “I knew that I could get it somewhere in the middle, absolutely,” he says. “Did I think it could be dead middle, without a touch? No.”

  Lest anyone forget, Sharpe’s plunge has been immortalized in an oil painting titled He Called the Shot, prints of which are sometimes auctioned off at pinball fundraisers. I love the sheer obscurity of the reference: imagine mounting that painting above your mantle, subtly edging houseguests over toward it for years until one finally says, “Wait—is that . . .”

  The moment the ball passed through the center lane, Sharpe says, the gruff councilman interrupted. “That’s it,” he muttered. “We’ve seen enough.”

  And with that, by a six-to-zero vote, pinball became legal once more in New York City on June 1, 1976. Sharpe, and everyone else, could once again play their favorite game in public. It was, appropriately, the same strategy that had zinged Jacob Mirowsky, the Bronx-based proprietor hauled into court in 1935 whose experts failed to outperform their counterparts at bagatelle—but when Sharpe did it, it worked.

  Sharpe’s game of Bank Shot did not instantly legalize pinball around the country. American anti-pinball laws were so hodgepodge that relegalization in each municipality was its own separate project, which is why so many articles on the subject are content to say that after Sharpe convinced the New York City Council, “the rest of the country followed suit.” In fact, when Sharpe dazzled the council room in New York, pinball had already been legal in Los Angeles for almost two years. But Sharpe’s episode was so dramatic, such a triumph of sense over stodginess, that it has become the moment renowned as a turning point in pinball history.

  Many write-ups of the event oversimplify Sharpe’s contribution, making it sound like he haplessly yanked the plunger on Bank Shot, crossed his fingers, and hey presto, pinball became decriminalized as arbitrarily as it had been outlawed. Nothing could be further from the truth. His plunge was a deliberate act of showmanship, an over-the-top(-of-the-playfield) demonstration in response to the reluctance he perceived in the council. And, lucky for all of us, it worked.

  What did Sharpe do after he changed the world? Right there in the council chamber, with everyone walking away and his hands still on the flipper buttons of Bank Shot, he kept playing. After all, it was ball three, and he was having a pretty good game.

  Josh and Zach Sharpe grew up in a house saturated in pinball. “There’s never been a point in my life where pinball wasn’t around,” Zach wrote to me. In 1998, at PAPA6, Zach won the Juniors Division, which led to a father-son television appearance on the Nickelodeon gameshow Figure It Out, wher
e they were billed as “past and present pinball wizards.”

  To the Sharpe brothers, pinball not only was an interesting hobby but also gave them an opportunity to spend time with their dad. It reminds me of my dad’s attempt to interest me in his own hobby, the card game bridge. He’d been playing since high school, traveling to tournaments and reading a monthly magazine called The Bridge World. My first paying job, at age ten, was as a bridge caddy at one of those tournaments, moving cards between tables, collecting score tickets, refilling water pitchers, and probably violating child labor laws. Sometimes I wonder if he hoped his son would one day adopt his passion, and we’d play bridge as partners. Or maybe that was not his hope but his fear, and bridge was a way to spend a night away from the kids. Regardless, bridge never interested me the way pinball snared Josh and Zach.

  Today Zach is a senior producer at a creative and marketing agency, and Josh is chief financial officer of an arcade game manufacturer. They also run the International Flipper Pinball Association (IFPA), the umbrella organization that oversees worldwide player rankings, sanctions leagues, and runs competitions. During the decade with Josh as president and Zach as vice president, the number of IFPA-endorsed tournaments around the world has exploded from fifty in 2006 to more than twenty-five hundred, and the number of registered competitive pinball players has grown from five hundred to over forty thousand. Both are usually ranked among the top players worldwide; at the time of this writing, Josh is fifteenth and Zach is second. Forty years later, Sharpe’s plunge has achieved mythical status. His sons own T-shirts reading “MY DAD SAVED PINBALL,” and when they wear them to pinball events, everyone knows what that means.

  “To help insure that pinball will hold its place in history,” Roger Sharpe wrote nearly forty years ago in Pinball!, “I have proposed that pinball leagues be established, similar in style to bowling leagues.” It’s a seminal bit of text buried at the end of his seminal book, and it goes even further: “We already have pinball tournaments, but why stop there? A Pinball Olympiad is the next logical step toward determining just which of the millions of players is really the World Pinball Champion.”