Pinball’s ‘king’ sees more than flashing lights

When you suggest to Keith Elwin that he might be a bit nerdish for having spent a good part of his 36 years playing pinball, he is quick to point out that he has interests other than flipping a little metal ball around. He mountain-bikes, swims, rock-climbs and takes photographs.

It’s just that, well, he’s always liked playing pinball, and has become very good at it. In fact, Elwin, a graphic designer in his real life, is the No. 1 pinball professional in the world. And he’s won just under $100,000 while achieving the title. You might say he’s to pinball what Kobe Bryant is to the Lakers, although shorter and not as rich.

I haven’t thought about pinball machines in a good many years, if I thought about them at all. When the subject came up recently, I was surprised that they still existed in the age of electronic gadgetry. I remember them being in coffee shops and arcades played by loners in corduroys with loopy smiles who spoke in complete sentences and received good grades in school. Real losers. They weren’t like us, no sir, not at all.

There may be a certain touch of jealousy in my tone because whenever I played, I tilted the machine and ended up with no points. Instead I hung out with Lefty Lyons in a pool hall above a bar in East Oakland where real guys learned to smoke, drink beer and shoot a little snooker. I wasn’t any good at that either, so I eventually gave up any activity that required physical coordination.

I heard about Elwin through a publicist representing the International Flipper Pinball Assn. who was touting a world pinball championship last month in Las Vegas and suggested I might attend. Watching a pinball game holds the same attraction for me as being in the audience of a yo-yo tournament, so I declined.

But then I decided that you might be getting weary of reading about war and the endless presidential campaign, so I ask today, are you ready for a little pinball?

Elwin has not only made money and a name out of it but is also designing a DVD called “Pinball 101” that teaches the physics of the game. You don’t get that in the NFL.

A bachelor, he lives on the beach in Carlsbad, in San Diego County, in a house also occupied by 15 pinball machines; older ones like Flash Gordon and Skateball and newer ones like Safe Cracker and Dracula. There are hundreds of others that have come along since a man named Montague Redgrave created the game in 1871.

Elwin traces the origin of the modern games to 1947 when they put flippers on them to give the balls a boost.

An older brother introduced him to pinballing as a kid and he began revealing not only a natural skill at the game but an entrepreneurial spirit by selling the free games he had won. His parents, both teachers, thought of pinball as a waste of time but that didn’t stop him.

“It’s the physics of the game that challenged me,” he said in a telephone conversation. “You have to learn angles and shots and the spin on the balls. It’s more intellectual than most activities.” But the lure of that little 2.6-ounce silver ball zipping around the board ringing bells and lighting lights probably had something to do with it too.

He turned pro in 1994, won the second tournament he played in and walked away with his first pinball machine as a prize. Since then, he’s played in about five tournaments a year and has won most of them, all without performance enhancing drugs, but with a lot of beer. It was the IFPA that declared him the King of Pinball based on accumulated points.

He wins money too, but wouldn’t cite an exact figure. When asked if it were as much as $100,000, he said, “Not quite.”

Unlike some pinball addicts who enter a competition every month, Elwin is cutting back on tournament play. I suspect that like a lot of champions who hang up their mitts or their pads, he’s getting ready to hang up his flippers.

Ten or 12 hours of pinball playing with breaks only for essentials can get to be a little old after a while. So he spends more time on those outdoor activities I mentioned and dating good-looking women.

I’m happy to see that pinball is alive even though it might not be the world’s most exciting spectator sport.

Electronic games have ramped-up the speed of fun, reflecting the high-tech pace of a world that can land a missile on another continent in minutes. We need pinball games to slow down and ease up.

So nice going, champ. Keep those balls rolling. Or whatever.

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almtz13@aol.com