United States | Bar games

Skee-ball wizards

A kids’ game thrills adults—and lawyers

|WILLIAMSBURG, BROOKLYN

“TRY leaning your leg against the machine,” says Alex Choi, one of the best rollers in Brooklyn’s Brewskee-ball league. “That’ll keep your body from moving too much.” It works: your correspondent’s new stance made her a slightly better skee-baller.

Eric Pavony, a co-founder of the league and its “skee-EO”, says there is no wrong way to stand. Some people stand with two feet apart. Some put one leg forward. Others totter: skee-ball is often played in bars. “We don’t have skee-ball injuries. There is no skee-ball elbow, but some people do get shin bruises from leaning too hard on the skee-ball machines,” says Mr Pavony.

It began as a children’s game, more than a century ago in Philadelphia. It grew popular on the boardwalk arcades along New Jersey’s shore. The machine is a ramp with walls on both sides. The player rolls a ball up the ramp, aiming for holes which are each worth a different number of points. Mr Pavony, who loved skee-ball as a child, decided to make it an adult sport. He added ten frames, as in bowling, and created the Brewskee-ball league in 2005. Pete Marinucci, who heads the Brooklyn arm of the league, chuckles: “We asked: what would happen if we took a children’s game and took it seriously?”

The league quickly grew, accumulating about 600 loyal players in Brooklyn, Austin, San Francisco and Wilmington, North Carolina. Hundreds more play in copycat leagues all over the country. High rollers qualify for the annual National Championships. The league has its fair share of hipsters, but they somehow restrain themselves from playing it ironically.

The national home is the Full Circle Bar in Williamsburg, in Brooklyn, where league games take place three nights a week. At the back of the pub are three skee-ball machines. Spectators sit on raised seating to watch and cheer. A “wall of fame” celebrates top-notch players with names like “Skeeopatra”, “Brewbacca” and “Skeebron James”. “Snakes on a Lane” is a star. The league runs on puns. It has three seasons, or skeesons, a year; each lasts about three months from kick-off to championship final.

Alas, no American enterprise is complete without a lawsuit. In 2011 Skee-ball Inc (SBI), the Pennsylvania-based maker of the skee-ball machine, sued the league for infringing its century-old trademark. The Brewskee-ball League insisted that it had made an oral agreement with the head of SBI in 2005. It eventually filed suit, too, claiming “skee-ball” is a generic term. “There is no other way to call skee-ball without using skee-ball,” says Mr Pavony.

Daniel Gervais, an intellectual property professor at the Vanderbilt Law School, thinks the league has a good argument. If consumers continually confuse a brand and a product, it could mean that a trademark has lost its uniqueness. The same thing happened to aspirin, the escalator and the yo-yo. Richard Idell, SBI’s lawyer, disagrees. “Skee-ball is not a generic term. It is not going to hold up in court. The machines are called ‘alley-rollers’.”

The case has been expensive for both parties. SBI is a small family business. The league has turned to crowdsourcing to help pay its legal bills. After three years of failed talks, the two sides are said to be very close to a settlement. That would make financial sense for both sides: SBI hardly wants to alienate such good customers. Mr Pavony is hoping for the elusive tenth ball. That’s when a ball rolls back down the ramp, giving the player a second chance to score.

This article appeared in the United States section of the print edition under the headline "Skee-ball wizards"

America’s lost oomph

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