My Rushmore: Games I Played As a Kid*

“My Rushmore” posts feature my musings about the four greatest [fill in the blank]. Of course, the actual Mount Rushmore in South Dakota is a monument to four historically significant American presidents – George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Teddy Roosevelt.  This isn’t about them.  Today, I write in memory of the four greatest games I played (inside my house) as a kid.

THE AUTHOR

I was a city kid. I grew up on the North Side of Chicago in a brick bungalow – a crowded brick bungalow. I was the youngest of nine, and by the time I came along my parents had pretty much had enough of the whole parenting thing. If I made it home for dinner and was in my bedroom about the time my parents were settling in with their late-night snack to watch Johnny Carson, all was good. I pretty much did what I wanted to do. Because I wasn’t all that interested in getting into serious trouble, that arrangement worked out well for everyone.

My days outside the house were filled with the normal city kid stuff – school, playing sports, throwing snowballs at cars, riding bikes, playing sports, climbing roofs, collecting beer cans, playing sports, raiding back porches of apartment buildings for bottles to turn in for nickels, and … playing more sports.

But like most kids, when weather or darkness forced me and my friends inside, we played games – either together, with siblings, or alone. Sure, I played Monopoly, Clue, the Game of Life, and Risk – but all four games on My Rushmore are, not surprisingly, games involving sports, and games that could be played alone, if need be.

Let’s get to it.

No. 4: Strat-o-Matic Baseball

Strat-O-Matic Baseball – or just Strat-O – is a table-top board game. A math student at Bucknell University named Hal Richman started Strat-O in 1961. He went on to release football, basketball, and hockey games, too. But Strat-O Baseball was my thing when I had time to kill from maybe sixth through ninth grades. My interest waned in playing Strat-O, I suppose, at about the time I got a driver’s license. I was the only Strat-O devotee among my circle of friends, but I take comfort in knowing there were enough of us that Strat-O has survived to this day, has its own Wikipedia page, and that its founder was inducted into the Jewish Sports Hall of Fame.

Strat-O is a dice and card based simulation game. I’ve never played the game Dungeons and Dragons, but I feel like Strat-O might have been something like D&D for baseball nerds. Basically, every major league baseball player’s statistical performance is represented on a game card. Rolling two dice and referencing a pitcher and hitter’s card yields a result for every at-bat. The makers of the game were “intent [on] replicating athletes’ abilities as accurately as possible, giving the gamer the feel of making managerial decisions.”

I spent hundreds of hours playing Strat-O at my desk, hand-scoring every game, and compiling neatly organized composite statistical summaries. Weird, I know. My mother must have wondered why I was constantly clamoring for more college-lined loose leaf paper and pencils. When I played Strat-O, I managed both teams, and the dice and cards yielded the results of each at-bat and, ultimately, the games. I would set up All-Star teams from each league, made up of my favorite players. But there was no way of rigging the game so that your favorite player always hit the clutch homer – it was all about statistical probabilities and rolls of the dice. I suppose by managing one team less aggressively or less wisely than the other, I could tilt the probabilities of one team winning – but I was most interested in letting things play out, and then compiling the statistics.

Today’s video-game addled  youth would find Strat-O to be boring, I’m sure. But video game systems that allowed you to simulate major league baseball games just weren’t a thing in the late 1970s, for better or worse. Playing Strat-O honed my math skills, sharpened my knowledge of baseball strategy, and kept me off the streets. It is well-deserving of its place on My Rushmore.

No. 3: Coleco Electronic Quarterback

Coleco Electronic Quarterback was a handheld electronic football game, released about a year after the first generation of the groundbreaking Mattel Classic Football. The games were very similar, using “simple mechanisms to interact with players, often limited to illuminated buttons and sound effects.” The “players” were represented by glowing, reddish LED blips on a dark screen, brought to life by the magic of a 9-volt battery. The object of the game was to press buttons to move a ball carrier (a brighter blip) down a field, avoiding “tacklers” (represented by less bright blip). The screen had three lanes running the length of the field, and each press of the button advanced the ball carrier a yard. This was high-tech stuff, let me tell you.

Unless you are 50-something or older, if you got your hands on one of these games and played for a few minutes you’d probably say, “you spent hours playing this?” Without a hint of shame, the answer is, “Yes. Yes we did.”  In defense of my generation, remember this: we did not grow up in an age of seemingly endless in-home entertainment options. There was no YouTube or Facebook or Twitter or TikTok.  Heck, ESPN – the first 24-hour sports network – did not debut until 1979. Even in a metropolis like Chicago, our televisions received about eight English-language channels – if you had the best antenna available. There was no cable TV, no Netflix, no HBO – nothing. We were starved for diversion, and mostly we got outside and figured out ways to entertain ourselves. But for those long car rides, rainy days, and late nights as we drifted off to sleep, Electronic Quarterback and handheld games of its generation filled the void and cracked the door open for what was to come.

I have no idea why I scored the Coleco version of this game rather than the Mattel version, above, but it was a source of some pride because the Coleco version was the first to have a feature that allowed the offense to pass. In retrospect, this game (and its Mattel cousin) was pretty mindless and boring. But it deserves its place on this list because it occupied lots of my time, and it was a sort of gateway device – a precursor to the mind-blowing, realistic video games of today. For those of you who love Madden, MLB The Show, EA Sports’ NHL and NBA games, and even Call of Duty and Fortnite, remember to honor your elders and go easy on us when we clumsily try to master the modern video game and the seemingly endless array of buttons, triggers, and joysticks on its controller. We grew up when dodging little LED blips on a dark screen was cool – and all we needed to operate the game was a 9-volt battery and our thumbs.

No. 2: Tecmo Bowl

Those of you who are super observant may have noticed that the title of this article ended with an asterisk – intended to be a qualifier on the word “kid.” The reason for that qualifier: Tecmo Bowl.

Here comes a confession. Around 1989, during my last year in law school, I visited a mall outside of Boston with my then-girlfriend, soon-to-be fiancée, and future wife. I have a very vague recollection that we casually looked at engagement rings, but I have an absolutely clear recollection that we came home with a Nintendo Entertainment System like the one pictured below. (Recollection confirmed with said wife, by the way.)

I must have had a few bucks saved up from nice summer gigs, and decided to splurge. We set up the NES at her apartment because she had a 19- or 21-inch color Panasonic TV (far superior to my 10-year-old, 12-inch, black-and-white Sanyo). We were both in grad school and did not have a ton of spare time for mindless endeavors, but we had enough to spend some of it playing Super Mario Brothers in her roach-infested, rent-controlled apartment.

Super Mario Bros. was the cartridge that came with the system, and probably the only one I owned for quite some time. After graduating in 1990, I moved back to Chicago and the NES came with me. At some point, I had purchased Tecmo Bowl, a football game for the NES. As described on its Wikipedia page:

[Tecmo Bowl] is an American football video game developed and released by Tecmo. Originally released as an arcade game in 1987, … a [cartridge] for the Nintendo Entertainment System was released in 1989 and was the first console game to include real NFL players, via a license from the NFLPA … The NES version of the game was extremely popular, spawning various sequels, starting with 1991’s Tecmo Super Bowl. The NES game has also been cited by various media outlets as one of the best sports video games ever made. 

Wikipedia

One of my friends from college who was a couple years older than me had worked and saved enough that he bought a townhouse in Chicago’s Lincoln Park neighborhood. It became something of a home for wayward members of my college crew, and a hangout for many of us – wayward or not. Among other things, we played Tecmo Bowl. Lots and lots of Tecmo Bowl. The original Tecmo Bowl featured 12 NFL teams, and whether you beat your opponent had something to do with your skill, and something to do with the team you drew.

Hence, the asterisk. I’m not sure I was a “kid” anymore at 25 years old; but during those sessions in that dark, cramped townhouse in Lincoln Park we acted a lot more like kids than grown-ups. I suppose I could have been spending time doing things that were more enriching, socially productive, or both.  But as it turned out, there would be plenty of time for that later in life. We hung out, drank beer, played cards, and played Tecmo Bowl. Don’t judge.

In researching this piece, I was blown away by the treasure trove of information available on the internet about Tecmo Bowl. In addition to the Wikipedia page, I found not one, but many detailed rankings of the NFL teams included in Tecmo Bowl, and of the NFL players who were the highest-rated, best players within that game.

Bring me any ranking of Tecmo Bowl players from now until the end of time, and I’ll tell you which player had better be at the top of the list – Bo Jackson of the Oakland Raiders. In 1989, when the NES version of Tecmo Bowl was first released, Vincent Edward “Bo” Jackson was at the height of his powers. The 1985 Heisman Trophy winner from Auburn, Jackson was clearly the greatest two-sport professional athlete of my lifetime. His career in football ended and his career in baseball was derailed by a serious hip injury he suffered during a football game in 1991.

Jackson’s greatness had three primary components. He was big. He was powerful. And he was fast. Very, very fast. Jackson had been selected in the second round of the MLB draft out of high school by the Yankees, but made good on a promise to his mother to attend college and accepted a football scholarship at Auburn. He played running back for the Tigers in the Fall, and baseball in the Spring. After winning the Heisman Trophy and (reportedly) running the 40-yard dash in 4.13 for NFL scouts (at 227 pounds!), he was the first overall pick in the 1986 NFL draft by the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.

But Jackson would never play for the Buccaneers, and he told them as much before they drafted him. As the presumptive first pick, the Bucs had flown Jackson on a private jet to Tampa to tour their facilities. That turned out to be against some idiotic NCAA rule, and in all its draconian glory the organization stripped Jackson of his eligibility to play baseball at Auburn during his senior year. Jackson thought the Bucs had intentionally compromised his baseball eligibility to force him to play football, and told the Bucs that selecting him would be a wasted draft pick. On April 29, the Bucs ignored Bo’s warning and drafted Jackson with the first overall pick.

About six weeks later – on June 2 – the defending World Series champion Kansas City Royals took a gamble and drafted Jackson in the 4th Round of the MLB amateur draft (the Yankees’ right to sign Jackson had expired). Again, Jackson kept his word and did not sign with the Bucs. He signed with the Royals, played 53 games at AA Memphis, and was called up to the Show in September. He played five seasons with the Royals, three with the White Sox, and one with the Angels – resuming his baseball career with a new hip after his football career ended.

Even though his baseball career was by then in full flight, the Raiders selected Jackson in the 7th Round of the 1987 NFL draft – the Bucs’ right to sign him having expired. Bo signed with the Raiders, who agreed to allow him to play both baseball and football. They figured having part-time Bo was better than no Bo. Given baseball commitments and injury, Jackson never played more than 11 games in an NFL season.

In 1989 – the season Tecmo Bowl was released for the NES – Jackson rushed for 950 yards and a 5.5 yards per carry average in 11 games. And he hit 32 homers, drove in 105 runs, and stole 26 bases for the Royals. For good measure, he was the MVP of the 1989 MLB All-Star game.

Don’t get me wrong, there were plenty of dominant NFL players coded into Tecmo Bowl – Lawrence Taylor, Jerry Rice, Ronnie Lott, and Barry Sanders, to name a few. But anyone who cares to argue the case against Bo Jackson is simply going to lose that case. If you dare to try, first consider this YouTube video (yes – someone made a YouTube video!!) titled “Why Bo Jackson is So Unstoppable in Tecmo Super Bowl” or this article, “Remembering Bo Jackson’s ‘Tecmo Bowl’ Dominance.”

Bo Jackson was the greatest two-sport talent of my lifetime, and his injury was tragic. Folks can argue my “greatest two-sport talent” declaration – there have been other athletes who have played professionally with some success in two sports. But what cannot be argued is this declaration: as represented in Tecmo Bowl, Bo Jackson was the greatest video game athlete of all time.

1.         Super Toe

The top spot on My Rushmore of Games I Played As A Kid* goes to the glorious, plastic oaf pictured above:  Super Toe, or – as I affectionately called him – “Toe.”

Super Toe was an elegantly simple toy sold by Schaper Toys in the mid-1970s. The game came with just a few components: Super Toe himself, two plastic footballs that were squared off on either end so that they could stand without a kicking tee, and a set of plastic goal posts that were constructed in sections. The idea behind Super Toe was simple – you used him to kick plastic football field goals through the plastic goal posts.

“The score is tied and time is running out …” was the pitch on the commercials. Once you set up the goal posts, you picked a spot for your field goal try, lined up Super Toe, placed the ball in front of his plastic leg, and – this was the fantastic part – whacked Super Toe on the top of his helmet, sending his kicking leg forward to strike the ball, which sent it hurtling through the air toward the goal posts. The harder you banged on Toe’s helmet, the further the ball would go.

Super Toe’s range was maybe 12 feet (give or take), and obviously kicking the ball through a set of plastic goal posts became more difficult as you got further away. At first, successfully kicking relatively short field goals was a challenge – you had to get the hang of just how hard you could slam down on Super Toe’s head. But as you got better, finding space to try longer and longer field goals was the challenge.

Toe and I spent a lot of time together, and I got reasonably proficient sending those odd plastic footballs through the uprights. But my time with Toe nearly ended disastrously.

To understand why, you have to understand the layout of my childhood home on Sacramento Avenue in Chicago, pictured below.

Chicago bungalows are relatively narrow, maybe 20 feet wide on a standard 25-foot city lot. Our house was situated in the middle of a double lot, so it was a little wider than most – say 25 feet. Our house, like all bungalows, was much longer than it was wide. In the front of the house, you had the aptly named front room. As you proceeded toward the backyard and alley, along the left side of the house you had a dining room, bathroom, and kitchen. On the right side, you had my parents’ bedroom, a second bedroom, and a third bedroom. In our house, a narrow hallway connected the dining room and kitchen, with the second bedroom (mine, at the time) and the one bathroom on either side of that hallway.

At our dining room table, my father sat at the end nearest the front room, facing the back of the house. We ate at 5:30 p.m. every day, like clockwork. One night, I was called to dinner at exactly the same time I was about to attempt Toe’s longest field goal ever. I had figured out that I could squeeze a few extra feet of “field” out of my bedroom by placing the goal posts near the closet door, which was furthest from the door to the room. But my room wasn’t going to be enough to contain Toe’s booming leg, so I lined him up in the hallway to attempt an epic kick that would have to travel into and across the bedroom to reach the uprights.

There was one problem. Unless you whacked Toe on top of the helmet just right, he tended to kick the ball wildly. As luck would have it, on this occasion I whacked Toe on the head a few moments after my Dad had sat down at the dinner table. Toe kicked the ball a long way – but sideways.  The ball rocketed out of the hallway, flew the length of our dining room table, and landed in my Dad’s mashed potatoes.

To my surprise, he did not yell. He got up calmly carrying a plastic football covered in mashed potatoes, walked down the hallway, picked up Super Toe, and then walked both to the back of the house, down the back stairs, and to the alley. There, he dropped Super Toe and the ball in one of our two steel garbage cans. He never said a word to me as he returned to his seat at the table and finished dinner. I just sat and ate silently, not knowing if I’d ever see Toe again.

Later that night, I snuck out to the alley and retrieved Toe and the ball. I hid both in my closet for a time, and made sure never to attempt a field goal from the hallway during dinner (or any time my Dad was home) again. At some point, I moved my bedroom to the attic upstairs. A long, window-less carpeted room served as my new quarters, and Toe and I had a gloriously long, safe space in which to split the uprights.

I rescued him, just as he had rescued me from hours of boredom.

-30-

PHOTOS

Honorable Mention: Mattel’s Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots

Honorable Mention: Aurora’s Monday Night Football

Honorable Mention: Slot Hockey