At Tecmo Super Bowl Tournament, Hope Comes 8 Bits at a Time

The first half of the 88 competitors arrive shortly before 10 a.m. on the first Saturday in March. We're meeting at the Badger Bowl, an old bowling alley four miles outside of downtown Madison, Wisc. It's a brilliant sunny morning, snow piles block out several parking places and dry ice cakes the black pavement. On the frozen lakes surrounding Madison, people play ice hockey, ice fish, and ice skate in brilliantly colored parkas that stand in stark contrast to the bright white snow reflecting in the sunshine. But we've not come to spend any time outside, inside we've all got serious work -- it's time for the world's largest Tecmo Super Bowl tournament.

It's dim inside the bowling alley. Already, amazingly, every bowling lane is occupied, but I don't see anyone playing Tecmo Super Bowl. For a moment, I allow myself to consider, what if this was an elaborate prank? What if there is no tournament and I've traveled to Wisconsin for no reason at all. Nervously passing the packed bowling lanes, eventually I come to a large bar replete with a stage and dance floor. Later, in the evening, an Ozzy Osborne cover band will take the stage and rock out for middle-aged bowlers. But that's in the future. In the present there are eleven flickering televisions of varying sizes, from old school big screens to 20 inch TVs, all turned to the greatest sports video game of all time. I breathe easier. I'm not alone in my love affair for a video game that is almost 20 years old. Competitors are getting in some last minute game prep. My heart skips a beat, I'm nervous and I don't know a single person. It's time for the sixth annual Tecmo Super Bowl tournament and I'm one of the competitors.

A man in a Randall Cunningham jersey stretches in front of the empty bracket stretched across a full length table. Another competitor walks up beside me, "I wish that jersey said, 'QB Eagles,'" he says. "That would be awesome."

Immediately, I am at ease. I'm among Tecmo Super Bowl friends. The joke, for those who are not diehard fans of the game, is that Randall Cunningham refused to allow his name to be used for the game. So he's identified on the screen as QB Eagles. The joke has a high hit rate for American men aged 25-40 who grew up playing sports video games. Otherwise, it's likely to be greeted with awkward silence.

I check in at the table with Josh Holzbauer, one of the event organizers, pay my $15 entry fee -- the winner will collect $400 -- and survey my surroundings: the eight-bit Nintendo machines, the vintage video game graphics flashing upon the screen, the bedraggled controllers that have, at two decades of age, survived many a video game war, and lots of grown men preparing to play the game they played as children. Suddenly I remember the feeling of eighth grade crushes, geometry homework, the "Fresh Prince of Bel-Air," and midnight curfews ... what it felt like to stay up all night sitting front of a television screen with your best friends playing a video game over and over again.

Across the ocean in Paris, Marcel Proust remembered the past with madeleines, I remember the past with Tecmo Super Bowl.

"Find your stations," yells Josh Holzbauer.

It's finally time for the competition. But how, you might be wondering, did I end up here? Follow along on a journey into the heart of Tecmo Super Bowl.

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1. My pregnant wife and 2-year old son drop me off at the Nashville airport shortly before 7:30 Friday night. I will be away from them for two days to participate in a video game tournament for a game that was released in December of 1991.

In December, 1991, I was 12 years old.

My wife thinks this is odd. She also thought it was odd when she would see her husband play an old video game with his friends whenever they came back into town. Grown men, bent over old controllers, frantically pushing one of two buttons, a or b, with all of our might, as if the world's fate depended upon it.

Which, to be fair, it sometimes felt like it did.

But here's the thing about Tecmo Super Bowl, every man who played the game, is jealous of my trip to play against other grown men. Since December of 1991 when the game was released, it has been popular. Now, just shy of twenty years later, the game has one of the greatest cult followings in video game history.

But unlike when you were young and there were always friends to play with, now we're all grown. If you're like me you probably live in a house with a wife and at least one child. And even if you're not married and don't have children, you probably don't have the time to spend an entire day playing an old video game with your friends.

So in some way, my trip to Wisconsin is like a trip back in time.

2. To reach the Tecmo Super Bowl tournament, I'm flying something called Midwest Air.

Yeah, you've never heard of it either.

As part of my travel, I have either a layover or stopover in Milwaukee. I'm uncertain which it is because while my plane will be the same, I have to disembark and then reboard.

In the process of disembarking, I lose my ticket to reboard for the second leg to Madison. So I have to get a new ticket from the desk clerk.

Five minutes later after I'm reticketed, we reboard.

Only there's one problem -- I've managed to lose my new ticket.

"I just gave you that ticket five minutes ago," an exasperated desk clerk says.

"I know," I say. "I apologize for my incompetence."

I've always had an ability to lose boarding passes. Last year, I opened a book I'd been reading four years ago, "The Ballad of the Whiskey Robber," and found my boarding pass for a Southwest flight to Albuquerque, NM.

I'd lost the ticket four years prior.

"You really lost it?" the desk clerk asks. "How is that possible?"

"I'm really not sure," I say, "but it's gone."

"What are you doing in Madison?" she asks. I believe she asks this question to relieve the tension between us. Either that or her question was a ploy designed to elicit whether or not I posed a threat to the other travelers.

"I'm going to a video game tournament," I say.

"Just go," she says.

3. Near midnight, I arrive in Madison, Wisc.

On the way to my hotel, booked less than a mile from the Badger Bowl, traffic stalls in front of a train crossing. Several Midwesterners, noting that no train is coming for a long time, hop out of their cars and take it upon themselves to lift the guardrails and wave cars through.

I've never seen this happen before.

Which brings me to my big observation about life in the South as compared to life in the Midwest. In the South, the people are friendlier, but less organized. If you ask a Southern person how to get somewhere, we'll talk to you for 15 minutes, but inevitably our directions will be incorrect because there is no real purpose to any of our roads. The cities have grown too rapidly for us to really have any idea about directions, and we never have any idea what the actual names of roads are anyway. Probably because the road names change so frequently. Plus, we don't really use the compass directions east, west, north and south. But we're friendly, so we'll pretend we know the directions to where you want to go.

In the Midwest, directions are infallible. The road signs are readily apparent, the roads don't change names, if you have directions you never get lost. I think this has something to do with the cold. There's a belief that you might die if you get lost in the Midwest.

And they don't want you to have to stop.

Getting lost is an insult.

4. Gameday arrives and I face the first dilemma of the competition: How do you get loose for a video game competition?

You can't stretch, right?

This really threw me for a loop. I was antsy and ready to play, but I didn't feel like there was anything I could do to channel the nervous energy.

Ultimately, I don't do anything.

5. My fellow competitors at the Badger Bowl appear, for the most part, to be between the ages of 24 and 36.

There are no girls.

Many players wear old jerseys honoring players who are featured in Tecmo Super Bowl. Ronnie Lott, Derrick Thomas, Brent Jones, Randall Cunningham, Joe Montana, Jerry Rice, and, interestingly, one Notre Dame jersey with the name J. Christ on the back.

Eleven states are represented: Maryland, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Illinois, Michigan, Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, Rhode Island, New York and Tennessee.

As the competition nears, one girl, Jamie Morrone, materializes at the bar with her boyfriend. Jamie is a blonde twenty-something already wearing a blue t-shirt commemorating the day's competition. (I'm also wearing my own matching blue t-shirt with Tecmo VI emblazoned on the shirt and the state of Wisconsin in the background).

Asked if Morrone finds her boyfriend's obsession with a 1991 video game strange, she shrugs her shoulders, "I'm just supportive, and he's buying all my drinks for me," she says.

6. This is the sixth Tecmo Super Bowl competition, and with 88 competitors divided into 22 groups of four for first-round play, the largest tournament yet.

While it's the sixth competition, it's only the fifth year. The first competition, featuring 20 players, was such a success, that the guys couldn't wait an entire year for the second. So they played two in the first year.

This year's theme is, "They threw to Jerry." As in Tecmo legend Jerry Rice. As such, the overall tourney bracket has been divided into four regions named after Tecmo quarterbacks: Joe Montana, Rich Gannon, Steve Young, and Chris Miller.

Chris Miller was the toughest connection to find. Ultimately the guys discovered that Miller threw a touchdown pass to Jerry Rice in the 1991-92 Pro Bowl.

7. One of the competitors in my group is Bryan Johnson, a 26-year-old Chicago White Sox video coordinator.

Johnson and I talk as we await the beginning of our competition. Johnson tightly clutches a piece of folded over white paper. He has run fifty season simulations on the game to come up with relative team values, ranked 1-28. He's averaged up the number of wins each team put together in fifty simulations, while also creating a column of each team's highest and lowest win total. He's averaged the performances and utilized those numbers to assign a power ranking to each Tecmo team.

Johnson is slightly embarrassed by the work, but only slightly. He also has a good sense of humor about his obsession. "I don't have a girlfriend," he says. "Shocking."

Johnson has driven up from Chicago for the competition. "I wouldn't do it for any other video game," he says.

I know exactly what he means.

8. There are many rules associated with the competition.

Lots of them are detailed and only hardcore players of the video game would know their significance. You can read those rules here.

But one rule that is incredibly important is this: you have to be prepared to play with any of the 28 teams on the game.

Hence Johnson's simulation and ranking of team strength.

Before each contest a coin is flipped, the winner of the coin flip selects the two teams, and then the loser of the coin flip gets first pick of the two teams.

It's a brilliant system to keep match-ups fair.

9. Before we start there is a dramatic reading from LT: Over the Edge Tackling Quarterbacks, Drugs and a World Beyond Football.

The author?

Tecmo Super Bowl God, Lawrence Taylor.

The excerpt is short, dealing with Taylor's rookie season, and the usual requirement that each rookie stand up during training camp and be humiliated by being forced to sing his team fight song, answer ridiculous questions, and so on.

Lawrence Taylor's performance was different. He stood up in front of the New York Giants: "I'm LT," Taylor said, "Don't f*** with me."

10. Our television, the group E location, is tucked away in the corner of the bar, not one of the big screens.

Two high bar stools sit in front of the television. A wall is directly to our left.

To begin the tournament we have all been divided into pools of four teams, World Cup style. Two players will advance from each foursome, after which time a 32-team single-elimination tournament will commence.

11. Each of the 10 televisions feature a Jerry Rice memorial coin. On one side is Jerry Rice's head, on the other side is a logo for the NFL Quarterback Club.

My first game is against Bryan Johnson, a guy who has run 50 simulations to value the teams.

We're both nervous. While I haven't run the simulations, I have done a Google search to find someone else's rankings based on simulations. I pull out my iPhone and survey the rankings after I win the toss.

I select two evenly matched teams: the Philadelphia Eagles and the Kansas City Chiefs.

Johnson has read my column and knows that the Chiefs are my team. Yet the Eagles are higher rated on his sheet.

"I'll let you have your team," he says.

12. "I'm really nervous," Johnson says, fidgeting on the stool beside me.

Truth be told, I'm nervous too. While I don't expect to win the tournament, I do expect to be competitive. And above all else, I don't want to be blown out. Yet, what if I've come to a tournament where men can manipulate Tecmo Super Bowl players like Leonardo Da Vinci could paint?

What if I'm in for an absolute mauling, a video game decapitation?

Johnson takes the ball first and attempts a long field goal on fourth down. Jittery, he pushes it wide left.

"Damn," he says.

With good field position, I take over the ball and go to my favored player, Christian Okoye, the man who I'd name my own son after, on a running play towards the top of the screen.

It's Okoye time!

13. But the Nigerian Nightmare fails me.

Johnson picks my play and his defense swarms Okoye, who fumbles on the first hit of the game. The ball spirals into the air, sickening music accompanying the bounding ball.

Jerome Brown of the Eagles, RIP, scoops up the ball and rushes it to the end zone.

Just like that, I'm down 7-0.

My mouth is dry. I'm shell-shocked. I reach behind me and take a drink of someone else's water.

"That was a big play," Johnson says.

My opponent takes possession again after a stop and converts a forth down by half a football length. (In Tecmo Super Bowl when the chains are brought out for measurement, the ball is either a first down by a half of a length or short by half a length.)

On the same drive, Johnson scores to go up 14-0.

14. Ultimately, I find myself trailing 21-0 at halftime.

Generally, a three-score second-half deficit is impossible to overcome in Tecmo Super Bowl, because there simply isn't enough time.

But I stage a spirited comeback and slice Johnson's lead to 21-14 on Okoye's second rushing touchdown of the game. Facing a third down deep in his territory with around 30 seconds remaining in the fourth quarter, Johnson reaches into his Tecmo Super Bowl bag of tricks and calls a punt on third down.

Why?

Because the clocks runs so rapidly on punts that I will have no chance to run another play.

Either I score on the punt return, a virtual impossibility, or the game ends.

15. The game ends.

I'm 0-1.

I have to win my next two games to advance.

My mouth is dry again and someone has moved their water cup away from me.

Johnson apologies beside me. "That was kind of a dick move," he says. "But I had to get the win, and I was too nervous to pick a play."

16. To our right a huge explosion of sound suddenly rains forth. Tony Orenga, aka the guy with the girlfriend, has brought his own cheering section to the tournament.

Orenga's cheering section features a megaphone, sombrero hats, loud clappers and abundant alcohol consumption.



As I watch Orenga's crew celebrate a victory, Holzbauer, one of the tournament organizers and a past champion of the tournament, returns to our group.

"You and me are up now, Clay," he says.

Josh, a blond-haired software manager from Madison, has already won his first game in the tournament by a score of 49-0. Now I have to win my next two games to have a chance to advance.

There is no margin for error.

Josh wins the toss and selects the Detroit Lions and the Minnesota Vikings as the two teams.

I have my pick.

For a few moments, I am silent. So silent that I become conscious of my underarms sweating and the heat in the bar.

"Is it hot in here?" I ask.

No one responds.

Do I take the Vikings, the higher-rated team, or the Lions with Barry Sanders, the man who can score from any position on the field.

My entire tournament fate could rely on this decision.

"I'll take the Vikings," I say, and take a gray controller into my sweaty palm.

These are truly the times that try a Tecmo Super Bowler's soul.

Part two of Clay Travis' eight-bit battle can be found here.