Footbag
“Ask not what footbag can do for you; ask what you can do for footbag”
foot bag is the shit, its fun to smoke pot and play footbag.Billy jeffers loved to play the sport, but then Mike wags was a fucking noob and lost it on the highschool south roof.Hes a little pussy and he wont go get it.
With humble beginnings, footbag is now viewed as the greatest and most popular sport in the world. It is named "footbag" because it involves a small bag that goes on the player’s foot. Players kick or stall the small bag using any part of their body apart from their hands although many players also use their hands. There are three main types of footbag; freestyle footbag, net footbag and circle kicking. Footbag is often mistakenly known as "hacky sack." People who make that mistake are often mistakenly known as idiots. "Hacky Sack" is actually a brand name for the worst type of footbag available to buy. The brand is owned by Wham-O, who also owns the naming rights to Frisbee and hula hoop. Wham-O's marketing has been so good that everybody use their brand names as the names of these generic objects without ever actually buying Wham-O products.
History of Footbag[edit | edit source]
Footbag was invented in the early 1970s in Oregon, USA. It was invented by Mike Marshall and John Stallberger, who thought it would be a good exercise to help an injured knee, ankle or left ear. Today those three areas are the most commonly injured parts of the body within the sport. In fact the concept of keeping an object off the ground with your feet is a much older concept, but in true American tradition, they claimed that they had invented the concept.
Originally the sport was called "hacking the sack" because they were hippies, but once they gave up their utopian ideals, adopted showers and sold out to Wham-O the sport was renamed footbag. Footbag was soon picked up by fashion icon Kenny Shults and in the 80s soon grew to be about mullets, pink Converse shoes and seeing who could wear the tightest shorts.
By 1993 a bunch of the best players had decided that prancing around doing lap catch stalls while listening to Ace of Bass was not the direction they wanted to see the sport go in and they created their own elite club. In a true demonstration of just how cool footbag is, they called that club The Big Add Posse. From that point on Footbag truly split into its three main disciplines and has grown to be the sport of the gods.
Freestyle Footbag[edit | edit source]
Freestyle footbag is the most popular discipline of footbag. It is mainly played by anorexic guys from Poland but there are also many players in other countries around the world. The main aim of freestyle footbag is to perform tricks of great skill and dexterity with a footbag but without injuring your knees, ankles or left ear.
All the tricks performed are given a point score called their ADD value. Add is short for 'addition' because the early footbaggers could see how confusing the sport would be if you called the point difficulty of a trick 'points' and decided that making up a completely unique term would make footbag a much easier sport to learn. The add system attempts to give an accurate value of difficulty to each trick. Unfortunately only three people in the world can actually understand how the system works which has resulted in an unworkable system.
As well as having an unexplainable add value, all tricks also have a ridiculous name. Tricks are often ranked in order of what is the most ridiculous name. "Around the world" is viewed as a very easy move while "spinning ducking paradox blender" is regarded as a much more difficult move. Moves are usually named by the person who tells the most people that they invented the trick. Occasionally this is also the person who actually did invent the trick in question. A couple of tricks were also named by Adrian Dick, Damian Coventry and Stuart Macferson from New Zealand - who thought those tricks would be impossible but that it would be amusing to pretend that they had been hit. EG: Blurry Reaper. Today those tricks are usually regarded as not very difficult (because they have uncomplicated names). Adrian, Stuart and Damian collated the original footbag freestyle move list of over 200 tricks in 1997 and published it online. They found these lists extremely helpful because they were based in New Zealand and their Internet connections were so slow they couldn't view any video.
Tom Mosher is a very keen freestyle footbagger who often gets a mention in encyclopaedia entries for footbag.
Net Footbag[edit | edit source]
Net footbag is often also known as 'the dark side' because it is occasionally used as a training tool for Sith lords. It is essentially like beach volleyball except without the beach or girls in bikinis. There is really very little else that can be said about it.
Circle Kicking[edit | edit source]
Circle kicking is the name given to standing around in a circle trying to keep the footbag off the ground. It is often associated with smelly hippies because they play it a lot but also has followings amongst emo kids and people with no arms. Most freestyle footbaggers begin as circle kickers but soon realise that freestyle is much cooler.
Steve 'Danceman' Blough is a big proponent of circle kicking and once referred to himself as the Michael Jorden of footbag despite the fact that he has never won a world championship, holds no world records and is largely considered crazy by the rest of the footbag community.
Circle kicking has produced a number of similar offshoots including extreme footbag, where players stand in a circle and once the footbag has been kicked three times they grab the bag and throw it as hard as they can at another player. The winner is usually the person with the most bruises at the end of the game. Urban extreme footbag is played in an urban environment with objects found on location such as empty cans or rocks.