Pinball pinnacle Local lawyer’s lifelong affinity for the flippers has him vying for silver-ball supremacy at world championships By: David Sanderson Posted: 4:00 AM CDT Saturday, Jun. 3, 2023 Last Modified: 1:23 PM CDT Sunday, Jun. 4, 2023 Updates

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This article was published 03/06/2023 (1187 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

This weekend, Freddy’s Pinball Paradise in Echzell, Germany, is hosting the International Flipper Pinball Association World Pinball Championship, an annual get-together that draws pinball wizards from every corner of the globe.

Among the registered participants is Winnipegger Jack Tadman, a married father of three who is currently ranked as the No. 3 pinballer in Canada, and the 80th best of his kind on the planet. Tadman, a lawyer in his “real life,” hopes to improve on his 2019 showing, when he placed 12th out of a field of 64 at an equivalent competition staged in Milan, Italy.

Typically, Tadman’s wife Leanne would be there to cheer him on. The couple has three-year-old twins, mind you, so she wasn’t able to make the trip this time around, he mentioned during an interview at The Forks, days before he was due to hop on a flight to Europe. That doesn’t mean she and the kids won’t be with him in spirit.

“Like any other major event, you get butterflies, especially during the playoffs, so what I started doing to settle myself down was take a few minutes beforehand, to look at pictures of our family,” said Tadman, 41, dressed in jeans and a black hoodie emblazoned with the crest of District 82, a pinball arcade situated in De Pere, Wis.

“It’s only pinball, right? So though it may sound silly to say there are nerves involved, that’s definitely the case. Some people find that being super serious serves as a good motivator. For me, keeping everything in perspective, by telling myself that it’s just a game and that there are far more important things in life, seems to do the trick.”

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One hundred per cent, Tadman says, when asked if he can recall his first encounter with the silver ball.

For a number of years starting at age five, he and his father left their home on Wilton Street every Saturday afternoon, to spend a couple of hours at his dad’s pal’s place. There, the two men caught up over coffee, while the younger Tadman flipped away to his heart’s content, on a pinball machine parked in one corner of the house.

“The game was called Four Square, and at the beginning, I had to stand on a stool, to see the playfield,” he says. “Not only do I own that very game now — I bought it from the family after Barney, my dad’s friend, passed away — but when the (world) pinball championships were held in Toronto (in 2018), where we were living, I brought it over to a buddy’s place, where a bunch of us took turns playing the game I grew up on.”

By the time he was 10, Tadman had become a familiar face at the Pirate’s Den, an arcade formerly located in the Grant Park Shopping Centre. More often than not, school chums he went there with, who were more into video games such as Pac Man and Asteroids, ran out of their allowance money within an hour of their arrival, at which point they’d ask if he was ready to head home, too. The thing was, he already would have racked up a dozen or so replays by then, so his stock reply became, “Sorry, but I’m just getting going over here.”

Tadman largely took a break from pinball between the ages of 15 and 23, “when the mind wanders to other things,” he says with a wink. One evening he was walking around Vancouver, where he was attending Simon Fraser University, when he happened upon an arcade housing a slew of pinball machines. Just like that, he was hooked again.

In 2012, by which time he had attained his law degree and was living and practising law in Toronto, he learned about a pinball tournament being held at an arcade, not far from his place. He entered on a whim, assuming he didn’t stand a chance against others who had travelled from as far away as New Jersey. To his amazement, he wound up finishing second. (Yes, he received a cash prize for his efforts, but no, they didn’t pay him in change.)

Later that same year, he was visiting Ottawa. He discovered there was a pinball tournament scheduled there, too. He won it, which caused him to think, hmm, perhaps he was more talented at pinball than he originally thought.

“We were fortunate enough that when we were living in Toronto, there was a place two blocks from us called Cabin Fever, which was the heart of that city’s pinball community,” says Tadman, who returned to Winnipeg in August 2022, primarily so the twins could get to know his parents, their grandparents, before they attend school in Toronto, where he and Leanne still own a home, somewhere down the road.

“Rust definitely settles in if you don’t play on a regular basis.”–Jack Tadman

“Rust definitely settles in if you don’t play on a regular basis, so it was great to have a place nearby to go to after the kids were in bed, to prepare and practise ahead of tournaments and such.”

Since moving back to Winnipeg, both he and Leanne have joined the Manitoba Pinball League, based out of Phantom Amusement Arcade located in The Forks Market, directly across from Tall Grass Prairie Bread Company. And while you might think a world-ranked player would win every time he presses the start button, that definitely hasn’t been his experience, he says.

“There are some great players here, some of whom also travel to tournaments,” he goes on, noting he qualified for the 2023 world championship by first winning this year’s Manitoba title, thus allowing him to enter a North American championship in Wisconsin in March, where he finished high enough to qualify for the worlds. “I’m always happy to pass along tips — the same way I’ll be picking the brain of top-tier players when I’m in Germany — to help people get to a place where they see the game differently than just trying to keep the ball alive.”

One of those lessons is, if you aren’t tilting, you aren’t trying. (If you’re unfamiliar with pinball, tilt is the term used for shaking or rocking a machine so strenuously during the course of action that it shuts down, ending one’s game.)

Terming himself a very active player, Tadman says pinball is as much physical as it is mental, particularly when you’ve attained a level where individual games can last as long as two-and-a-half hours.

“I tend to move around a lot when I play, and have inadvertently kicked other players, if they’re just a few feet over,” he continues, adding, “good question, I’ve never really thought about it,” when asked which of his digits he uses to operate the flippers. (Mimicking play, he decides it must be his index and middle fingers.)

“There have also been times when I’m wearing sandals, where I’ve lost one because I’m moving around too much. So there I am, feeling with my foot, trying to find it, with three balls in play, at once.”

According to Tadman, one of the great things about pinball is that it can be enjoyed by young and old alike. Escher Lefkoff, currently rated No. 1 in the world, is a 20-year-old from Colorado. Then there’s Ellen Sharpe, a septuagenarian grandmother who is one of the top-ranked female players in her home state of Illinois. As for his offspring, his eldest “has some skills, for sure,” he says, no doubt owing to seven pinball games he keeps in their Toronto abode.

“I will say that the way I played when I was a kid, when it was all about winning extra games and gaining multiple balls, is a lot different than the way I play now, when the optimal strategy is to reduce the game to its most basic component, by making the same shot over and over and over again, to get points. It can be boring to watch but it works.” (As many as 15,000 people are expected to follow this weekend’s action on Pinball Videos, a live pinball streaming service.)

Oh, and if you’re wondering if he knows all the lyrics to a certain tune by British rockers the Who, all about a “deaf, dumb and blind kid (who) sure plays a mean pinball,” yeah, he may have heard it “once or twice,” he says, breaking into a grin.

With that, he deposits a loonie (talk about inflation!) into a James Bond-themed game at The Forks, stating we may want to put our briefcase down, as “there’s a good chance we’re going to be here for a while.”

david.sanderson@freepress.mb.ca