- Ryan Smith
- Michael Anthony (far left), Lucas Nunez (middle left), Leah Wheatley (middle right), and Ted Powers (far right) all managed to survive the first night of Hands-on-a-thon.
Steve Dau can’t remember how old he is.
It’s Saturday night and—at last—we’ve reached the final hours of Headquarters Beercade’s Hands-on-a-thon, a pinball tournament for extreme masochists. The part where you win the grand prize by outscoring your opponent? That only starts after you’ve kept one hand affixed to the machine while standing on your feet for 72 sleepless hours. Never mind cognition. Physical endurance and sheer force of will trump everything else. To quote the heavy metal smiths whose cartoonish visages adorn the game Dau is touching, “. . . and nothing else matters.”
“I feel like I’m in a petting zoo or something,” noted Megan Robertson.
“I see this as a postsemester adventure,” Tomcheck said. “I kind of feel like I’m in the contest too.”
And unlike at, say, Guantanamo all the torture here is of the self-inflicted variety. Three hundred people applied to join the contest on Facebook by posting pleas and self-advertisements. The 12 entries chosen by Headquarters’ staff ranged from serious do-gooders excited about directing thousands of dollars to charity to pinball wizards hoping to start a collection of these nostalgic but expensive toys.
- Ryan Smith
- The final three Hands-on-a-thoners rest up or stretch during a 15-minute break in the “action.”
On Saturday night at 7 PM, with just an hour left in the three-day event, only three players remained: Robertson, Dau, and—of course—Hall. Michael Anthony lost earlier in the day by leaning too much of his exhausted body on the frame of the pinball machine. Dau, a bartender who works at a brewpub in Saint Charles, chalks it up to a round of shots he convinced everyone but Robertson to consume.
