American Pinball Operators Association · Regional Tournament Browser · 1972–1976
● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●
From the broadcast booth · 1974 season
Friends — the season is on. Nine regions, nine purses, every machine inspected and leveled to within a hair of dead-true. We're calling it from the floor: this is the deepest field the APOA has ever fielded, and the kids coming up from the rec halls are nervier than anything we saw two years ago. Pick a city below. Pull up the bracket. Read the player cards — really read them; the rivalries inside this circuit are why the bleachers stay full past midnight. Submit your own scores at the bottom; the hall-of-fame ledger is open to anyone who's logged a serious number on a sanctioned cabinet.
▸ Select a Regional Tournament
through
► Submit Your Score to the Hall-of-Fame Ledger
★ Hall-of-Fame Ledger ★
Init.
Handle
Machine
Score
Tournament
Date
— a quiet rumor passes through the bleachers if you type the four right letters in sequence —
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
The 1974 APOA Nationals
Las Vegas · The Silver Ball Comes Home
SEPT 14 — 17 · 1974
$24,500
TOTAL PURSE · 9 CABINETS · 144 QUALIFIERS
Registration closes August 30. Forty-dollar entry. Bring your own grip rag.
Qualifying flights run continuously Fri 10am – Sat 8pm. Single elimination Sat midnight.
Inspection sealed cabinets opened Sat 9am sharp. Tilt sensitivity sworn to before notary public. Hosted at the Sahara West Ballroom · sanctioned by the American Pinball Operators Association
— A letter from Vincent “Doc” Marchetti, Tournament Director —
Friends and fellow operators,
People in the trade press keep asking me whether pinball is a sport. I find the question funny because no one has ever asked me twice after sitting in the front row of a Saturday-night final. You watch a kid from a Toledo bowling alley lean over a Williams cabinet for forty-three minutes in a row, never flinching, never letting the ball settle, working the upper-right flipper with a touch so light the bumper coils never even get warm — and the question answers itself.
What we are doing on this circuit, and what we are about to do in Las Vegas this September, is genuine athletic competition. The cabinets we sanction are precision machines. The springs are tuned. The playfields are leveled to a half-degree. The targets register down to the millisecond. And the players — our players — are athletes whose instrument is reflex and patience and an honest mechanical understanding of how a five-eighths-inch steel ball behaves when it leaves a slingshot at twelve feet per second.
I have seen our champions cry on the bleachers after a final ball drains down the center. I have seen rivalries that ran four years in a row finally settled on a single replay extra-ball at three in the morning. I have seen a sixteen-year-old girl from Albuquerque named Junie Diaz beat three seeded national contenders in a row on a machine she'd never touched before that weekend, and I have seen the room stand up and applaud for nine straight minutes.
That is what we are protecting. That is what the APOA stands for. Come to Vegas. Bring your best. The machines are ready.
— Doc Marchetti Tournament Director, APOA National Circuit From his desk above the Sahara floor, July 1974
