If you didn't know why they were here, it might be hard to find the thread that links the three dozen people standing in the sun-dappled backyard of this Ballard bungalow. From their complexions you might guess it's not beach volleyball. But after that you'd be stumped. Jury duty, maybe?
Matthew Williams
Gagno, assuming a familiar position.
Matthew Williams
Robert's mom Kathy on his love for pinball: "I think his brain has changed because of it, I really do."
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These are the members of the Seattle Pinball League. Today is their first-anniversary tournament. And right now they're waiting to find out who made the cut.
Check out this slideshow of the pinball league players.
There's Todd MacCulloch, the seven-foot-tall former center for the University of Washington Huskies and, later, the NBA's Philadelphia 76ers and New Jersey Nets. He has a tactical advantage—his extreme height allows him to see a pinball no matter where it is in a machine—and a practical one too. MacCulloch retired a millionaire, and can at any time play one of the 30 machines in his garage on Bainbridge Island, a site spoken of by his fellow pinballers in the excited whisper of a fourth-grader describing Disneyland.
Next to MacCulloch is Julie Gray, one of the league's few female members. Her surname describes the color of her hair, sweatpants, and temperament. It doesn't, however, explain why she always wears matching wrist guards and a pair of headphones, which at this moment are blasting the Bee Gees. And next to both of them is Jeff Gagnon, the league's only gang member—though the gang he belongs to, the Crazy Flipper Fingers out of Portland, is interested less in drive-bys than in making sure its members always mark their high scores with the initials C-F-F.
In the center of a ragged half-circle is the bungalow's owner, Andrew Nunes, a dead ringer for the Home Alone burglar not named Joe Pesci, who wears a SpongeBob SquarePants ski mask while he plays. Reading from a clipboard—at pinball tournaments there's always a clipboard or 12—Nunes announces that MacCulloch, Gray, Gagnon, and a half-dozen others are moving on to the semifinals. But it's the name that doesn't get called that draws the most attention.
"Whoa," says one of the assembled. "What happened to Robert?"
"Robert" is Robert Gagno (pronounced "gahn-yo"), and what happened to him is what happens to even the best pinball players: He got cold while another player—in this case, MacCulloch—got hot.
Robert is tall and rail-thin, with tousled brown curls, oval-framed glasses, and great big sapphires for eyes. When he's playing pinball, which is most of the time, those eyes bug out in a state of twitchy hyper-alertness. At other moments, like when he has to meet a stranger, they quickly make for the ground.
Robert is also autistic, which helps explain the lack of eye contact and why he wouldn't have offered his hand for a shake had he not been reminded to do so by his mother and father, Kathy and Maurizio, who, as both parents and pinball competitors, are usually right by his side. Moreover, Robert is a savant, which helps to explain why at 22 he's the top-ranked player in the league. He's also tops in a league in his hometown of Vancouver, B.C. In a sport where the elite have been playing for decades, Robert is something of a prodigy.
Just two years ago, on a whim, Maurizio signed up Robert for the Canadian World Championships, his son's first competitive tournament. "I had to go to Toronto for business anyway," Maurizio says. "So I figured 'What the heck?'"
"What the heck" turned into a 12th-place finish. Shortly thereafter, the people responsible for ranking pinballers decreed that this impressive debut meant that there were only 3,722 players in the whole world better at pinball than Robert. Today there are 22.
So is the secret to Robert's meteoric rise just practice? Talent? Or, as some have suggested, something beyond his control? Whatever it is, it'll have to wait, because shortly after the handshake, Robert spins on his heels and marches back into the house with a slightly herky-jerky gait that will soon become familiar.
Inside, he hunches over at the hip like a speed skier, pitter-pattering the buttons on "Dirty Harry" while Clint Eastwood and his .44 Magnum look on from the backsplash.
"This is an incredible ball," he says to his mom standing behind him.
One ball turns into two, which then turns into three, which in pinball is three times better than one. Robert delicately nudges a button so that a ball jumps from one flipper to the other, an advanced technique known as an alley pass. Now he's not just playing pinball, he's juggling too. The look on Robert's face is something between a smile and "Oh my God, they're removing my fingernail without anesthetic!" As he plays, three guys stride up. One of them has a clipboard. "Aw, man, he's still going," he says. A few minutes later the last ball goes down.
"Is that a good score?" asks Kathy.
"Yes," answers Robert, one arm flung up and behind his head as if he were patting himself on the back.
"But you used to hate this game."
