LATimes.com: Richard Crasnick rode in three championship parades with the Los Angeles Lakers, wrote speeches for a basketball legend named Magic and toured Europe with Olympic gold medalists. But the biggest sporting event of his life is playing out in a drab warehouse in Carson, using a thin triangle of leather less than half the size of a credit card.
Crasnick is president of FIKI Sports, which stands for “Flick It and Kick It,” a two-person business that includes his lifetime pal, Craig Matthews. They are betting on a sport that couldn’t be more low tech in an era of sophisticated game consoles that contain more technology than a supercomputer did 10 years ago.
Paper football is played by two people sitting across a table or desk. The “ball” usually is a sheet of notebook paper folded into a flat triangle. Touchdowns are scored by flicking the triangle until it hangs over the edge of the table without falling off. Points also are awarded for “kicking” the ball with your finger through your opponent’s goal posts — formed by his or her index fingers and thumbs.
Crasnick’s version, projected to bring in $1.5 million in revenue this year, is the result of a shared daydream with his brother, Michael, 16 years ago. They took a paper football, wrote the then-Los Angeles Raiders team logo on it and slipped it into a small plastic bag to mimic packaging.
After a long drive, tabletop football scores big [LATimes.com]
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