Pinball Wizards
by Denise Dowling
by Denise Dowling
Lyman "Silk" Sheats, the 1993 World Champion Pinball Player, crouches like a hunchback
over a Shaq Attack game. 
For the next three days of the international Professional
and Amateur Pinball Association tournament, he must tune out the bleating, blipping
and taunts from games like Nightmare on Elm Street and Demolition Man.
"He sits in a crouch for hours, transfixed" says publicist Sharon Kahn. "He looks like an angel."
Sheats is legendary in the pinball subculture. Players remark on his cat-like style and hands precise as a surgeon. Lyman credited his 1993 victory to a "Zen relationship" with the Dr. Who game, on which he scored more than two billion points.
Nineteen-year-old Bowen Kerins was relatively unknown when he walked into the tournament last year. The modest math major at Stanford University didn't even know he'd won until his name was announced.
"Did I win?" he said. "Holy cow!"
At this year's tournament, held February 3-5 at the Park Central Hotel in Manhattan, Paul Madison of Minnesota became the 1995 champ. He walked away with a pinball machine and $2,000 in cash. That equals lots of quarters.
In general, playing styles fall into two categories. There are people like Lyman who make love to the machine, whose hand moves are calculated and rhythmic, their legs braced like a tripod. These are the players who don't blink when you talk to them, who remain serene amid a cacophony of buzzers and bells.
According to Kahn, "you could dance naked in front of them and they wouldn't know it."
Then there are the shakers who fuck the machine, bucking it with pelvic thrusts. You can tell those flippermeisters because when they're away from a machine for too long, their fingers itch and their legs vibrate. They're jonesing for a pinball fix.
Fifteen-year-old Josh "Razor" Sharpe says he can play it "soft and slow like Lyman" or "hard and gutsy" like his Dad. His father Roger Sharpe is a pinball marketing executive and part of the reason Josh is considered a pinball prodigy.
"Before I grew up, I would stand between my dad's arms and put my chin on the bar and I'd be moving my head in circles, watching the ball go around," Josh recalls.
According to Josh, his family doesn't put any pressure on him to excel at pinball. But when asked what's in it for him, he answers, "Recognition. A lot of people know me as Roger Sharpe's son, but it's not his fault. He didn't mean to be good."
