2007: COMING OUT PARTY #TBT

Once a month I am gonna take  you down memory lane and tell my story in footbag. Each post is gonna focus on a different year in chronological order. You can read all the previous posts here.

Start of the year

Basically, I was a complete bum not studying enough, partying too much and bitching and whining a lot about high school. I did seem to get much better at footbag during this time though.

Before Euros

That summer I went to France with my mom, her husband, and my little brother. We toured around the country site for two weeks before we finally ended up in Paris.
I had set up a session with Charles Dupuy and Serge Kaldany there. Serge was crazy good at this point and it was a pleasure to get to play a lot of one on one with him.
Charles and I instantly hit it off and after the session, we went to Arthur Ledain’s place. We had crêpes (which Charles kept calling CRABS) with cheese and ham. I impressed them with my pancake throwing skills.

Frankystyle also showed up and showed me this trailer, which nobody had seen at this point.

This was an amazing night for a young footbag kid.
A couple of days later I flew from Paris to Euros in Vienna with the Parisian crew.

Euros

On the plane ride, I turned 18. I ordered a beer just before and the stewardess asked my age, when I told her I was just about to turn 18 I got kisses for my cheeks and champagne for my belly. When we landed in Vienna we went directly to the opening party, where I celebrated my 18th birthday. I got super drunk and puked all over the terrace outside and the Berlin guys carried me home. 18 is in Denmark what 21 is in the states.


Lise bought me my first legal beer.

I stayed at the Gym as the only Dane. This was good for socializing but not for my game. Euros 2007 was definitely my party boy coming out party.
Charles Dupuy and Daryl Canady from Munich was also staying at the gym and we had so much fun and grew very close. Even though I never see them and rarely catch up with them, I still see them as brothers to this day.


One night I found this ladies trench coat which I strolled around in. I still miss that coat.

Lise and I made a deal to be Doubles Net partners one day at this Euros. I just brought this up to her and we decided to wait another 10 years. She still has a bunch of injuries but she is working on sorting them out and wants to return to freestyle footbag.

A video I did from the tournament.

After Euros

One day I got a message from a beautiful young girl on MySpace. She had seen the videos I had posted there of me playing footbag and she thought it looked kinda sexy. I invited her to a party at my high school. You are allowed to drink at high school parties in Denmark. I ended up bringing her home and dated her for some time. I was so stoked.

Danish Champs 2007

It was a small Danish Champs in Copenhagen with no foreign guests. I played very well during the weekend and hit some stuff I would be stoked for today.
Mads Neuhard did the first dropless routine in DK history. That was a big moment.
Lise’s game was probably at its peak at this time. She got second in routines and won Shred30 in front of Mathias Blau.
Mathias won his first Danish Champs and he is still dominating to this day.

Video by Lise Thygesen

2006: FIRST WORLDS #TBT

Once a month I am gonna take  you down memory lane and tell my story in footbag. Each post is gonna focus on a different year in chronological order. You can read all the previous posts here.


Fjellerad Footbag Camp

Once again the year started with a footbag camp in Fjellerad. This  time without anybody from Copenhagen. I think they thought traveling to the northern part of Denmark three times in a  little over a year was too much. It was still a great weekend. I remember Mathias Blau hitting a run with “BAP” drill and “Rubberman” at 13 years old.

DEMO in Fåborg

A bit later that year we did a footbag demonstration at an event about alternate hobbies and sports. Fåborg is a small city near my hometown of Svendborg. A bunch of players from all over the country came and we played footbag for 6 hours. The more experienced players also did a show with Mads Hole on MC duty. I played really well, this was probably the first time I didn’t feel like a total newbie.


Me playing with Søren Nøhr. Slightly pink hair and slightly pink shirt that Tom Mosher sent me all the way from Canada-land.

Worlds in Frankfurt

Finally the day came! My first Worlds! I travelled with Søren Nøhr to Frankfurt. Me, Søren and Mathias Blau shared a room. Mathias’ parents were also staying at the same hotel. It was my first time travelling outside of Denmark without my parents and it was as expected a great experience.

I met so many people for the first time that it would be hard to list them all. Some of them are my close friends to this day, some I still keep in contact with from time to time and some have unfortunately vanished from my life, but that is to be expected. Nobody mentioned, nobody forgotten.

I will mention three experiences I had during this week that I still remember very clearly:

The first one was a late afternoon where Søren Nøhr, Mathias Blau and I went back to the event site a late afternoon. We walked around a bit and thought that there were nobody left, but behind a small red house we found Vasek Klouda and Steve Goldberg. Vasek was playing and taking requests from Steve. He let us give him requests as well and tried all kinds of crazy stuff.


Me and Mathias Blau in the background witnessing the magic of Vasek.

The second one was me in a barefeet circle with Felix Zenger and Jorden Moir. We were just fucking around and attempting stupid shit. I decided to try Enterrage and hit it. My first three dex. The both went crazy. And at exactly the same time Mads Neuhard, Mads Hole and Lise Thygesen showed up at the event and they also joined in. Getting love from my heroes and my footbag family at the same time for a big milestone was such a great experience.

The third one is not shred related but still had a huge impact on my future life in footbag. I was already interested in the behind the scenes stuff at this time and at this time the most important guy in footbag in Europe was Jan Zimmermann. Jan Zimmermann is the guy who started planetfootbag and he was the main force behind the Quantum footbag shoe that was unveiled at this tournament. I had a long conversation with him sometime during the week and he told me a lot about the Quantum shoe and all the other work he was doing. It was really inspirering to me and it made me realise you can really make things happen in footbag, if you are willing to put in some work and that is possible to important to the community without being a great player.

Danish Open

Danish Open returned to Copenhagen and this year there was a big turnout of foreign guests:
  • SweJohn from Sweden
  • Grek from Hungary
  • Shirine Daouk from Switzerland
  • Jakob Wagner from Germany
  • Vasek Klouda, Honza Weber and Dexter from Czech Republic
    (The king of footbag video was filmed at this tournament.)
  • Felix Zenger from Finland

I finally won intermediate and was now ready to step up and compete with the big boys next year. This was also the first time I felt like I was invited along to party with the older Copenhagen players, which was really cool for a young naive Asmus.


After my winning routine

 

2005 – YEAR 2 #TBT

Once a month I am gonna take  you down memory lane and tell my story in footbag. Each post is gonna focus on a different year in chronological order. You can read all the previous posts here.

Fjellerad Footbag Camp

My second year in footbag started with the first annual Fjellerad Footbag Camp. Fjellerad is the city where Mathias, Søren and Nikolai are all from. This was a time where footbag was really going in Denmark – In 2004 the European Championships was in Copenhagen, the Danish Championships later that year had seen a lot of new players (me included) showing up, Lise was one of the best female footbaggers in the world and there was even a footbag magazine in print in Denmark.The footbag camp was a great experience. If I remember correctly there was more than 20 players there. I learned a lot and got to know everybody better.

Video by Lise Thygesen

 

First Breath After A Coma

This video was the first time I saw myself play footbag. I didn’t realize that I took long breaks after each stall before seeing this. It took me a while to fix it.

 

Svendborg Barbies

Around this time I was also lucky that I convinced a couple of guys to start kicking with me in our hometime. We would sneak into the gym at our school after classes and work our asses off. Everything was so new and exciting. With called our little group “Svendborg Barbies”, which in hindsight is pretty dumb but we were only 14/15 after all..

I designed a logo for us (one of my first attempts at graphic design)


USA

That summer I went to California and Nevada with my family. As soon as I got out of the airplane in San Francisco, some guy stepped up to me and said “nice shoes” and threw a footbag at me. We kicked for a few minutes, but I was so baffled I didn’t even get his name. I still don’t know who he was.

Later on the trip I managed to set up a footbag session in Las Vegas with some players I had gotten in touch with through (you guessed it) modified. First we met up and played at the hotel where we were staying. After a while the guys suggested we wen’t to Loren Baum’s place. Luckily my mom let a young Asmus run away with some Americans he had never met before.

We played for hours while watching old footbag VHS tapes. Pretty sure a young Evan Gatesman even made an appearance and attempted Nemesis. Finally one of the guys gave me a ride home to my hotel and I didn’t get drugged or raped or anything. What a night for a young footbagger.


Me and Loren Baum AKA Happy Om on a Las Vegas rooftop.


Danish Footbag Open

For the first and only time DFO took place outside of Copenhagen. The reigning Danish champion at the time Nikolai Lorenzen arranged a big tournament in the third biggest city in Denmark Aalborg. He had booked a cool old theater for the event and hired one of Denmark’s greatest turntablist DJ STATIC for the afterparty.

Special guest was the hottest thing in footbag that year Jorden Moir. I was a massive fan of Jorden at the time and his solo videos from his room made me believe I could get good without having good players around me. It was a huge experience for me to get to play in a 2 man circle with Jorden. Dylan Fry was travelling around Europe at the time and also joined event.

I stayed with Søren Nøhr in Fjellerad and every morning we took the bus into Aalborg with Mathias Blau and the other active youngsters to join the fun.  

For the second year in a row I got last place in intermediate. This year I felt like I should have ranked one spot higher, but I was happy with my routine.  

Nikolai ended up defending his title in fron of a huge and excited crowd.

Mads Hole’s awesome videos from the event.

 

Boarding School

This was also the year I finished primary school and decided to take a year in boarding school instead of going straight to high school. There is a big tradition for boarding schools in Denmark with over 250 schools all over the country. Many of my friends absolutely loved going to boarding school. I wasn’t that convinced about it’s greatness but it did definitely shape me in many ways and matured me a lot. I did not play a lot of footbag during the time but me and couple of friends did have a lot of illegal late night hacky sack circles going down.

2004 – THE BEGINNING #TBT

Once a month I am gonna take  you down memory lane and tell my story in footbag. Each post is gonna focus on a different year in chronological order. Here is the first one.

It’s 2004 and I am sitting in my room in my parents basement in a small town in the south of Denmark. A message pops up on MSN Messenger. It is from a boy in Copenhagen, I have never met him but we have messaged back and forth on a danish youth site. He sends me a link to a video and tells me that what they do in the video is called footbag.

The video was Kampa Park, named after where the video takes place – The legendary Kampa Park in Prague. It was filmed in 2003 and edited by Mads Hole and Mads Neuhard. I watch the video in awe and when I saw Vasek do Neutron Smasher > Toe Barrage > Toe Symp Whirl > Rev Swirl > Pincher I knew I had to start playing. I got my first footbag soon after that.


My first footbag was a Dirtbag. I hit my first ATW with that and then I lost it. I was heartbroken. My next footbag I bought from the legend Torben Wigger. My third bag was an actual professional 32 panel made by Mads Neuhard. Here is a photo of how it looks today:


I loved that bag

 

My First Danish Champs

Later that year I went to my first Danish Footbag Championships. Me, Mathias Blau, Søren Nøhr and two other young cats Kevin and Thomas all stayed at the boy (Phillip) who showed me footbags place. I also met the rest of FootbagDenmark for the first time. The first one I met other than Phillip was Frederik Mens. I went into a small shop to get some candy on the way to the event site and this grown ass man stopped me and was really excited to finally meet me. That felt really cool for a young boy traveling to Copenhagen for the first time on his own. I still think about this every time I bike by the shop.


Phillip and Me

I still remember many things from this weekend quite clearly. I remember hitting my first Legover, just before I did my routine and hitting one during it. I remember Søren Nøhr (14 years old at the time) beating Jan Birkel (35 at the time) in the “Intermediate” division. I remember walking along the train tracks to Phillip’s stepdads place, where we were gonna sleep. I remember the Chili Con Carne on saturday night. I remember Nikolai Lorenzen becoming Danish Champion.

I don’t think I would have stayed around as long as I have, if it wasn’t was this weekend in Copenhagen. So a big shout out to the FootbagDenmark family.