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The Seattle Times – With Flair and Style, Footbag and Juggling Festival Gains a Foothold (2007)

A 2007 article previewing the Seattle Juggling and Footbag Festival, with plenty of familiar names featured. Among them Lon Smith, Jorden Moir, Peter Irish, Jim Penske and others.

More than once, Matt Baker has dropped his keys and, without really realizing it, found them flying off the side of his foot, into the air and back into his hands. That’s the kind of move you find second nature when you’ve flown with the footbag crowd for so long.

“I’ve done that with my phone and broke it,” says Baker, co-founder of the Seattle Juggling and Footbag Festival, which turned the Ravenna-Eckstein Community Center on Saturday into a cavalcade of flying arms, legs, clubs and spheres.

Read the full article here.

To really go back in time, you can see the Modified thread about the event as well as these great photos from Dat Phan.

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Torontoist – Tall Poppy Interview – Camille Surovy, Shredder

This one was the first that came up once I typed in “footbag radio interview” in a search. Though I think this does not come from a radio interview. It is quite detailed and shows what was happening in the Canadian scene in the mid 2000s.

Camille Surovy has made a name for herself in the footbag world. Apart from possessing some of the finest footbag skills, Surovy is also a key member of The Footbag Association of Toronto, and even organized the international footbag tournament called G.L.A.S.S. (Great Lakes Area Shred Symposium) that took place last weekend. Footbag (aka hacky-sacking) is one of the most inclusive sports in existence and anyone can play together irregardless of their skill. Surovy embodies the essence of the sport, she’s welcoming, thoughtful, and friendly. Torontoist caught up with Surovy after GLASS to talk about the tournament, the footbag community, and shreddin’.

Read more here.

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Blue Ridge Outdoors – Footbagging Frenzy: Hackysacking in the South East

This was a preview for the East Coasts event in 2004, with a brief appearance from Peter Irish.

Footbag isn’t just the sport you played in the parking lot after school. In fact a lot of people take it quite seriously. It’s been competitive sport in several forms since the 1970’s-with a substantial number of footbag tournaments and festivals held around the world every year. Commonly known as Hacky Sack (actually a product manufactured by Wham-O, Inc.), footbag clubs are popping up all over the country including the Blue Ridge.

Pete Irish of Maryland has been kicking competitively for 20 years. His foot fetish began casually in the late 80s after he broke his arm in a skateboarding accident. After a little practice he made his parents drive him to the 1986 East Coast Footbag Championships in New Jersey. He quickly learned that this was a serious sport.

Read more at http://www.blueridgeoutdoors.com/magazine/june-2004/footbagging-frenzy-hacky-sacking-in-the-southeast/

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LA Times – It’s Still Kicking Around (2002)

The LA Times prepared a preview for the World Championships in 2002. It featured interviews with Tuan Vu and Steve Goldberg.

Full article can be read here.

SAN FRANCISCO — The 23rd Annual World Footbag Championships opened here this week with good vibes and scant fanfare, despite the fact that they coincide with the 30th anniversary of the Hacky Sack this year. Yes, there is a world championship featuring that little beanbag kicking game that Deadheads used to play in circles. “Hunh,” a middle-aged bureaucrat marveled outside one of the heats at the UC San Francisco student union. “People actually still do that?”

“Actually, the way it’s done now has a kind of X-games feel,” offered a 29-year-old software tester named Tuan Vu, to whom the question was repeated. Vu, a local known in footbag circles as “the Disco Ninja,” was bare-chested and sweat-soaked from the tip of his soul patch to his Adidas Rod Lavers.

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LA Times – The Power of Hacky Sack (1995)

This is actually a short letter to the editor, but considering the role Poland has had in the sport in recent years, it’s worth putting in the collection.

Thanks for Michael Colton’s interesting story about Hacky Sack, “The Goodwill Game” (Sept. 18).

I was first introduced to the game in the fall of 1988 when I accompanied 30 University of Redlands students to our Salzburg campus for a semester of study together. We played Hacky Sack all over Europe.

I remember one spirited game in the plaza in front of St. Peters, Rome. A too-swift kick resulted in the footbag landing on top of a Polish tour bus. It was lost for good, and we figured it might have made its way back to Poland. One year later Poland was free.

Never underestimate the power of Hacky Sack!

JAMES KEAYS

Redlands

From LA Times.

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LA Times – The Goodwill Game (1995)

The full title of this probably wouldn’t fit in the title bar, which is The Goodwill Game: You Can’t Win at Hacky Sack – And That’s The Point. The Ultimate Neo-Hippie Sport.

There is often antagonism within the freestyle footbag scene to be associated with the hippy imagery, which might be blamed on articles like this…

On a hot, crowded Saturday at Venice Beach, Pat King, 19, spots two guys kicking around a Hacky Sack. Hoping to play, too, he whispers the secret password recognized at hack circles around the world: “Mind if I join in?”

The Olympics claim to promote peace and unity, but any hacker will tell you the true goodwill game is Hacky Sack. It has kept warrior guards awake in ancient China, warmed up the legs of soccer players, and helped treat sports injuries by stretching muscles and tendons. In its latest incarnation, though, it’s the ultimate neo-hippie sport–the athletic equivalent of tie-dyed clothing or listening to the Grateful Dead.

Read the full article here.

Interestingly enough this is all about the circle kicking style, but Worlds were there in San Francisco the year before.

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New York Times – Floppy Little Footbag is Big Game on Campus (1984)

One from the more distant archives. This one is an article in the New York Times, mainly about the popularity of the hack circle and similar activities, such as juggling, taking off on campuses around the time. Some quotes from Gerg Cortopassi, co-founder of World Footbag Association.

Read the full article here.

PHILADELPHIA, Feb. 11— The object is a small, floppy sphere that lies inert wherever it falls, but it has started students leaping and kicking and, according to one professor here, ”feeling better about themselves” on campuses around the country.

At Temple University and the University of Pennsylvania it is called a Hacky Sack, at the University of Delaware a footbag.

By whatever name, it is the instrument of a new sport with ancient Oriental roots that moved down the West Coast, crossed the country to East Coast colleges and now, proponents say, is beginning to find converts from Europe to the Far East.

By May it had grown so popular that it gained its own national organization, the World Footbag Association, based in Portland, Ore., whose officials estimate that as many as five million Americans are playing forms of the sport.