Tom Lynch

It looks like something from a Scorsese movie. You enter a smoke-filled, dimly lit garage, packed with male twentysomethings with two-day-old beards. They look stressed and tired, but most of all, they look like they're up to no good.

The hoodlums are gathered around televisions, hunched over, listening closely to the sounds of beeps coming from the speakers. The suffocating qualities of the dark room are bettered only by the intensity of each breath one takes. Little flashing lights beam from the TV screens as miniature figures dance down a mass of green, computerized grass. Random exclamations of "Go!" and "Get 'em!" effortlessly linger in the air, until one screams, "Fucking Favre! You piece of shit!" Then, seconds later, at another television, someone proclaims, "I'm gonna drive the ball down your throat. You ain't shit!"

Every Saturday night, forty or so young men gather in the garage of Phil Pogorzelski, all of them with one purpose--to defeat their opponents at "Madden NFL" on PlayStation 2. "We're not trying to prove anything," says Pogorzelski, a tall, awkwardly skinny young man wearing jeans and a Tampa Bay Buccaneers jacket. "It's just that when all of us get together, all of our life distractions disappear." Pogorzelski and his crew, who have been holding these meetings for more than two years, construct their own season: they assign divisions of teams, they have playoff rounds, they keep track of players' statistics. To keep in the competitive spirit they even compete for a trophy, titled the "Helmet of Honor," which is simply someone's old football helmet from grammar school. If you ask those who ritually participate in "Madden Night" why they would be willing to sacrifice their Saturday nights for video game-play, you will get a variety of responses. Camilo Peralta, a front-runner for the "Helmet of Honor," emphatically says, "It's fun because I know all the guys. I mean, it's dudes, football, and beer--that's what America's all about." But traditional social lives don't seem to really exist on these guys' agendas. Peralta, practically disgusted at the notion of substituting bar hopping for the Madden congregation, puts it best: "Girls? Who needs 'em?"

It's obvious that Pogorzelski loves football, but it seems that the video game is more important to him than physically playing or watching the sport on television. "PlayStation football has its advantages," he says. "For instance, you can't actually play four football games in one day. It's impossible. But with Madden, you could knock off four games in under three hours, and you're barely tired." The "league," which meets at the Northwest Side garage around 11:30pm, often plays into the early hours of Sunday morning. Adds Pogorzelski, "We do it for the love of the game. The video game, that is."

(2003-01-29)

Also by Tom Lynch

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