Bowen Kerins stands in the center of a Pittsburgh warehouse, the rock anthem “Welcome to the Jungle” blaring on his iPhone. It’s moments before the finals of the 11th Professional/Amateur Pinball Association (PAPA) championship—the Super Bowl of pinball—which draws contestants from arcades across the globe. The winner will walk away with $10,000 and claim to the title “World Pinball Champion.” At an event stocked with wizards, Kerins sure plays the meanest pinball. The world’s top-ranked player, he entered the four-day tournament as its two-time champ. Now, with more than 50 contenders aiming to topple him, Kerins copes with the pressure the only way he knows how—with an earful of Guns N’ Roses.
“I need it loud and obnoxious,” he says, ripping off air guitar licks as he approaches “Whitewater,” an early-’90s game with a river-rafting theme. Kerins removes his earbuds, letting in the din of mashing flippers and trilling bells, and genuflects before the machine. He draws back the plunger, firing his first ball. For nearly 15 minutes, he maneuvers the metal orb around the playfield, completing the game’s missions with precise skill shots and keeping the ball alive with delicate flipper taps and an occasional bump to the sides and top of the table. When it finally drains, Kerins has racked up more than 25 million points, an outsize opening score that shows he’s still king of the pinball world.
It’s a climb that began as an undergraduate on the Farm. As a freshman, Kerins, ’96, fell in with a group of Stanford pinball junkies. They spent hours mastering their techniques in a five-machine arcade in Tresidder Union that’s since been shuttered, and fed their obsession by chatting incessantly in an online pinball newsgroup. They also became fixtures at Bay Area arcades. In early 1994, one of his cohorts won a tournament in San Francisco with a grand prize trip to PAPA 4, held that year in New York City. Kerins tagged along, figuring that at the very least he’d be close enough to visit his family in Rhode Island.
The 18-year-old Kerins made quick work of eight different machines over the course of the weekend, amassing 1.5 billion points on The Who’s “Tommy” in the semifinals, and stunned the flipper fraternity by defeating the defending champion. The next morning, he appeared on the cover of USA Today’s Life section and The Tonight Show came calling. But Kerins chose to take an Economics I exam rather than appear on Jay Leno’s couch. Because he had skipped a previous test to attend PAPA 4, the professor gave Kerins an ultimatum: take the exam or fail the course. “Looking back, it was a dumb decision,” he says. “A really stupid mistake.”
Nowadays, Kerins, who bears a passing resemblance to Seinfeld’s George Costanza, doesn’t field many calls from late-night comedians. He and his wife and infant son live in Salem, Mass., where Kerins writes math textbooks for Education Development Center, a nonprofit working to improve education and other services worldwide. But in certain circles, he remains a legend. “There are a million guitar players and then there’s Jeff Beck. Or Jimi Hendrix. That’s what Bowen is to pinball,” says Rick Prince, who competes in pinball’s senior division. “He’s in that class of the top five or six players in the world. All the rest of the players can’t even touch him.”
Leading up to a tournament, Kerins’s training regimen involves playing pinball three to four hours a week in his basement on the three machines he’s won in various events. He tries to simulate formal competition by disabling bonus balls on the machines and starting games at odd times of day or when he’s fatigued, since he’s likely to play 10 hours of pinball for three straight days at tournaments. He also draws on an encyclopedic knowledge of pinball—name a game and he can recite the strategy for scoring the most points and keeping the ball in play.
An event like PAPA celebrates the inherent geekiness of the pinball scene. Fueled by caffeine and adrenaline, men outnumber women about 25 to 1, and can be seen sporting T-shirts with slogans like: “To win at pinball is to lose at life.” Kerins is clearly in his element. He commands audiences with his energetic playing style. On powerful shots, he lunges into the table, pounding the flippers and kicking his right leg out behind him. Mid-ball, Kerins shouts at the machine and flashes a thumbs-up when he collects bonus points. After a high-scoring run, he takes a bow. “Compared to others, I’m pretty manic,” he says. “I want to make sure I’m always having fun and relieving the tension of the moment.” Even with his frenetic technique, Kerins excels most because of his dexterous touch, which allows him to deaden and catch a ball on a flipper and apply the precise amount of pressure to save a ball headed for doom or shoot it up a ramp for a jackpot.
In the finals, however, the pressure is at last getting to Kerins. Going into the closing game, “The Addams Family,” he has a considerable lead among the final four players. A solid score could clinch the title. But Kerins stumbles on all three balls and barely cracks 10 million points. Keith Elwin, his main rival and the world’s No. 2 player, shoots past him to 190 million points to win the tournament. With the loss, Kerins also relinquishes his top ranking to Elwin, the Nadal to his Federer. He’s disappointed, but also relieved after three days on pinball’s grandest stage. Kerins may have lost at pinball, but it’s clear he’s winning at life.
TED BOSCIA, MA ’07, is a writer at Cornell University.
