It sounds like he has awesome parents. I wish I had 1/10th the zeal and entrepreneurship his Dad(and seemingly his uncle) had.
The only thing I didn't quite grasp is this excerpt. I feel like it's implying something I don't pick up. Is it saying they didn't work together? Was sending the sample sets rude?
> He did make a final good-faith effort to partner with the sport's originator, Wayne Godinet, offering to purchase $20,000 worth of product. It was almost a third of the profit earned from reselling the Japanese shipment. Godinet sent back two sample sets with a bill for the cost of goods and shipping.
So then he felt free to go do his own version.
I think this is supported by the next paragraph:
> In a similar vein, Nike was founded in 1964 only after a running shoe company called Onitsuka lost interest in partnering with a recent Oregon track grad named Phil Knight. While his shoe empire was born between the grooves of a waffle iron, Bob and Jill's cup empire was sketched on the back of a Fresh Fish Co. paper placemat.
There was someone else in the space, but they weren't interested in working with the newcomer who ended up being bigger.
At face value, if someone asks to buy 20k of my product, sending samples seems like an obvious next step?
That it came with a bill implied the producer wasn't interested in the business.
We've also the Wheel Blacks for wheelchair rugby, the Tall Blacks for basketball, and of course, then in cricket it's the Black Caps. (A "cap" in cricket is when you get to play international cricket).
And of course the infamous time the national badminton team tried to call themselves the Black Cocks.
National soccer team is the All Whites.
And womens' sports teams tend to derive from the Silver Ferns (national netball team), plus a reference to their code.
So Black Ferns, rugby, White Ferns is not soccer as you'd expect, but cricket (the traditional "cricket whites" are only worn in test cricket these days), the soccer team is the Football Ferns.
And I'm unsure if there was ever a Fern Cocks badminton team.
The story fits!
That said, there were some exceedingly smart cookies in the early speedcubing scene, and you know, necessity is the mother of invention :)
Speed is crazy.
That video, along with the Skrillex track, is the only reason I even knew about cup stacking. Until today I had no idea that it was an actual serious sport with international competitions. It's always very interesting to see this kinds of subculture crossovers.
Nowadays it makes for a fun free for all drinking game as everyone fumbles stuck together red cups.
But I guess it does build up atleast some level of hand-eye coordination and dexterity. Which is utterly lacking in most of today's youth and educational worlds where using actual tools and making things by hand is viewed as "dangerous" by many, and only a small fraction of kids get into many sports, and all of our focus is on more abstract concepts.
I ask myself the same thing about a lot of the various fidgety things like the spinners. Or the point of the games that are just nothing but how fast can you click like the paperclip games.
some people just like different things. even when you ask, they just say they like it. dopamine hits maybe? better that than dope then I guess
Because people enjoyed them so did them.
Especially fencing.
They're all just games of dexterity in the end. No different from videogames, come to think of it.
Would be great to also have one on that boys & girls club where the whole idea was invented and what else they might have come up in the 80s.
The "invent a game with cups" at least is a great hint towards motivating kids (on a different level than actually competing in the resulting game) close to a Sesame Street kind of mindset from back then and might deserve a story on its own for "hacking" cups into being toys and even a sport in the end.
Fox, KitWhich I recognize is over the top, but in particular the covid ESSR funds to schools were invitations to everybody and their sister to bilk public schools anyway they could with programs like this.
Our regional tiny PreK-4th grade school gifted itself with a $25k wall to ceiling video game system along the same lines (https://play-lu.com/). These companies even have marketing literature on how to use ESSR funds.
For those who want to dive down this ea bit hole a bit for our local spend dilemma:
https://www.westamwelltimes.com/post/champagne-dreams-the-lp...
We just had that fucking parachute. And that awful chicken fat song.