As the old saying goes, “use your head” — especially when playing “headis” — a combination of soccer and tennis. The German town of Unna hosted a tournament on Saturday. (P.S.: DO try this at home…)[icopyright one button toolbar]
MLSsoccer.com offers this explanation:
What kind of game would you come up with if you combined table tennis, ping pong and header keepie uppies?
It’s called “headis,” which is short for “header table tennis,” and you can see just what it looks like how insanely awesome it by watching the above set of videos.
Headis is still so obscure that if you type something like “headis champion” into Google, it has no idea what you’re talking about and implies that you’ve spelled something wrong.
So where in the world does headis come from?
According to Wikipedia, headis was invented in 2006 by René Wegner, a Saarbruecker sports science student at the time, at “Wesch,” a pool in Kaiserslautern, Germany.
So it’s a new sport? Will it one day earn varsity letters? (Stay tuned)
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.