Part II of the Rob Nelson Interview: Playing for the Portland Mavericks, a Game Called Boku, Et Cetera
January 30, 2011 by Arne Christensen · Leave a Comment
I earlier posted the portion of my talk with Rob Nelson in which he talks about co-creating Big League Chew and his 30 years managing one of the legendary bubble gums. In this part, Rob Nelson describes how he came to be a Portland Maverick, what it was like to be on the team, and what his game called Boku is all about.
How did you come to join the Portland Mavericks in 1975? I understand you’d been playing in South Africa, and it sounds pretty unlikely to go from there to Portland.
I met with two fellows in a pub in Ithaca, who told me about baseball in South Africa, and I went to my college coach–I’d had one real good year at Cornell–and he said, “You’d be a good fit for this project in South Africa.” I had a pretty good instinct about it, and it was a risk/reward thing. I was younger, didn’t have many bills to pay, could be a gambler.
In 1975 I went back to South Africa, where I was playing ball with a bunch of guys from the U.S. It’s funny, almost all of the team stayed there after the season, and two guys never came back: they married local girls, and just moved to South Africa permanently. My dad sent me a packet of clippings, and there was a Sporting News article about the Mavs. I thought it was something that might work, so I took a trip over to Portland that March, after the season ended.
I figured I’d substitute teach and go out to the Northwest to try out for the Mavs. It was really interesting there in Portland. Bing Russell told me, “You’re not a big league prospect.” But it sounded perfect, and it was. We came up with the gum, and I started working with John Paulson and his JUGS company .
And I met my wife 20 years ago, January 1991. It was strange, me a pitcher 40 years old or so, and her 16 years younger, but we hit it off. I’d been a single guy, using baseball as a perspective, a way to approach life, but thank goodness she asked me out to lunch. Now we have three kids, twins and a daughter, Paige, who’s 11; she’s named after Satchel Paige.
What was your situation with the Mavericks, and why did it work?
Bing Russell, he was a maverick before it was a cliche. He died 7 or 8 years ago. Bing was a terrific guy, a lot like me. He grew up in New England, went to Dartmouth, then went west to become an actor, and it worked out. He was on Bonanza. In a lot of ways we have parallel lives. We got along great: Bing had his heart in right place. The Portland Beavers had moved to Spokane in 1972, and Bing had the Mavs from 1973-’77.
Most of the players on the team just wanted to play ball. They felt that if you didn’t get a fair shot from a major league team, you could go to the Mavs, prove yourself, and make your way. In AAA, you have players who don’t want to be there, they want to “climb the golden stairs,” as Johnny Sain said, to the big leagues. But with the Mavs, most of the guys were young, single, wide-eyed; they didn’t have a real solid sense of where they fit in the larger scheme of pro baseball.
Portland was a city of diversity, it was perfect for the team. You know in ’78, the Beavers had twice as many home games as we did in ’77, our last year, and the Beavers had less total attendance.
In 1977 I was the 10th man in the pitching rotation, and the pitching coach too. I had a great sense of what I could and could not do as a pitcher, so I was an ideal coach: I knew enough not to put myself in the game.
I read Bouton’s essay some years back on the Mavs , and he emphasizes the kind of rapscallion nature of the team. Was he exaggerating a little bit? Was the team really that wild, unruly?
It’s unfortunately true, yes; we had a cast of characters, unruly guys. It was as colorful as Bouton made it out to be. There were guys on that team doing things I’d never imagined doing, coming from Cornell, just a background completely different from those guys. At one point my manager, Jack Spring, said “What are you doing on this team?”
I was trying to rebuild my career: something about being around that team, it just made sense to me. Spring though I might take business classes at Portland State University, but I never got that chance, between working for JUGS, doing marketing with them, and the Big League Chew project.
I noticed last night that apparently you invented a board game called Boku , right? The game where you try to get five marbles lined up in a row, and stop your opponent from doing the same.
Boku; it won a prize from Mensa, and that was nice. But it wasn’t a real success, I wasn’t hungry enough with it. It’s quite popular among a small group of enthusiasts in the U.K. I’ve put on Boku tournaments at schools, and it’s had really good, dizzying responses from 3 rd to 5 th graders.
The game was originally called Bollox, which means “gum things up.” It’s hard to say what makes one game a hit, why certain games get so popular. The Apples to Apples game, it’s real popular, millions in sales. Pictionary, it was invented by a guy Rob, a waiter in Seattle: Why do these games get so popular?
My game, Boku, it has just two rules, but the sandwich rule is a surprise. It changes everything, makes the game a lot harder. You know, I’ve looked and looked, done all kinds of Google searches, everything, and apparently the board design and the two playing rules for Boku are unprecedented. Improbable as it sounds, apparently those two things, over the hundreds of years of board games-chess, etc.-no one else had come up with either one.
I have a couple ideas that are embryonic. The Lucky Letters game, an alphabet-based lotto game: I have one state I’m waiting to hear back from about it. You try to tweak this, tweak that, and hope to really hit the jackpot at some point.
Do you think there’s a chance that playing baseball helped form a way of thinking that led you to come up with these board games and Big League Chew?
No one’s ever asked me that. You do have a lot of time to speculate about stuff, come up with different wrinkles; you get a chance to ruminate, sitting out in the bullpen. Maybe I was drawn to baseball because of the time element, the way nothing much goes on; but a lot’s happening if you pay attention
I try to get kids thinking of new ways to do things when I’m teaching, or holding baseball camps. Have some fun: it’s the playful side of my personality. I like word games. And the family culture for me was to have fun with the game, but do it well: they’re not mutually exclusive.
I come from pretty humble roots. My dad was a cop in New York City, and he never knew his dad, who died when he was 1. Our family, we’re happy with our lot in life. Our friends in high school, they wanted to hang out there, at our house, because it was a good place to be.
All in all, I don’t know of anyone who’s done so much with so little talent as myself. I took advice from some really smart people, who knew how to point me on the way. If I could sum it up in one word, it’d be grateful. I’ve had good instincts, I got lessons from a dozen key people: about a dozen great role models, and I played for great coaches. The two elements, instinct, luck: it’s a fine line between the two, hard to tell when it’s been crossed.
