About
Hacky sack started in Oregon in 1972.
Two guys, John Stalberger and Mike Marshall, made a small beanbag to
help John rehab a knee injury. They started kicking it around. Other
people wanted one. They called it the Hacky Sack and put it on the
market. By the late 70s it was a registered trademark and a real
business.
By the 80s and 90s, you couldn't walk through a college quad or a
parking lot without seeing four guys standing in a loose circle,
trying to keep a small leather pellet-filled ball off the ground. It
was a thing you did between classes. A thing you did at concerts. A
thing you did when you didn't have anything else to do.
Then it got serious. The freestyle scene developed — players inventing
moves with names like the Clipper, the Pixie, the Butterfly, the
Symposium. There are world championships. There's a footbag federation.
There are players who can keep the bag in the air for over five hours
straight using only specific kicks, stalls, and delays they've spent
years perfecting. The world record is 63,326 consecutive kicks. Six
hours, fifty-five minutes. Set by a guy named Ted Martin in 1997 and
never broken.
We are not those guys.
Sunday Sack is for the rest of us — the people who learned to kick a
sack in middle school and never stopped, even when we stopped being
good at it. The people who'd rather stand in a circle with three
friends than be alone with our phones. The people for whom the bag
isn't really the point. The standing around is.
Respect to the freestylers who kept this thing alive for fifty years.
We're just here to keep the circle going.