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Die neuste Folge der FB Radio Show ist online:

FB Radio: May 7th, 2006
Live from NOCER Productions' "Osborne Identity" , 51 Minuten

Der erste Spieltag der Deutschen Amateur Liga im 5-Mann Paintball wurde dieses Wochenende gespielt. Dabei kam es in den einzelnen Regionen zu folgenden Ergebnissen:

DAL Mitte:

1. MIB 2
2. Flying Colors
3. MIB 1
4. Diamonds
5. Damned
6. Unlimited
7. Templer
8. Colorfull
9. Lost Boys
10. Skullz

DAL Nord:

1. SU-Real
2. TBA Schwarz
3. Lübeck lions
4. Chaosphere
5. Templer
6. Painthers
7. TBA Grau
8. Remedy

DAL Süd-West:

1. Playboys
2. Inmate
3. SAF-Crew
4. Lost Souls
5. 7/11

DAL Süd-Ost:

1. Inflame
2. The Misfits
3. DestrAction
4. Ohio Falcons Kids
5. Redux
6. Bock 2 Zock 1
7. Bock 2 Zock 2
8. Ohio FUN 2
9. Suicide

DAL West:

1. Fast 'n Deadly
2. Fortune
3. Cologne Predators
4. Fight Club 3
5. Goodfellas Youngsters
6. Bad Boys Cologne
7. 667 N.o.t.B.
8. Paintstorm Elements
9. Roughnecks
10. Fast`n Deadly 2
11. Fortune II
12. Splat Dragons
13. Elysium

DAL Ost:

1. Team Fabrik
   
2. Paintfreaks
   
3. Muchachos
   
4. Rebirth Berlin Next
   
5. Satis-Verborum
   
6. Excido
   
7. Ironwolves
8. Havana Beach Club
   
9. Shooters
   
10. Party Animals
    
11. Insane

Der erste Spieltag der Deutschen Nachwuchs Liga im 3-Mann Format wurde dieses Wochenende abgehalten. Dabei kam es in den einzelnen Regionen zu folgenden Ergebnissen:

DNL Mitte

1. Lost Boys
2. High Voltage
3. Straight Forward
4. D Vision
5. Front Inc
6. MIB
7. Royal Aces
8. United Blood
9. Unlimited

DNL Nord

1. RunningMen
2. Schaumburg Hornets
3. Remedy
4. Madballz
5. Ladyfire

DNL Süd-West

1. Mellow D
2. Harlekins
3. Nieder Forrest 1
4. Pirates/Overkill
5. Pacmen
6. 7/11
7. Illuminated

DNL Süd-Ost

1. wird nachgereicht bei Verfügbarkeit

DNL West

1. wird nachgereicht bei Verfügbarkeit

DNL Ost

1. Predators Magdeburg
2. Impressive Magdeburg
   
3. Hammerheadz
   
4. Fabrik
   
5. Whizz-Kidz
   
6. Predators Magdeburg young
   
7. Team Ghost Berlin
   
8. Paintkiller
   
9. Oculus Ex Neo
   
10. Ad Rem
    
11. Shooters
    
12. Oculus Ex
    
13. Paintkiller Deluxe
    
14. Red Riot

Kila Products die eigentlich nur für Ihre magnetischen Balldetents bekannt sind bauen Ihr Sortiment weiter aus und bringen nun ein Tuning-Board für die Promaster und die Freestyle7 raus. Das Board kommt mit all den Funktionen die man von einem aktuellen Tuning-Board erwarten kann:

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Alex French von der LA Times hat am 7.Mai einen Artikel über Paintball für den Sportteil seiner Zeitung veröffentlicht. Darin wird  in der Hauptsache auf der falsche "Kriegsspiel-Image" des Paintballsports eingegangen. Aber auch das Team Dynasty ist ein Thema und wird mit einigen Bildern sowie einignen Absätzen über die Erfolge und den Lebensstil der Jungs porträtiert:

War Games

If you were lucky enough to be a member of the San Diego Dynasty, the most dominant team in the 25-year history of competitive paintball, you would almost never wear a shirt. Your torso would be chiseled, as bronze and dark as an old penny, and dappled with round welt scars like cheetah spots. You would wear Dolce & Gabbana sunglasses, nylon board shorts and shiny sterling rings on your fingers and thumbs. You probably wouldn't have to work a day job, but you might anyway, perhaps building custom cars or smashing stuff at construction sites. You would live in the Pacific Beach section of San Diego, where the party meets the ocean.

Cruising the main thoroughfares—Grand and Garnet—from east to west, you'd pass long stretches of sky-high palms, beach sundry stores, upscale Cali-Mex cantinas, wood patio bars and 24-hour taco shops, all the way west to Mission Boulevard and the boardwalk, where vagrants with dreadlocked beards and beet-red skin camp, and thready-veined boys on long boards hiss past bikini-clad girls on beach cruisers with 12-packs of Pacifico cradled in handlebar baskets. You would be one of the best paintballers on earth, a supernova in a sport most people have no idea exists. Seeing your picture in paintball magazines would be old news, though you would never grow tired of it. Nor would you grow tired of seeing yourself in paintball videos or signing autographs for kids who idolize you with the same intensity that I idolized Roger Clemens when I was about the age of most Dynasty fans—between 9 and 16. You would have groupies. The pages of your passport would be covered with stamps from exotic locations, places such as Buenos Aires and Malaysia and Majorca. You would think of the other members of Dynasty less as teammates and more as brothers, and you would inform people of that fact often—that you love each other very, very much. If you were lucky enough to be one of the members of Team Dynasty, you would have a certain awareness that you have been blessed by the gods.

Chances are, when most people think about paintball, they think: war games. They think about rednecks hiding in the forest disguised as bushes and wielding markers (paintball-speak for guns) that look like real assault weapons. If that is indeed the case, then they don't know that paintball is the third most popular action sport in the world (behind skateboarding and in-line skating, but ahead of snowboarding, BMX biking and surfing). Nearly 10 million Americans (predominately male) participate in the sport, though only 6% of them play competitively.

The game is, essentially, capture-the-flag, but with more strategy. Competitive paintball is played in a number of formats; depending on the tournament, teams may play with three, five, seven or even 10 members per team. Instead of rocks and trees, the pros seek cover behind brightly colored inflatable bunkers that sound a hollow ping when hit by a high-velocity projectile. When a player is struck by a paintball, whether it's on the head, chest, foot or on part of his or her equipment, that player is eliminated. In seven-man paintball, the most popular format, the field is always 180 feet long and 100 feet wide, but the number of bunkers—35 to 40 are routinely used—and their arrangement on the field vary from one tournament to the next.

Paintball's massive audience moved ESPN to produce an eight-episode series of the U.S. Paintball Championships from Miami, which currently is airing. The sport is a billion-dollar-a-year retail industry, and the pages of a handful of magazines devoted to pro paintball often feature Dynasty's Alex Fraige, Ryan Greenspan, Angel Fragoza, Yosh Rau, Quincy Boayes, Johnny Perchak and Brian "B.C." Cole hawking apparel and high-tech markers that look more like gas pump handles than machine guns. These advertisements lay bare Dynasty's accomplishments: four World Championships and three Triple Crowns, a title that requires winning the professional division of the American Series, the European Series and the World Series. No team had ever won the Triple Crown before Dynasty.

To those outside the paintball community, the irony accompanying the public adulation surrounding Team Dynasty is that this group of young men, who are renowned for winning pantomime battles, is flourishing in the heart of San Diego, a community that is responsible for training real soldiers and that knows, perhaps better than most, that war is not a game.

Friends asked me several times while I was researching this article: "Do you think those paintball dudes would totally kick ass in Iraq?"

It's the type of question that infuriates Team Dynasty members and paintball advocates who spend a lot of time fighting the idea that paintball is a dangerous war game, part of our culture of violence. Such perceptions prevent the sport from being embraced by the mainstream, they say.

But paintball wasn't intended to be a mainstream pastime. It was a survival game conceived to settle a dispute between two friends, a New York stock trader named Hayes Noel and a writer from New Hampshire named Charles Gaines. According to a 2004 Sports Illustrated article by Gaines, Noel believed that the survival instincts he'd learned living on Manhattan's Upper East Side and working on the trading floor would outperform those of Gaines, not just in an urban environment but also in the woods, an environment in which Gaines had been raised, and with which Noel was almost wholly unfamiliar.

To settle the bet, Gaines, Noel and 10 others—including a ski shop owner, a forester and three writers—took to the woods of New Hampshire in June 1981. Each man was dressed in camouflage and shop goggles and was equipped with a Nel-Spot 007 bolt-action pistol (the kind used by ranchers to mark cattle), a supply of paintballs, extra CO2 cartridges, a compass and a map of the 100-acre game site indicating the whereabouts of four flag stations and home base. Twelve flags hung at each station. The objective was to be the first man to arrive at home base with four different colored flags and without having been shot by another player. According to Gaines, stockbroker Noel spent most of the afternoon cowering in a bush. And the forester, who never fired a single shot and was never seen by another player, won the game.

Following the competition, one of the writer-participants, Bob Jones, wrote the first Sports Illustrated piece about the game; later the other two scribes had articles published in Time and Sports Afield. All three reflected on the unbelievable adrenaline rush that accompanied the hunt. Each article was met by an overwhelming number of letters from readers requesting instructions on how they, too, could play. Gaines, Hayes and ski shop owner Bob Gurnsey responded by selling a starter kit that included a Nel-Spot pistol, paintballs, a compass, goggles and a rule book. They called their creation the National Survival Game. Before long, it would be called paintball. It took practically no time for the game to find its way to Canada, Australia, France and Denmark. These days paintball is played in more than 50 countries.

There are a number of compelling anthropological theories about why it became so popular in the U.S. One is that paintball caters to the American infatuation with guns. Social scientists such as MIT's Hugh Gusterson say this fascination has been hard-wired into our collective psyche. "America's obsession with guns and gunplay has its origins on the Wild West frontier. All real men needed to know how to use a gun—it was necessary to their survival," he says. "Now, it's more necessary for men to have mathematical and linguistic skills, but the fascination with guns has endured."

In 1994, James William Gibson, a sociologist at Cal State Long Beach, published a book called "Warrior Dreams." Gibson argued that in the post-Vietnam years of the late 1970s and early 1980s, a new paramilitary culture took hold of America. It was a time of "Rambo," pulp action novels, military thrillers and magazines such as Solider of Fortune, and those generally depicted good men acting alone or in small groups—and beyond the aegis of a corrupt command authority—to defeat evil men in armed combat. It offered men a fantasy identity as powerful warriors capable of healing the wounds of defeat in Vietnam and battling other perceived foes, such as liberals, feminists and illegal immigrants.

As part of his research, Gibson played paintball at a complex where one course had been designed to resemble a Vietnam village and another to look like the crash site of a Nicaraguan supply plane. "This was definitely a war game," he recalls, and he didn't find that surprising. "From the time of the Greeks up until firearms became fairly reliable in the 18th century, sports like wrestling, fencing and archery were also a form of combat training." As early as the late 1980s, paintball players were abandoning fatigues in favor of motocross clothing resembling the uniforms worn today by Dynasty and other professional teams. Governing bodies such as the National Professional Paintball League were formed to regulate play. To rid the sport of the stigma of violence, insiders began referring to paintball guns as markers. And bunkers were redesigned to look less like military installations and more like playground toys.

For all that, Gibson has reservations about paintball as a sport. "The problem," he says, "is that you're still drawing on somebody."

Proponents of the modern game wave off such criticism. "Paintball isn't a war game," says Eric Crandall, a former paintball player and Team Dynasty's longtime manager. Players consider themselves to be athletes. If they wanted to go to war, they say, they'd enlist.

Anyway, says Chuck Hendsch, president of the National Professional Paintball League, the explosion of paintball's popularity has more to do with the world's largest retailer than with war. "Paintball was only introduced into major sporting goods retailers in 1997, and in Wal-Mart in 1995," he says. He also notes that a case of paintballs that used to cost $125 now sells for $50.

Gaines, one of the game's creators, once said paintball could be seen "as a metaphor for the efficacy of teamwork, for universal cause and effect and for the manner in which consequences evolve from sequential decisions. And some people will even tell you that it is a sure and ugly metaphor for war. We don't believe that is so, but I am not out to argue the point here."

In the parking lot of San Diego's Qualcomm Stadium, the National Professional Paintball League has set up a campus of vendor tents, sound stages and portable bleachers for the fourth of five events that will decide the Super 7 World Series of Paintball. Six turf fields are spread over acres of pavement. Two hundred teams from as far away as Stockholm are jammed into area hotels. Preliminary-round games for amateur and semi-pro divisions are scheduled to begin Friday, and 18 professional squads, including Dynasty, are slated to play the first of their eight opening-round matches Saturday morning.

To win a game, a team must eliminate all seven of the other side's players and capture the opposing flag in less than seven minutes. The teams that survive the first two days return to compete for the $25,000 prize pot.

Es gibt einen ausführlichen Artikel von Gary Shows dem Besitzer von San Diego Legacy über die Pläne von Smart Parts die NXL ins Fernsehen zu bekommen. Darin kann man lesen das sich fünf der orginalen NXL Teams (Aftershock, Trauma, Ironmen, Legacy und Assassins) entschieden haben an dem Aufzeichnungsevent nicht teilzunehmen. Der vollständige Text vom Paintballstar mit jeder Menge Hintergründe üder die Politics in der NXL:

Gary Shows has been around paintball a long time. He's worked for Dye, more recently Hybrid. Onwer (and player) of NXL team San Diego Legacy, and now one of the owners of the PSP. The following article was written by Gary and is his personal opinion on why 5 of the 10 original NXL teams won't be present at an upcomming invitation-only event to be filmed for ESPN in Connecticut next month.

The NXL was originally started with the existing Pro Division Teams in the PSP in an attempt to create a League that would be able to be shown on TV just as any legitimate sport show and be able to create careers and pay players as professional players with actual Salaries.

This could be done by legitimizing the League and having a Network that would be interested in promoting such a format.

We set up rules and structure much like the NHL and began the process of seeking interest. We did this in an attempt to make sure that whoever came around that may have an interest in putting this league on TV would be clear to move without baggage. This is the reason that initially there was no filming and the like so that this party would see that they had exclusive rights to the filming and would not have a dilution factor that pre-existed. In Hind site this was a bad move with good intentions.

The Gardners had some influence and connections with in the Television Industry or at least made efforts to make contacts and they managed to get the ear of Dick Clark.
He had an interest in trying to take the NXL to a Televised League on TV and was willing to use his resources.

The NXL and Dick Clark entered into an agreement.

In general it was outlined like this.

Dick Clark would get the NXL on TV within a two year period and for this Dick Clark Productions would get 20% of the revenue generated by the production. He would further get the rights to the products generated by the league. This means the Products generated by any team and the souvenirs sold Dick Clark Productions would also get 15% of the income from these items.

It was also written into the agreement that this would after I think three years be reduced to 15% of the revenue to Dick Clark Productions and this was for any thing world wide and forever that the League existed. It seemed a fair trade if indeed Dick Clark Productions could do what he said he could do.

Well after the first show Dick Clark had a Heart Attack/Stroke…This also meant that he was in default of his Key Man clause of the agreement because he could not represent any longer. His entire operation was no longer interested in Paintball. This initial airing of the TV show extended his agreement and is supposed to end based on non performance in June of 2006.

This is where it gets kinda murky. Understand that the entire time the NXL had existed that Jerry Braun had acted as legal council for the NXL.

There was talk that the Gardners wanted to pursue things along with Jerry Braun and we all Oked this effort. We were thankful they showed so much interest and expended their personal time in this effort to continue moving forward.

We heard at the 2005 World Cup that they had found the person that Dick Clark had to approach to actually get the TV time, and the Gardners were contacting him. This persons name is Stan Moser. They told us that things were going well and that they were making progress.

After World Cup the NXL had a meeting the first part of December in Las Vegas and we all voted to place the NXL in the PSP in an attempt to allow the teams to compete for money as prizes in a tournament format. The NXL had always played a League format. Nothing was mentioned about Dick Clark or anything about TV except that the Gardners and Jerry were working on it. Oh Yeah (it was close).

We then are asked to go to New York after Texas for another meeting. This was to meet with the ESPN people and the production people to put the NXL on TV.

We get there and to our surprise we have the Gardners, Jerry Braun & Stan Moser along with the Smart Parts CFO and a couple of other Lawyers on one side of the room and the rest of the NXL owners on the other.

We find out that these individuals have formed another group/company with intentions of taking the place of Dick Clark Productions. In other words instead of allowing the agreement to become dated they wanted to revive it but with them in its place! They were going to now take the Dick Clark %’s This was our Partners & our Legal Council who are now saying they are our partners but now taking on a another role but actually have cut themselves into a larger piece of the pie!

They said they had a production budget and that a date was set to film a tournament.

This was to take place in Connecticut at the Mohegan Sun casino Resort. Taking place on May 22nd..23rd..24th

Over a three day period we would have a shoot /tournament with 10 teams and this would be aired in the fall. Sounds good but!

What about that 20%/15% deal with Dick Clark? If we waited this would go away and there would be more $ for the league. Oh no! The new company they were putting together would take the place of that. How can that be if we get on TV because then Dick Clark Productions will just say they were responsible for getting us on TV because after all Stan Moser is a personal friend of Dick Clarks and the NXL would have never contacted him without Dick Clark.

So there is this possibility that if we agree, then we are obligating ourselves to the 15% to Dick Clark and another 15% to this new company MGB. We refused this deal

The Gardners also wanted the NXL to guarantee their money back because they had fronted the $800,000.00 toward the cost of the initial production at this event. They mad a proposal that goes like this.

The Gardners would get the first $800,000.00 that came to the league. Jerry Braun would get the next $100,000.00 and then Stan Moser would get the next $400,000.00 after this was completed the Gardners would then get the next $800,000.00 which was now $1.6 million! We thin the Gardner should get their money back, but not in this manner.

We reminded them that the League was originally set up so that 20% went to Dick Clark, 20% went to the Administration of the NXL, and then the 60% balance was to be divided amongst the Franchise Teams to be paid out as the owners wanted. Most of the owners were going to pay this $$ to the players in the form of a Salary.

Now because of this new “Circumstance” this was no longer possible. We told them that it would take somewhere between 10.3 Million to 13.3 Million dollars or Revenue before any money would reach the players. We told them that if the players found out that this existed and that they were making $$ and the Teams/Players were not that we would have a mutiny!

We wanted no part of this deal but would rather let the Dick Clark deal pass and then start on our own looking for other avenues…

This new Company consisting of Jerry, Gardners, and Moser wanted to continue and they said if we did not want to sign the new deal that they would form their own league and continue themselves.

This Film shoot at the Mohegan Sun has been fronted by the Gardners and even up till the Vegas event they were trying to get the NXL to go.

They gave each NXL owner a contract that had to be signed in 72 hrs while at the PSP Vegas Event. We refused to sign. Aftershock Refused! Ironmen Refused! Trauma Refused! Legacy Refused! Assassins Refused! This is five of the ten NXL franchises that refused to sign such a deal and extend an agreement that was not necessary and would end the agreement if they only waited another 30 days. We also would not sign an agreement that basically made it impossible to get any money to the Teams & players!!!!

The Boston Legion had already told the League they were not going to the event because there was not budget to go there. Then at Vegas they said they were going to form another league if we did not sign! We asked if they were going to have these other Teams sign such a deal and we were told no! With the new league they would have 100% control. We asked who they were inviting and were told the following teams:

Dynasty..Philly..Strange..Miami..New York..Naughty Dogs..Boston..XSV. ALL SMART PARTS TEAMS, with the exception of XSV. They were going to pay for all the teams. This is not a tournament, but a Smart Parts Advertisement with XSV in there for appearance sake. Boston is going because now someone is paying for them to attend…

Again I have to say, it is really easy to get on TV. You just purchase it, but this was never a goal of the NXL. We want it to be a legitimate league with legitimate Teams and players who are getting a salary…just as the NFL, NHL, AFL, XFL or any existing professional League has.

I might also add that this production taking place has no performance agreement. There is no contract for airing the Event in the Fall. We asked to see the contracts and they could not produce them…

We asked why would they not ask these teams to sign an agreement that they have asked their partners to sign?

We feel there is much more to this story that is just not being told…

The NXL is still moving forward as part of the PSP’s and from the last event in Vegas is stronger than ever with the best competition in the World taking place.

So in summary, 5 of the 10 NXL teams are not attending this Smart Parts Event for the above mentioned reasons…

Updated May 04, 2006 Written by Gary Shows