aurellius said:
Didn't Real Life get nerfed sometime back in the 70's or has it been around longer than that?
M
[trivia]
Birth of a Nerf
It was 1970. Skirts were short, hair was long. The Beatles broke up. And Fred Cox (Arts and Sciences '62) was in the midst of a record-setting 15-year career as a kicker for the Minnesota Vikings.
Then fate, as they say, intervened. A friend, John Mattox, approached Cox with an idea for a children's backyard kicking game. There was only one problem: What to use for a ball?
"John said you had to use something heavy so they can't kick it out of the yard," Cox recalls. "I said all you're going to end up with is a bunch of little kids with sore legs. What you need is something a little lighter, something on the order of foam rubber.
"It was kind of a fluke that I came up with the idea."
Unbeknownst to Cox and Mattox, Parker Brothers, the toy giant, had been trying for several years to produce a football to complement its hugely popular foam Nerf ball. The same sponge-like quality that made the round Nerf work as a faux baseball or basketball proved too light for a football. Imagine the hoopla when Cox and Mattox visited Parker Brothers' headquarters to offer their somewhat-heavier-but-still-light-enough-for-kids prototype.
Since the product was introduced in 1972, more than 50 million have been sold--the hottest selling footballs in the world. Placed end to end, they would stretch from Pittsburgh to Tokyo. (Not that anyone has tried...)
"It's amazing how few people know I was ever involved with it," says Cox, now a chiropractor in Monticello, Minnesota.
"Very few people I played with on the Vikings knew I invented the ball. Now they tell me they wish they'd invented it...." --Bob Fulton
[/trivia]
EDIT: Parker Brothers marketed the round Nerf ball in 1969.
Far out!