Tin and games - car ball in the seventies
It wasn't Stefan Raab who invented this hard-to-control game with the hood. Back in the spring of 1978, a German "national team" competed against a team from Switzerland in the parking lot of the Neckar Stadium in Stuttgart to compete against each other in sheet metal-based ball pushing. Each team consisted of five players and their equipment - an old VW Beetle that had been adapted for its new purpose with just harness belts, harder shock absorbers, a cow catcher and a few old tires as side impact protection.
The initiator of the spectacle and team captain of the Germans was Paul Wittmann, who got the idea from the USA, where car ball games have allegedly been held since 1965. But the "ex-high-wire artist, ex-showman and ex-hell driver" was off the mark by a good 30 years and up to 9500 kilometers. Because the first recorded car ball game in history took place in Karlruhe in 1933. As a one-on-one (Mercedes-Benz versus Opel), it was effectively a modernized version of the pistol duel.
However, Wittmann did not yet achieve the breakthrough he had hoped for. It took another 29 years, the introduction of private television and a trained butcher before Autoball became reasonably popular. The invention of the airbag probably didn't help either. As auto motor und sport wrote about the international match in the 1970s: "In car soccer, broken bones, bruises and cuts are an integral part of the spectacle." And that wasn't referring to the cars...
