SEBT Participants Recall Their Roots, Reluctantly

On the eve of SEBT, I welcome all 1^st and 4^th Club members to recall their rather distant and modest past. For if we’re to forge ahead toward SEBT, we need to recall our past. Born of boredom, rather bad hygiene, and alcoholism, the first recorded 1^st and 4^th Club Subbuteo tournament transpired on Christmas day 1896. The then, Martin’s Celery Concern, ruled the working class with an iron hand. The pickers, before the blasphemous idea of unionization, labored 16-hour days, insipidly without respite. To make their lives bearable, they founded a Subbuteo society that would form the roots of the modern-day 1^st and 4^th club. Sure they used a ball formed from the remains of a schnapps cork, and the rudimentary figures were meticulously sculpted from chicken bone, in it’s crudest form the joy of Subbuteo spackled over the dung heap of the Martin Celery picker’s listless lives. Rusty “the finger” Johnson (seated second from the left) suggested flicking the players with the finger, revolutionizing the game we know today as Subbuteo. Before “the finger”, the tongue was employed as the mover of players. It is these founding father to whom we are truly indebted.