Title Bout

I've written before about playing various games through the years and even yesterday with what I've been playing with Action PC during quarantine, but I'm not sure that I have ever written about the game that I played before any other.

Title Bout was a board game from the company Avalon Hill and had licensing for their sports games from Sports Illustrated.
SI often carried ads in their magazine for the sports games from Avalon Hill, which had some popularity, but not to the degree of their top competitors in Strat O Matic and APBA, but even at that age I was a rabid boxing fan, so it was Title Bout that I wanted most.

The first edition came out in 1979 and strategy games were usually something that didn't hit stores in Hagerstown in an era of only a few places to shop.
Hagerstown did have two toy stores, neither of which would remind anyone of Toys R Us, but an occasion to visit either was one to relish.
One was located on the outskirts of downtown and wasn't really a part of retail shopping as it wasn't near the downtown shopping area.
At the turn of the decade, Hagerstown's downtown area was already showing the signs of deterioration from the Long Meadow Shopping Center's arrival in the late '60s and the Valley Mall's 1974 opening, but still, Juvenile Sales wasn't even a convenient stop from there as anyone familiar with the one-way maze-like streets that plague the Hub City to this day.
My mom might have taken me to Juvenile once or twice a year as a kid and I only remember bits of information about the store.
I remember more about their move to the North End into what was then vacated by the Safeway grocery store in an attempt to stay alive.
I took Ryan there a lot as a small child, but they didn't last more than a few years before going out of business.

The other store was KB Toys, which would file for bankruptcy in 2009, but at its peak, KB Toys seemed to be in every mall in the country and if your town didn't have a Toys R Us, KB Toys was the closest thing even though it was small and somewhat limited in its stock.
However, KB Toys must have signed an agreement with Avalon Hill as they sold a few of the sports games, but mostly the company's war and historical games, which could be quite hard to understand at my age (or even older, as I remember my buddy Greg and I buying their Vietnam game and being so confused that we returned it!) were the main portion of the supply.
One day, as I looked around KB, I discovered Title Bout in stock and it immediately was at the top of my want list/
I don't recall the expense, but it was a bit salty for me at the time to just purchase or have my mom buy for me without a reason.
My guess is that it was around 15 dollars, so in the early 80s, fifteen dollars was equal (to this chart anyway) to 47 dollars today.

I do recall how I bought it though.
As a kid, I always wanted to work in sportscasting and although I was a pretty decent player in Little League, I had no illusions of being a future pro.
Still, I was moving up to senior league (then ages 13,14, and 15) and was on the field warming up during tryouts, when my dad called to me.
The senior league had just two teams and I was afraid I'd get drafted by one that was managed by a gentleman with an agenda- I had made the All-Star team over his son the previous year and we both played first base and my dad had told me that this fellow had told him he wanted to draft me and "with my son and Shawn" we should be set.
Dad knew how that was going to go- his son would be at first base and I'd be exiled to the outfield, which didn't exactly fit my less-than-nimble skillset!
Dad told me this, but he had other news- I could leave right now and talk to a league president to be the "voice" of the league from the press box, announcing the game, keeping score and a not-to-be-underestimated point- earn twenty dollars a week!
That was a huge sum and having money in my pocket to do something I loved (did I mention money?) certainly beat playing out of position and seldomly behind someone that I had proven to be the superior player.
I never played another organized baseball game again, but I spent four years in the booth and loved every minute of it.
Title Bout was my purchase with my first payday and that game traveled with me everywhere.
It was in the booth as I held matches between innings.
It was on my lap on vacations to Ohio, Arkansas, and Florida (watch the video below to imagine the two boards across my lap in the back seat) and it even (along with other games) traveled with me in the car to help pass the time between the end of the school day and dates with Cherie, if I couldn't find a pickup basketball game to play in.

I won't get too detailed about the game itself because you can watch the video below ( if interested, you'll understand the logistics of the game) and get a feel for the game and what the board and fighter cards looked like, but the one thing that I didn't like about the game was the gameplay without dice.
Using "action" cards as Avalon Hill did, you could start expecting certain results to happen in the deck (if they had not been played to that point) and it took some of the spontaneity from the game that dice rolls can bring away.
This was a trademark of Avalon Hill games as we played Statis Pro football a lot between Greg, Ryan, and myself through the years and you could almost feel a big play coming up (Handoff to Bruce Harper) from the card deck.
I had eight-man tournaments, sixteen-man tournaments, title defenses, and supercards brought to mind from the greats of the fight game and the stars of the late 70s (remember my card set was 1979 or 1980), which would often be named by whatever place that I was playing at or watching on TV.
I had tons of this stuff that is either gone or in the attic somewhere and I remember playing after work with two guys that I worked with inside the restaurant (Super Show at the Burger Dome?) as we fried up various burgers that never hit the menu at Burger Chef.

Title Bout was the first of many sports games that I've played and what I like best about sports games is that they are only constrained to the imagination even to this day with the computer games that I play.
Title Bout is still in the attic and I think Ryan even played it some when he was still at home and even if I never play it again, I don't have the heart to move it along.
Too many memories and too many nights spent with the company of cards like Alfonso Zamora, Yoko Gushiken, and Danny "Little Red" Lopez to recall to give to Goodwill or sell for a few quarters on eBay.

The passings are already filling up sadly, but I'll be cleaning the inbox next time with a few articles of interest.