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This Issue 01/18/2007

Also in this issue

• Throw it Back
• GETting in
• Reindeer Meat
• Top five of sorority rush

Ten thousand dollars, cash, sat stacked on top of a television in a ballroom at the Philadelphia Holiday Inn. It was all riding on a video game. Lou Tillery, a hotshot gamer from Louisiana, was taking on Young Gunnz, a heavy hitter from New York, in the finals of one of "Gametime" Bobby Morgan's famed underground Madden tournaments. All day long, the room had been filled with heckling and trash talk, as the nation's best virtual football players clashed over and over again. But now there was silence.

Over a hundred ballers-as hardcore Madden players call themselves-and their fans turned their attention away from the nearly two dozen televisions ringing the perimeter of the room and focused with rapture on the showdown in the center. Plenty of them had money riding on the game and nobody had ever seen stakes this big before. "You literally could hear a pin drop," Hank "Hustle Man" Brown says. "It was the greatest game I've ever seen," reflects Antoine "Boogieman" Talley. "There wasn't no heckling involved-there was too much money at stake. Let the players play."

Lou Tillery won, but that's not important. He and Young Gunnz are fine gamers, sure, but ballers come and go. Forget those two, this was Gametime Bobby's show.

* * *

The 36-year-old Morgan is a short, solidly built black man. He's got a close-cropped buzz cut, goatee, and round, alert eyes. Clad in a maroon zip-up hoodie and black T-shirt, tonight he's running his weekly Madden league night at McFadden's Restaurant and Saloon, adjacent to the Phillies' Citizens Bank Park. Keeping one eye on the high-def TV screen he's playing his own game on and the other on the 20 or so league members scattered around the bar, he's down 14-0 to a relative newcomer at the end of the third quarter. Standing just a few feet away, Kareem "'Reem is Back" Robinson, has been riding Morgan all game. Squawking loud enough for the whole bar to hear, 'Reem shouts at the newcomer, "This is the commissioner, my man, whose ass you kickin'!"

Morgan's already thrown four interceptions and when one of his receivers drops a sure touchdown pass in the end zone, he turns away from the TV he's playing on and disgustedly swats at the air.

"You got your ass slapped," 'Reem yells when the game ends in a shutout.

"I did not get my ass slapped," fires back Morgan, stomping away.

"Bobby, there's kids that can score points!"