Former Champions Team Up For Impressive Winning Display

 

The clear winner of this year's Teams Championship was the new team of two former IJA champions, Benji Hill and Chuck Gunter. Hill won the Individual Championship in 1987 and Gunter was the Los Angeles Juniors champion.

 

Both now live in Alexandria, Va., and trained since last Christmas to craft a routine that showed some entirely new ways of passing props between two people. A handful of drops marred what may have otherwise been a Gold Medal performance, and the judges awarded the duo with a Silver instead.

 

Hill said they were happy to win, but not thrilled about their performance because of the drops. "That was the first time we performed it in public, and it just wasn't performance ready yet," he said. "There's a big difference between doing it in the gym and doing it on stage. It wasn't nerves, but we just didn't have enough practice with our communication and both forgot cues."

 

Still, the audience enjoyed the novelty and skill of their musical routine, beginning with three clubs whipped back and forth with solid Albert throws by one man and Treblas by the other. Their six club passing began with passing ultimate chops, a move first shown by the Raspynis. Hill tossed ultimate back crosses to Gunter, and ended the six by throwing Gunter ultimate Albert throws. They passed seven clubs also with ultimate throws, always throwing to each other and never employing a self-pass, and claim to have passed nine in that fashion. They stood side by side with seven and painted a lovely picture in the air as Hill passed every club to Gunter with a triple-spin throw behind his back and Gunter to Hill with an overhand outside triple-spin toss. They broke apart for synchronous five club work, and ended with a five club dropback from Hill to Gunter.

 

After a quick blackout, they returned to stage to do rings. There was a series of five ring dropbacks and tosses from back to front. The finale was what they termed their most technically demanding trick of the routine, a "push-back." With Hill doing a five ring cascade in front, he tossed three quickly in the air back to Gunter, then handed the other two backward. Gunter grabbed the two from Hill's hand, then spotted the three rings descending and began his own five ring cascade. "The margin for error is nothing," Hill said.

 

They then passed eight and ten rings to each other with ultimate tosses, Hill standing in front of Gunter doing back tosses while Gunter tossed forward to Hill.

 

The appearance marked a comeback of sorts for Hill, now 26, who has been sidelined with a hand injury for three years. He said he and the 17-year-old Gunter would like to enter a European circus competition next spring and attract bookings as one of the very few high-technique two-man stage acts performing today. "I finally feel like this may be our chance to be the best at some aspect of juggling," Hill said. "We pass 10 clubs and do synchronous back crosses with five, and would like to be able to get work and legitimately say ours is a world class act."

 

Hill said they'd also like to perform on the IJA stage again and win a Gold Medal. "Winning the competition is irrelevant," he said. "We're after the Gold. We like the Kapell system and think it works well for the IJA. We'd like to be the first Gold Medalists. I think that would be the ultimate achievement."

 

The only other team medal awarded was a Bronze to the Dew Drop Jugglers of Minneapolis, Minn., who themed their three-man act on the Indiana Jones character. Mick Lunzer, Jason LeMay and Jeffrey Kasper came on stage in khakis and pit helmets, "stole" their diabolos from a museum case and did a routine that included synchronized work and passing up to four between the three people. They continued the theme by juggling machetes, including a shoulder-to-shoulder triangle pass. LeMay stood on Lunzer's shoulders for a nine club feed, with the bottom man tossing some under the leg throws for good effect. They passed clubs in a line with up to 11, then finished with 12 in a line. In the end, they put all the clubs in a smoking "ark," and carried them offstage as their prize. "I'm glad that people enjoyed the theme," said Lunzer. "We would have liked not to have dropped so much, but that goes with the name!"

 

The group has been together for six years now, and members are trying to shed their day jobs in favor of full-time performing. They are regulars at the Minnesota Renaissance Faire, and performed at the grand opening of the Mall of America in August.

 

Two other teams finished without medals. They were Out of Hand (Bryson Lang and Justin Menzel of Yardley, Penn.) and the team of Jay Gilligan and Pat McGuire of Tempe, AZ.