Maiden Win for Joel Daniel at Atomic Age Modern
Joel Daniel had entered 122 ranked tournaments before Sunday and won none of them. He came into Silverball Sunday at Atomic Age Modern as the sort of player the ratings quietly overlook — IFPA #3620 in an eight-player finals field that averaged #2008, seeded fifth of eight, a name you note on the sheet and move past. By late afternoon he was the last one standing, having beaten Mesa’s own Dave Halley on a 1977 Evel Knievel to close out the day.
It took the full event to get there, not one lucky ball. Across a 41-player qualifier and a seven-round elimination finals, Daniel kept finishing near the top without quite topping anyone — until the moment it counted, when he stopped finishing second and started finishing first. On a 104-degree July Sunday, in a Main Street shop where the machines are kept in genuinely good shape and the tournaments run into the evening, that steadiness turned into a maiden title.
Halley Runs the Qualifier, Daniel Slips Into the Last Seat
The qualifier was Pace Match Play — head-to-head games across seven rounds, points banked from wins, stragglers cut once everyone had their guaranteed rounds. Dave Halley set the pace and never gave it back, winning his first five rounds outright before easing to a pair of runner-up finishes to take the top seed. Behind him, Brian Pinney turned in the day’s most lopsided qualifying run: the AZ NACS #2 posted the high score on six of the seven machines he played, and still finished second, undone by a single fourth-place game on Bride of Pinbot in Round 2. Kevin Erickson claimed third.
Daniel’s qualifier was a study in the near-miss. He landed in the top three of all seven rounds — five of them in second place — and didn’t win a game until the very last one, closing on The Party Zone in Round 7 for his only round victory of the afternoon. It was enough. He tied for sixth with Louis Rulon and Mark Farina Jr, and that three-way knot filled the final seats of the eight-player bracket. The players seeded above him had done the heavy lifting; Daniel had done just enough to still be in the room.
The Amazing Race Reshuffles Everything
The finals threw out the qualifier’s logic entirely. In an Amazing Race, all remaining players tackle the same machine each round and the lowest score goes home — a format where reputation buys you nothing and one soft game ends your day. The reshuffle was immediate. Pinney, the qualifier’s dominant runner-up and the only Arizona top-10 player in the finals, was the first man out, eliminated in Round 1 on Dolly Parton — the very machine where Farina Jr uncorked the widest margin of the entire finals, a 211,530 that dwarfed Rulon’s 97,710 for the next-best figure there. Erickson followed in Round 2, edged out on Whirlwind.
Round 3 brought the day’s oldest table into play and Daniel’s first statement of the finals. Volley is a Gottlieb from 1976, designed by Ed Krynski with art by Gordon Morison — a slingshot-less, wedge-head oddity of which barely 3,013 were built, the kind of quiet mechanical relic where the top lanes light the drop banks for 5,000 a target and there’s nowhere to hide a bad ball. Daniel put up 54,380 to lead Jason Barre’s 36,180 and send Farina Jr out in third. The field was tightening, and the underdog was suddenly the one setting the number to beat.
Nine Ball, Then Down to Two
From there Daniel simply kept surviving the cut. Chris Stoltenberg went out on Firepower in Round 4. Round 5 was the tense one: on Nine Ball, Daniel’s 175,040 held off Louis Rulon’s 158,750, a gap of about sixteen thousand that separated advancing from elimination. Barre bowed out on Harlem Globetrotters in Round 6, finishing third overall and leaving just two players for the title.
Worth noting along the way: Daniel and Erickson have become regular sparring partners, meeting across 22 shared tournaments in a rivalry that rarely settles, and Sunday tipped Daniel’s way again — Erickson out seventh, Daniel still alive. He’d spent months finishing a step behind players like these. This was the day the step went the other direction.
The Evel Knievel Decider
The championship came down to one game on Evel Knievel, Bally’s 1977 licensed nod to the daredevil, designed by Gary Gayton with art by Paul Faris — one of some 14,000 built, an early solid-state survivor with a five-bank of drops and no software to bail you out. Daniel and Halley were the last two on the floor, and Daniel closed it cleanly: 111,720 to Halley’s 61,380, nearly double the runner-up and no ambiguity about who’d won. The top seed from the qualifier finished second; the man who’d scraped in on a tie finished first.
That the decider landed on a nearly fifty-year-old machine felt fitting for a finals built almost entirely on the shop’s older iron, where scores are small, mistakes are punished, and no multiball comes to rescue a shaky afternoon.
What It Means, and What’s Next
For Daniel, the number that changes is the one that’s stubbornly refused to for 122 events: he finally has a win next to his name. His IFPA rating had already been creeping the right way over the past year, and a full-tournament victory over a field this much stronger on paper is the kind of result that moves it further. It’s his first win in 20 events this season and the sort of afternoon a player points back to. The Silverball Sunday series rolls on at Atomic Age Modern, and Daniel will return to the next one as something he’s never been before — a defending champion, no longer the name you skip past on the sheet.
Final podium — Silverball Sunday 7/5
- 1st: Joel Daniel (IFPA #3620)
- 2nd: Dave Halley (IFPA #897)
- 3rd: Jason Barre (IFPA #397)
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