How Two Friends Invented Hacky Sack in the 1970s

Foot-juggling games have existed for thousands of years, but the Hacky Sack and the popular sport known as “footbag” were both invented by two friends in 1972.

John Stalberger and Mike Marshall met at a music festival in Oregon City, Oregon, in 1972. Stalberger was visiting from Texas, where a promising college football career was cut short by a knee injury. Marshall introduced Stalberger to a game he learned from a Native American man he met in a military prison after going AWOL.

The object of the game was simple. Using only your feet, chest, knees and head (not your hands), try to keep a small, hand-sewn beanbag in the air for as long as possible. The game turned out to be great rehab for Stalberger’s knee and the two friends would play for hours. It was Marshall who came up with the name. Whenever he wanted to play, he’d say, “Let’s go hack the sack!”

Stalberger and Marshall started to think that their fun little hobby could be something bigger, but they needed to improve the design of the footbag. The original model was just the toe end of a sock filled with popcorn kernels. For two years, Stalberger and Marshall experimented with different sizes and shapes of footbags. The early bags were flat and made from scraps of denim jeans, couch upholstery and thick cowhide leather. They quickly learned that seeds were bad filling material, because they sprouted when the bags got wet.

In 1974, Stalberger and Marshall settled on a 2-inch round bag made from two panels of soft leather (stitched like a baseball) and filled with plastic pellets. Stalberger and Marshall applied for a patent and started traveling around Oregon selling their first handmade “Hacky Sacks.”

Then tragedy struck. In 1975, Mike Marshall died in his sleep from a heart attack at just 28 years old. Stalberger was devastated but decided that the best tribute to his friend was to continue chasing their dream of bringing the Hacky Sack and the sport of footbag to the world.

The first packaged and branded Hacky Sacks hit stores in 1977 and Stalberger formed the National Hacky Sack Association to promote the new sport of footbag. Everywhere the Hacky Sack went—college campuses, city parks, Grateful Dead shows—more people fell in love with it. In 1978, Stalberger created a competitive version of the game called “footbag net,” a combination of Hacky Sack and volleyball.

By the early 1980s, the Hacky Sack craze had spread nationwide and Stalberger was approached by Wham-O, the toy company behind classics like the Frisbee and the Slip ’N Slide. Stalberger sold the Hacky Sack rights to Wham-O in 1983. Still, he remained one of footbag’s greatest promoters, helping organize international competitions and supporting the World Footbag Championships. According to Wham-O, more than 25 million official Hacky Sack-branded footbags have been sold.

Footbag and the Hacky Sack are only the latest in a long line of hands-free, foot-juggling games. The oldest historical example is cuju, translated as “kick-ball,” which was played in China as early as the third century B.C. Cuju was played with a ball and there were both cooperative and competitive versions.

The closest international analog to footbag is jianzi, a game still played in China, Vietnam and the Philippines using a shuttlecock instead of a ball. The object of jianzi is the same as footbag: to keep the feathered shuttlecock in the air using all available body parts except the hands.

It’s not clear which Native American game Mike Marshall learned from his cellmate, but there are records of several traditional foot-juggling games among North American tribes. At a Crow reservation in Montana in 1901, visitors described small bladders filled with antelope hair that women tried to keep in the air with their feet for as many kicks as possible. A similar game was observed at a Cheyenne reservation, where the object was to catch the ball on the foot, similar to a “stall” in footbag.