Goal-Oriented

Clearly, the market's got potential. "Nobody I've found has an actual number for outdoor rims," he says, "but if you drive around you'll see rims with no nets all around. So it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that even if I get a small percentage of that, I can retire."

Green Bay, Wisconsin, has been an especially good customer. Tom Fritsch, assistant parks superintendent with the Green Bay Parks and Recreation Department, says he was worried about the safety, but that he had a more pressing reason to get rid of chain nets: "The main thing is, people who live in quiet neighborhoods didn't like all the noise. I know that might sound weird, but when the ball would hit the hoop, the net would rattle, and people wouldn't like it."

Green Bay has used DuraNets for three years, and Fritsch guesses his department has installed close to 60 -- all of which, to his knowledge, are still up.

"The reason they stay up so long is because they're ugly, and the kids aren't ripping them off," he says. "I don't think the manufacturer's going to like hearing that stuff, but hey, it works for us."

Rothbard describes his invention over a chocolate shake at Denny's on NASA Road 1 near the Johnson Space Center. He's 42, and he's got a rumpled version of that odd-looking short-on-the-sides, long-in-the-back hairdo, and a vague reticence to spill his beans to a strange reporter. But once the ideas get cranking, with a concurrent acceleration of vocal speed, it becomes difficult to stay on the topic of basketball nets because, as it turns out, basketball nets are just one of a stormy sea of ideas crashing around in the man's head. "I've got lots of stories," he tells me, and he does not lie.

For instance: In 1980, he was contracted to build a model coral snake for the Houston Zoo's venomous snakes exhibit. Four years later, a nosy zoo visitor discerned that the snake wasn't moving and called the Houston Post to report it dead. Thus discovered, the fake snake garnered news coverage as far away as the London Times, and also won an Esquire Dubious Achievement Award and a Texas Monthly Bum Steer, of which Rothbard is particularly proud.

Neither the infamy nor the scores of ideas (good and otherwise) have made him rich, and he's grown cynical about the machinations of product development.

"There's a lot of good ideas that sit on a shelf because corporations don't want to pay independent contractors a dime. They wait until the patent expires and then they do it. So there's usually this lag time between good ideas and the market. Less than two percent of products that are patented ever go to market." An undocumented family legend has it that Rothbard's uncle invented the collapsible umbrella, but never did anything with it.

And Rothbard, conceiver of countless signed-and-dated journal notes, knows what that's like, too. He once invented a cage contraption that held pizza boxes level in car seats to keep hot cheese from heading south in a turn -- but Domino's didn't bite. He briefly marketed a videotape for pacing rowing machine enthusiasts, which he hoped to develop into a series filmed on the world's great rivers. "Always before, people had done it with chase boats, so on the tape you would hear the engine," but Rothbard perched his 13-pound camera in one end of the shell and came up with a silent, soothing video row. "It's still copyrighted," he notes. "I could still do it, if somebody wanted to put up the money."

He's presently mulling ideas for "automotive products, condom products, playground stuff, a mousetrap, stuff for barges, some new musical toys, some diggers, a lot of inflatable products, some tents, some skateboard stuff, some new stuff for airplane landing gear and a new spiral playground slide." He's also working on a device he calls a "cartoon product."

"You know the Salvation Army? At Christmastime they do this" -- he mimics the wristy ringing of a hand bell. "Well, this will be a little device that goes in there that generates electricity from the back-and-forth motion. They ought to be making some power." He laughs, but it's a laugh that suggests he's not entirely joking.

He says he can't be too specific about these projects because he hasn't completed his patent searches. And for most of these ideas, he probably never will. It's the curse of the independent inventor: too little time, too little money and too many brainstorms.

But Rothbard's intent on taking at least one idea, DuraNet, all the way. "This is kinda corny, but when I'm gone, something's left behind. I have changed nets that, except for the chain, have been the same way for 96 years ....

"Other people have thought about this," he says. "They just didn't do anything about it.