Glendale couple takes domino building to new level, will appear on national TV show
By JASON BARRY
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GLENDALE, Arizona (KPHO, KTVK) — Gloria Woodman and Robert Dehate spend a lot of time building up what eventually comes down. The Glendale couple has turned their love of dominos into a never-ending challenge to build something bigger and better every time they gather around the dining room table or pour a pack of dominos on the floor.
“You get a tower that’s 3 to 4 feet high, and you put one wrong one down. I’ve watched the tower just crumble in front of you,” said Woodman. “You have to build it strong enough so that it stands and doesn’t fall before it’s supposed to,” said Dehate. “But it also has to be weak enough to topple, so trying to find a good balance of strength and topability is very challenging.”
According to Woodman and Dehate, their creations are extremely time-consuming and require a lot of precision. It is very similar to the couple’s other hobby, flying rockets. The full-time rocketeers own their own hobby store.
During the pandemic, they were home a lot, so playing with dominos was a natural way to pass the time and learn some tricks of the trade. “There’s a specific distance you want to keep them apart,” said Dehate. “If they’re too close they cant fall and get jammed up, and if too far apart, they’ll actually slide and knock the next domino over.”
The domino masters’ skills recently got the attention of Hollywood. The couple will appear in a new national TV show called “Domino Masters,” airing on Fox next month, where they will test their domino-building skills against other contestants.
Woodman and Dehate aren’t ready to quit their day jobs, but they won’t stop reaching for the top, one domino at a time. “Our friends now, when we tell them what we did, they are amazed,” said Woodman. “It’s not an everyday thing you run across.” Some of the more elaborate structures use thousands of dominos and can take several hours or days to complete.
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