The spectacle is too good to ignore. Whether via YouTube, or in a park just off Sydney’s Darling Harbour, the sight of two dudes playing what looks like table tennis with their heads is irresistible to the eyeballs. The lunchtime crowd goes from strolling through to massing around the concrete-reinforced tables, ogling this suite of moves lifted from assorted penalty areas, rec rooms and keepy-uppy sessions.

The onlookers may think they’ve stumbled upon a novelty, but instead they’re being treated to a pair of the finest exponents of Headis – head tennis – in the world. More than that: they’re watching the inventor of the new sport, Rene Wegner, in action. He’s visiting Australia for the first time, hoping to parlay the Aussie willingness to play almost any sport into new Headists (that’s not the term they use, but it works). “When we come here first time on this nice continent, what we recognised here is people are so open – they like it, they take a picture. But then what happens here is people give it a go way earlier,” Wegner says.

He takes a swig of water. He’s sweating heavily in the unfamiliar humidity, but a rally of a dozen headers in a row will do that. Dial up video of a Headis tournament, and you’ll quickly notice there’s a lot of beer involved. But as Wegner notes, that’s for after the match: “You’ve just seen how we’ve played. You can’t do this wasted.”

The German accent is unmistakable, and it’s from that great footballing land that Headis hails. Wegner mentions that Jurgen Klopp is a fan, and it makes perfect sense – if the sport needed an avatar, it couldn’t do better than the Liverpool manager, who embodies a similar spirit of Teutonic madcap: frenetic, self-consciously eccentric and very, very fun. Klopp was rather taken with Headis when Wegner and company had a meet-and-greet at Klopp’s previous managerial post, Borussia Dortmund. Klopp also couldn’t help needling these funky kids about being from Kaiserslautern, rival to his old home club of Mainz.

If football-mad Germany was bound to seed something like Headis, then Kaiserslautern is key to its character. “If it was to come out of a German city, it had to be our city,” Wegner says. “There are a lot of Americans there because of the big air base. Skateboarding was very big growing up.”

The sense of innovation and casual cool of extreme sports have surely influenced Headis. The origin tale goes that back in 2007, Wegner and his uni friends wanted to play some football, but they couldn’t find an available field. The ping-pong tables, however, lay dormant. Soon enough, they had set themselves up with a table in an empty swimming pool, and had ditched using a soccer ball for what Wegner describes as “a Barbie-kind-of rubber ball off a little girl”.

Wegner was a sports studies student at university, which was meant to complement his pursuits in snowboarding. But after he returned from a stint in Vancouver, it dawned on him that all the business strategy and marketing he had studied were just as applicable to this activity he and his mates had mucked together.

“We were shooting at a barbecue at my parents’ house, a tournament,” Wegner recalls. “We called it ‘the world championship’ because everybody who was playing in the world was playing. We edited that video and had the premiere in a cinema. And all from that, there was media in Germany right away – one of the biggest late-night shows, we were there really early, after a few months already. And it wasn’t a sport, you know? It was still an idea.

“But the response was always there. From that, we build on it.”

Potential new converts to the Headist cause.

Wegner was on the road 120 days last year in a dozen different countries, heading (pardon the pun) as far afield as South Africa and the Dominican Republic to introduce the sport. Headis has a program to get into school sport. It also continues to promote its associations with professional clubs in the Bundesliga, and Wegner has travelled to London to shoot a video with Arsenal. Headis also holds a dozen top-level tournaments a year, feeding those viral highlight reels which play a significant role in getting the sport out there.

The Headis story rather does resemble the plot of BASEketball, a 1998 movie made by the creators of South Park. In the movie, a pair of childhood friends invent a baseball/basketball hybrid in their driveway, and it eventually catches on in popularity – so much so that it eventually becomes a big-time professional sport in its own right, and succumbs to the crass commercialism that it once was seen as a remedy.

Wegner’s concept for his sport is acutely aware of this temptation; Headis definitely has opportunities to make money, but remains devoted to a grassroots ethos. While other sports do activations, Wegner goes to university O-weeks and start-up clubs. “We want it to spread further. But the spirit should stay the same – everybody likes to be active, be a part of it, way more than being commercialised too much.”

Again, it’s in the DNA of the game that understands it doesn’t take itself too seriously. How else to explain another essential bit of Headis culture, every player goes by a nickname. Wegner is “Headi Potter”; top players have handles such as Headsinfarkt and Sebastian Headdel. Headis’s Australian chief Andre Sakr goes by “Head Honcho” – “I had to explain it to the Germans,” he says. “They didn’t know what it meant.”

Says Wegner on the names: “The beginning was out of that wrestling illusion. We like it so much, it reflects that we don’t want it to be that serious … some guys, I don’t even know their real name. I just know their nicknames.

“When it developed, we had to think about it – yeah, for sure, we want this because it shows the sport is meant to be fun. So, first organic, and then conscious.”

The first ever Australian Headis tournament will be held in Sydney on June 2. For more information, check out www.headis.com.au