Michael Leonard has his game face on.

A little over a week remains in the Missoula man’s 15 minutes of fame. His Tummy Table, once a runaway leader in an online contest for the next “tailgate-approved” invention for a national beer commercial, is battling tooth and nail with the Band-O-Beer.

“That’s a rip-off,” Leonard noted of his main competition. “You can buy that product online.”

Be assured, this game face includes a cheek with a tongue planted in it.

An electrocardiogram technician at the International Heart Institute, the 25-year-old Leonard got involved in the whole thing on a lark.

He was getting his sports fix on the Internet in October when he chanced upon something called Jimmy Football, who urged America to come up with an idea for Bud Light’s next “tailgate-approved” ads. The winner gets two tickets to the Super Bowl in Miami in February.

“I think I maybe put 20 minutes to a half-hour into the whole thought, and then the pitch I gave them probably took me under 30 minutes, too,” Leonard said this week.

His idea: a place to set your beer, your brat, your cell phone, your whatever when at a tailgate party.

“You’re usually standing around trying to juggle all this stuff, and it usually involves having to set your beer or something on the ground to manage your plate,” Leonard said.

And he has experienced the problem?

“Oh, yeah, everyone has. Everyone suffers through that.”

Hence the Tummy Table, a tray that hangs on a tailgater’s front from shoulder straps.

“It’s kind of goofy, but almost practical,” Leonard said – in other words, perfect for a beer commercial.

***

Would-be inventors were instructed to describe their inventions for an unseen panel of judges somewhere in cyberspace.

“But I tried to write it like their commercials, kind of a satire, or a cheesy infomercial,” Leonard said.

Then he forgot about it until late October, when he got an e-mail saying he was a finalist.

“Even then I thought, ‘Oh, that’s cool.’ I figured there were at least 50 or 100 finalists,” Leonard said. “Then I started reading the fine print. I was one of four and had made it to the peer review area, where we are right now.”

The “peer” reviewer is anyone who punches up the voting page on espn.go.com. Four 30-second spots are available for viewing. The Tummy Table’s rivals are the Beer Mobile, a remote control cooler championed by Michael Smith of Palm Court, Fla.; Daniel Klavoon’s Beer Sphere from Lockport, N.Y.; and the Band-O-Beer, a bandolier-type belt worn around the torso that holds cans of beer.

Dave Farmer of Loveland, Ohio, submitted the latter.

Leonard has seen blogs promoting the Band-O-Beer, but said he’s resisted pointing out on them that the creation is already on the market.

“I don’t want to give them any bulletin board material,” he said. “I’m trying to run a clean campaign.”

He’s getting help from family, friends, Grizzly fans and co-workers at St. Patrick Hospital, where Leonard has worked since graduating from the University of Montana in 2008.

To Leonard’s surprise, the beer company has stayed out of the campaign.

“They didn’t say anything. They didn’t give me any kind of directions to plug them or anything,” he said.

***

Leonard was a running back at Lincoln High School in Rapid City, S.D., where his mother Sandy works for the school district. She called up the local newspaper, and the Argus Leader ran a story on Leonard’s quest last Sunday.

“Everyone in the family is on board – parents, brothers, sisters, friends,” he said of the South Dakota voting bloc. “I’ve got a niece – she’s not 21, she’s 8, but she’s an avid voter, even though she’s not supposed to be.”

A high school buddy, Paul Zimmer, is an account executive for the New Orleans Saints and he’s doing some drum beating down South.

“He’s going to the Super Bowl regardless, because he’s got tickets from work, but he really wants me to make it so we can hang out in Miami,” Leonard said.

The main groundswell of support comes from St. Patrick Hospital, where staff workers, nurses and even doctors have jumped on the Tummy Table bandwagon.

“There’s something like 1,500 employees at St. Pat’s, and I’m trying to pull that whole resource pool my way. It’s a lot of votes,” Leonard said.

He had a spot on KECI-TV’s “Montana Today” show last week. There’s a group called “Vote Tummy Table 2009” on Facebook. A post on eGriz.com has drawn more than 1,000 hits.

“I don’t tweet, I’m not quite that hip, but it’s being tweeted and blogged and e-mailed,” Leonard said.

Leonard passed out “how-to-vote” literature in the north end zone of Washington-Grizzly Stadium at the Grizzlies’ game against Northern Colorado. He wasn’t committing to doing the same at Saturday’s playoff game against South Dakota State. He’s considering wearing a readerboard around the tailgate area, “but I don’t know if I’m that shameless,” he said.

His girlfriend, Missoula Sentinel graduate Jestine MacDonald, is a senior at UM and is working the campus contingent.

“She’s a big football fan,” Leonard said. “If I mention her, I’m supposed to say she is brains and beauty incarnated.”

He knows it’ll escape no one’s attention in Missoula this week that he’s a native South Dakotan. But Leonard won’t have torn allegiances on Saturday when SDSU comes to town.

“Both my parents went to USD, and that’s one of the places I’ve applied to for grad school,” he said. “I’m not a Jackrabbit.”

***

The “Tailgate Approved” contest went online Nov. 9. For reasons Leonard’s not sure of, the Tummy Table quickly soared to a lead of almost double digits.

“I was commanding almost half the votes for about a week, and I figured this thing’s over,” he said. “I wasn’t trying to get ahead of myself, but I had a lot of confidence for a while.”

That started to change in Week 2, and last weekend the Tummy Table actually fell into third place, behind both the Band-O-Beer and the Beer Mobile. By Friday afternoon, the Table had scratched back into the lead with 28 percent of the vote. The Band-O-Beer was a close second at 27 percent, followed by the Beer Mobile (24) and Beer Sphere (21).

Voting continues through Monday, Dec. 7.

“I’m trying to have fun with it, but it’s actually getting really stressful watching those numbers,” Leonard allowed. “We don’t want some guy from New York or Ohio or Florida to win.

“Everyone compares it to when everyone got behind Monte to win the national mascot championship. We want to keep it local.”

Kim Briggeman can be reached at 523-5266 or at kbriggeman@missoulian.com.