Beer Pong's Big Splash
By Rebecca Winters Keegan, With Meaghan Haire
At their all-night parties, theancient Greeks played a game called Kottabos, which involved flinging the residue from the bottom of their cups of wine at a target. Kottabos was probably the first drinking game to get really, really big--supposedly even Socrates played. Today young philosophers still like to mix booze and projectiles. Only now they call it beer pong.
Beer pong is not just the drinking game of choice for this century's twentysomething thinkers; it's a cottage industry and quasi sport with mass-market 8-ft. aluminum beer-pong tables for sale, a national tournament offering a $50,000 grand prize and a forthcoming documentary called Last Cup: Road to the World Series of Beer Pong. Top players have been known to rake in tens of thousands of dollars a year from competitions. Who says America's college grads lack marketable skills?
The boisterous game, in which players try to toss Ping-Pong balls across a table into cups of beer and drink if theirs are hit, is becoming so popular that it is in the midst of a backlash. Some cities and campuses troubled by the binge-drinking culture that accompanies beer pong are banning the pastime and its paraphernalia. "Beer pong is severely misunderstood," says Billy Gaines, co-founder of Bpong.com host of the World Series of Beer Pong (WSOBP). "It's a sport. It just happens to involve alcohol. People are not playing the game to get drunk but because they love the challenge of throwing a table-tennis ball into a cup with some type of liquid in it." If booze is really beside the point, beer pong would be unlike any other drinking game in history.
But beer pong has certainly outgrown its frat-house roots. An early version with Ping-Pong paddles has been largely supplanted by a paddle-free game, which started in Northeastern colleges in the 1980s and was originally called Beirut--in reference to the battle-scarred Lebanese capital.
Whatever you call beer pong, it's ubiquitous. Bars across the country, like the LA Hangout in Lutz, Fla., host weekly tournaments and organize leagues. The Hangout's Sunday-night beer-pong crowd is usually 20 to 40 teams, mostly of players under age 30, including students, teachers and retail workers. "When we started it, no one had even heard of beer pong," says Paul Riebenack, one of the Hangout's two owners. "Now everyone seems to know what it is. Two and a half years later, it's more mainstream."
For some beer pongers, the appeal is the thrill of competition. "I like to beat people," says Chris Clark, 22, who plays on Team Premier, a group of the six best players at the Hangout. "When I come here, I win pretty much 75% of the time, and it's 100 bucks in my pocket." For others, beer pong is a social tool. "You can go into a party where you don't know anyone and just jump into a game, and by the end of it, you know everyone," says student Kristin Catlin, 22. In college, beer pong's acculturative role makes it just like any other team sport, says Gaines: "It is kind of the same thing as swimming." Except, you know, for the hangovers.
With young diversion seekers embracing beer pong, it was only a matter of time before the real-life drinking game spawned a virtual version. JV Games designed Beer Pong, a video game for the Nintendo Wii. But concerned parents and even Connecticut attorney general Richard Blumenthal sent angry letters until the company agreed to change the title of the game to Pong Toss. "We never anticipated such a severe reaction to the word beer," says Jag Jaegar, co-owner of JV Games. Pong Toss hit stores July 28 with a rating of E for everyone.
If Jaeger had been following the beer-pong reaction on campuses, he might have been more prepared. For many parents and college officials, beer pong has become synonymous with binge drinking. Despite current efforts to get the game taken seriously as a sport, the point of most beer-pong games remains to intoxicate your opponent. Last fall, Georgetown University banned beer pong, beer-pong tables and inordinate numbers of Ping-Pong balls in its dorms--even in the rooms of students of legal drinking age. The University of Pennsylvania, Yale University, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and Tufts University have also banned drinking games. "We don't want our students participating in activities that could do excessive harm to themselves or others," says Michelle Bowdler, a health administrator at Tufts.
It's not just colleges that have hit back at beer pongers. Belmar, N.J., outlawed outdoor beer pong in 2005 after the city council passed an ordinance declaring that it exposed neighbors to "foul language, rowdy and disorderly behavior." Two other Jersey Shore towns have followed suit. In Pennsylvania and Virginia, state officials have told bars to pack up their pong tables.
Beer-pong diehards and the bars that serve them have responded to the criticism by instituting some safety standards. The Hangout has separate bartenders and security guards to monitor pong participants, who have to wear special wristbands. The bar also dyes tournament beer green. "We can see who is consuming what and at what time," says Riebenack. But should players manage to get too many regular drinks in between matches, the bar helps arrange free rides home. At the World Series in Las Vegas, each team plays with 10 cups, four with water in them and six with beer. The 16-oz. cups are a quarter to a third full. Since each side has roughly one beer per person, the idea is that no one will consume more than one beer per hour. Last January, 300 teams of two paid at least $500 to enter the WSOBP. In its fourth year in 2009, the World Series expects some 500 teams.
Back at the Hangout, Pete Ouellette, 22, is hoping to find sponsors to send two Team Premier members to the WSOBP next January. "We don't fold underneath the pressure," the business major says of his team's beer-pong dominance. "Some people get their heart rates up when they get to the last cup, whereas we just relax." Sort of like an athlete getting in the zone--or getting a buzz.
Video on Time.com To see beer-pong enthusiasts in action, go to time.com/beerpong