Ah, beer pong. The beautiful game.
It's as American as apple pie,
Baseball.
Shock & Awe.
Which brings us to…
Ronald Reagan.
1980s Debates over his
foreign policy in the Middle East
gave the game its nickname, Beirut.
So basically,
the Gipper gave us beer pong.
Thanks Mister President!
There you go again.
Not quite. Reagan is just a
small part of beer pong’s story.
So let’s go back to the beginning.
To the Fifties. Hanover, New Hampshire.
Dartmouth College.
In a fraternity basement, WASP-y undergrads
were playing ping-pong and drinking beer.
Chip Mayflower served.
Todd Toddsworth put his beer on the table to return.
And then fate struck,
or, uh, splashed. Whatever.
Soon these pioneers decided
the game was more fun by aiming
directly at the cups.
Dartmouth pong was born.
They snapped off their paddle handles
for better arc shots.
Ping-pong tables became 8-by-5
sheets of war-painted plywood.
Nets=two-by-fours or broomsticks.
Plus: more cups.
Clear, plastic, filled with
two gulps of the cheap stuff.
Game on.
Each Dartmouth fraternity quickly
developed its own version of
this two-on-two game.
Different names, same goal.
Hit balls at cups.
Hit the outside, they drink a swig.
Land it, that’s a sink.
They drink it all.
If all your cups are gone, so are you.
By the early Seventies,
Dartmouth had a hotly contested
intramural beer pong league.
Students wrote the New York Times,
demanding to know just who exactly
held the world record for longest pong match.
By the late Seventies, it went viral.
Road-tripping students from other schools
had carried the gospel across New England,
to Bowdoin in Maine,
Williams in western Massachusetts.
Dartmouth pong traveled, intact,
to Ivy League rivals at Penn and Princeton,
into central Pennsylvania,
to Bucknell and Lehigh.
At first, they played Dartmouth’s game.
The words “beer pong” even made
Lehigh’s school paper in 1979.
But change was coming.
And its name was Ronald Reagan!
Nope, still not there.
But we are in the early Eighties,
when a Lehigh fraternity brother
wandered over to Bucknell,
and saw them playing pong without paddles.
Or maybe it was the other way around.
Drinking and meticulous recordkeeping don’t really mix.
Bucknell and Lehigh couldn’t quite agree
who threw the first ball.
Still can't.
But everyone agreed this new game needed a name.
And now, the Gipper!
In the early Eighties, responding to a series
of brutal terrorist attacks and kidnappings
in the Middle East and Europe,
President Reagan bombed Libya, one of alleged culprits.
The public demanded the same punishment for Beirut,
Lebanon’s capital, where much of the violence had occurred.
Bomb Beirut! The headlines screamed it,
inspiring students back in the Keystone State.
What were ping pong balls if not little bombs?
And didn’t their game get its players “bombed”?
As the game spread locally,
it was known briefly as Libya, then Beirut.
Whatever you called it, Dartmouth pong got benched.
By the late ‘80s, Beirut had burst out of of Pennsylvania,
to the Midwest, Gulf Coast, all the way to the Pacific.
Places where no one had heard of Dartmouth pong.
Distinguishing between the two wasn’t necessary.
Outside the Northeast, Beirut got dropped.
Most people think of the throw game
when they hear the words “beer pong."
You just need some basics:
a table, a stack of red solo cups,
a bunch of ping pong balls, and plenty of beer.
Four people. Two on each side.
Racks of 6 or 10. Water cups, one for each team,
placed right above your rack to clean balls of floor grime.
You are now ready to party.
Let’s talk technique.
Most shooters throw a lob,
arcing the ball into the cup at a forgiving angle.
Others fling the ball shallow and hard, the laser.
There’s the bounce, an ambitious approach
that’s worth two cups if sunk,
but subject to vicious defense by the team under fire.
Get that sh** out of here!
Most game variations allow a “re-rack”
to consolidate cups into easier-to-sink formations.
Beyond that, who knows.
“House rules” are usually just a random assortment
of bylaws inherited from an older sibling or an upperclassman.
If shooters on a team make cups in the same turn, they go again.
Then there are rebuttals.
If your last cup has been sunk you’re about to be eliminated.
Take a last gasp to shoot ‘til you miss.
Some play “guys finger, girls blow,”
defensive moves that are as hard to pull off
as they are embarrassing to say.
Distractions take many forms.
Nudity is popular.
Wild motions, funny faces, it’s all gravy, baby.
Beer pong has come a long way
from its early days with Chip & Todd.
Jimmy Fallon has played live on late night TV;
Obama’s daughter allegedly played on a recent college visit.
But it doesn’t stop there.
Beer pong tournaments swept the nation in the Aughts.
The granddaddy of all such showdowns
is the World Series of Beer Pong,
hosted in Las Vegas by BPONG.com.
So next time you rack ‘em up,
thank Chip and Todd, thank the Gipper,
Thank Dartmouth, and Lehigh, and Bucknell
and college kids everywhere.
Thank the party gods, for giving us a game as
American as apple pie, and a hell of a story to go with it.
Class dismissed.