Cupping the Balls
Notes from a Beer Pong Tournament
By: Chuck Mindenhall
There’s something dastardly about losing to a not-yet-showing pregnant girl and her giggling blonde friend at competitive beer pong, but thems the breaks. Coming in the organizers said that “the greatest thing about beer pong is anybody can beat anybody.” We took this to mean we had a chance—but an anybody like us going down to an anybody made up of sober chicks?
There are circumstances.
We are drinking nervous beers in quick succession. That, and my partner Larry Nova has a substantial nicotine habit, shaky hands, coke-bottle glasses and rueful hand-eye coordination. He’s also a southpaw.
No amount of beer will change these facts.
But none of this happens just yet. Right now my friend and I—going by the team name of Whiffenpoof Song, after the Godz famous number, after Lester Bangs and all the hoo-haw—are learning how to toss 40mm ping pong balls into 16-oz plastic keg cups with a certain kind of everyday suave. This is the Southern California Beer Pong Tournament (SCBP) at Stingers in San Bernardino. Winner of this double-elimination satellite tournament gains an automatic bid to participate in the World Series of Beer Pong in January, where they stand a chance to win $50,000. Shit’s gotten that huge—last year 600 teams participated in the third WSOBP, which is now held at the Flamingo in Las Vegas.
The tension in the air is more of an angst. Beer consumption alters this air every quarter of an hour for the next five hours. It’s common for whoever wins a tournament like this to remember winning, but not how. For everybody else, just the fog.
A dozen or so 8’x2’x27.5” beer pong tables have been roped off to one side of the bar, and everyone—all the power duos from Lancaster, San Luis Obispo, Ventura, La Jolla, everywhere—warms up. There aren’t many black dudes here, very few Puerto Ricans. Most of these are white college guys, post-college guys and drop-outs that play college campus games. There are guys with popped collars, rosy cheeks, Notre Dame jerseys, guys almost certainly on the lam. Most everyone has bedhead or ball caps—some guys have Michelin Man rolls on their stomachs. There’s impossible stoicism in the faces, tons of big-spending confidence. Some would even say pomp.
Then there’s Hot Cheese Soup, the cats we’re warming up with beforehand.
Hot Cheese Soup comes from Palmdale. One guy is of the redheaded genre, and his partner has a five o’clock shadow. He looks like a less gaunt Benicio Del Toro, but he knows how to put a little English on the ball and he wets his fingers like a pro. Every few minutes one of Larry Nova’s balls goes bounding off the table, and one of the guys from Fully Sloshed, playing at a nearby table, has to retrieve it for him. This is as much a part of the game as anything else, retrieving errant ping pong balls. People do this on auto-pilot, unflinchingly, in the same motion that they reach for their beer. Within half an hour of a beer pong tournament you’ll see more ass crack than you will in a lifetime otherwise. The thought to swipe my credit card is a disconcerting one.
There are a lot of talented beer pongers here in the IE satellite event, some of them legends already in a drinking game—also known as Beirut, also called scud—that has risen like a phoenix from college campuses all over America. There are satellite tournaments in places like Missouri, Michigan, Florida, Calgary. Beer pong purportedly originated either at Lehigh University or Bucknell University, depending on whom you listen to, back in the 1980s. Its growing popularity seems inevitable. As with caring for a newborn child, there’s always been an inclination to throw things like wads of paper into your buddy’s beer. Drinking exacerbates the need. It’s innate.
Variations of the game can be traced farther back than the 1980s, for sure—but games like Quarters are similar in concept, and that little game predates Ernest Hemingway; ping pong (with antiquated paddles) goes back to Victorian times. The object is to loft the balls into the cups at the other end of the table, which are removed one-by-one as each is sunk. The first to clear all the cups wins. Your team is allowed two shots per turn (one each); sink both balls and you’re rewarded with a third shot.
If this were a Phi Kappa Psi party, each cup would contain warm domestic lager, and would be consumed after each successful shot, germiphobes be damned. Not so in an organized event like this. In the SCBP tournament, these cups are filled with water and not meant for consumption. This shit’s totally official—by not coercing alcohol, the organizers are free from liability issues. Just to be clear: Beer pong is becoming standardized. All drinking is completely voluntary, and completely ubiquitous.
Of the 62 teams filling out the brackets, none of them carries more mystique than Team Kobe. People whisper and nudge their neighbors when they see Team Kobe pass by. Team Kobe, it just sounds like a dickhead kind of name—but there’s a television crew filming their every move. Former NFL coach Marty Schottenheimer talked about something he called a gleam—“there’s a gleam gentlemen, there’s a gleam . . . go get the gleam.” This tandem has been to the World Series of Beer Pong. They go on unfathomable runs of sinking eight or ten balls in a row, and they never get vocal about it like Ruination or the Big Sausage Krew might. Theirs is a quiet mojo. They also drink beer right out of the pitcher, arms akimbo. One of them is from Irvine, the other Huntington Beach. One wears a backwards Miami Dolphins hat. The other is a film student.
Both have the gleam.
Meanwhile there is a Cinderella (sort of), and Whiffenpoof Song is unlucky enough to draw them in the first round: The Hot Mamas. Teams are being called to their respective tables over the PA by Peter Rusch, co-founder of the SCBP circuit—“Table four, Menace to Sobriety and Suck It Slow . . . table five, Rambo Times Ten and Guys Finger Girls Blow . . . table six, Nigerian Oatmeal and If Rims Counted,” and so on.
On good days, Rusch if forced to call out a name like “This Microphone Looks Like a Penis in My Mouth” or “I’m Giving Handjobs in the Bathroom After This,” which he gamely does to keep things civil. Fellatio is held in utter regard among these constituents. Everywhere you look, people hold table tennis balls in two pinched fingers, lurching half over their tables with one leg jutting out behind them like bird-bath statues.
Whippenpoof Song quickly sinks a lot of balls, so many in fact that there is one cup left. By Whiffenpoof Song, I mean me—Larry Nova misses everything. He is no help, but even still we’re kicking the hell out of these hoochies. Hot Mamas have seven left! Then four (ahem).
Then two.
There’s a Hitchcockian vertigo that comes over you as you miss the last cup a dozen times each. As simplistic as the concept of beer pong is, that last cup can shrink nightmarishly before your eyes. The freaking table sways, too, swear to god. By the 20th miss, this feeling becomes full-fledged existential horror. Other tables are going on to the second and third games, people have changed fundamentally in this time, clouds pass in sped up frames. The Hot Mamas are down to their last cup now, too.
Like Cal Poly with nothing to lose against Florida State football, they easily sink their last cup on the first try with humiliating nonchalance. They do a dumb girl giggle and slap five, no idea how shackled we are, how helpless. There are a thousand blinking eyes watching from a dark backdrop, there’s laughter.
In beer pong, you have one final go round called “redemption.” Since it was the second Hot Mama that sank the shot, we have two shots (one each) to force overtime, where, if we sink it, three cups will be placed back out on each side. All these details don’t matter. Larry Nova doesn’t hit the table; mine comes off the lip. Just like that, we are exposed as patsies by a pregnant girl and blonde friend, who says “I’ve never even played before!” to console us. The sun is up. It’s remarkably sunny. Yet here we are, beaten dogs beneath the hail.
But a silver lining begins to show itself in all of this. The beer begins to report.
There’s a theory among beer pong players—and maybe you’ve had this suspicion, too—that the more you drink, the better you become at whatever it is you’re doing. People have contended this with darts, with billiards, with video poker, with shuffleboard and other recreational pub games. People say it about dancing. I myself believe that I become positively untouchable once into the stratosphere of my eighth beer, but proof of this is always after the vapor point of recollection for those people I run with (the skeptics). This “sport,” as some of the participants call it, comes closest to testing and answering that universal question.
Rusch, who’s been around the game for a few years, says “it might be true that a beer or two helps loosen someone up.” What about a half dozen or two, the more common intake number? “Alcohol impairs function, so I doubt that anyone gets better the more they drink.” So wait—by that rationale, beer pong is a game that is, in its purest form, designed to have its worst games at the end, in the championship rounds, when players are slurring through the brume?
Dude. Finally!
But there’s a key to the attrition of sobriety we’re talking about here, a strategy. It is part tolerance, part moment. As Graham Lasseter of the team the Lone Rangers says, “there’s like a step on reaching a skill level were you’re best, when you’ve had just enough beer to be loose but not too much to get double vision.” Lasseter does concede that for even the most skilled kegsmen, booze sets in at some point. Whether he wholly believes this is anyone’s guess.
“It’s a hard zone to stay in. Some people go it sober—but outside of tourneys they would be ridiculed to all hell. I guess when you stay sober you’re always on the same level—but this is beer pong, it’s half the name. Where’s the fun in that?”
Things take on gravity as the brackets shrink. We play a team with an amiable Rastafarian and a girl—another girl—with a Jamaican rootswear hat and clever haunches. They beat us easily, proving that the first loss was no fluke. Larry Nova shrugs it off. I drink more beer which is, after all, the name of the game. At this point, half the joint is eliminated and loitering about the winner’s tables, some of them riling the feathers of others, some of them throwing down the “sloppy verbal judo”—as the publisher here calls it.
Hot Cheese Soup, who’d beaten the Milk Maids and gave the Lone Rangers its first loss, succumbs to the pressure. They get into a scuffle with another team, a comical sort of fight where security carries a little guy with quick darting animal eyes out. He’s the redheaded genre from before, now far less sober. Just a beer pong casualty, a number.
“When we played Hot Cheese Soup earlier, I had already sort of pegged that guy for a douche,” says Lasseter, he himself with bright pink cloudbursts on each cheek—the first sign of firebelly. Believe it or not, fights are unusual at beer pong tournaments; it’s like college hockey, lot of antagonizing and hooliganism, few fights.
Things accelerate. Stampede squares off with Team America (another dickhead name)—and the Stampede guys fume openly at the exorbitant amount of time Team America takes to throw, which they estimate at “an hour.” I clock it at 23 seconds, but even that can seem like an hour in these altered states.
Team Kobe rushes through its competition just like William Tecumseh Sherman stormed through the South—Guys Fingers Girls Blow (boom); Kick Rocks (boom); Slyfidel (boom). But they couldn’t get past the Lone Rangers.
Team Beirut likewise destroys everything set in its path, until the big showdown with the dawdlingest team in the tournament, Team America, where they lose. The obvious heroism of Team America beating Team Beirut might have registered hours ago, but now nobody thinks about dumb things.
Except me.
From here everything begins to fade. My notes say things like “evil eyes watching each other” and “fifth hour, notes from the underground . . . those MyWicky dudes are buncha yuppie pukes” and other bits of increasingly hard to read drivel. It’s a sickening sort of memory to try and recall Team America’s championship game with MyWicky, who’d won eleven straight games to be there. I only remember the guy in the popped-collar Lacoste shirt walking around in hot hubris sinking an unreasonable amount of shots; the atavistic features of the onlookers treating things pretty casually; the Mercedes necklace worn by the Team Kobe guy, who was now a spectator, making me wonder about materialism; the waitress and the $28 tip.
The Hot Mamas have long gone home; the Hot Cheese Soup guys have been forcibly removed, and the MyWicky yuppies live to see another day at the World Series of Beer Pong in January.
Maybe those bastards will win $50,000 out there. This could be the booze talking, but in beer pong, anybody can beat anybody.
There are circumstances.
We are drinking nervous beers in quick succession. That, and my partner Larry Nova has a substantial nicotine habit, shaky hands, coke-bottle glasses and rueful hand-eye coordination. He’s also a southpaw.
No amount of beer will change these facts.
But none of this happens just yet. Right now my friend and I—going by the team name of Whiffenpoof Song, after the Godz famous number, after Lester Bangs and all the hoo-haw—are learning how to toss 40mm ping pong balls into 16-oz plastic keg cups with a certain kind of everyday suave. This is the Southern California Beer Pong Tournament (SCBP) at Stingers in San Bernardino. Winner of this double-elimination satellite tournament gains an automatic bid to participate in the World Series of Beer Pong in January, where they stand a chance to win $50,000. Shit’s gotten that huge—last year 600 teams participated in the third WSOBP, which is now held at the Flamingo in Las Vegas.
The tension in the air is more of an angst. Beer consumption alters this air every quarter of an hour for the next five hours. It’s common for whoever wins a tournament like this to remember winning, but not how. For everybody else, just the fog.
A dozen or so 8’x2’x27.5” beer pong tables have been roped off to one side of the bar, and everyone—all the power duos from Lancaster, San Luis Obispo, Ventura, La Jolla, everywhere—warms up. There aren’t many black dudes here, very few Puerto Ricans. Most of these are white college guys, post-college guys and drop-outs that play college campus games. There are guys with popped collars, rosy cheeks, Notre Dame jerseys, guys almost certainly on the lam. Most everyone has bedhead or ball caps—some guys have Michelin Man rolls on their stomachs. There’s impossible stoicism in the faces, tons of big-spending confidence. Some would even say pomp.
Then there’s Hot Cheese Soup, the cats we’re warming up with beforehand.
Hot Cheese Soup comes from Palmdale. One guy is of the redheaded genre, and his partner has a five o’clock shadow. He looks like a less gaunt Benicio Del Toro, but he knows how to put a little English on the ball and he wets his fingers like a pro. Every few minutes one of Larry Nova’s balls goes bounding off the table, and one of the guys from Fully Sloshed, playing at a nearby table, has to retrieve it for him. This is as much a part of the game as anything else, retrieving errant ping pong balls. People do this on auto-pilot, unflinchingly, in the same motion that they reach for their beer. Within half an hour of a beer pong tournament you’ll see more ass crack than you will in a lifetime otherwise. The thought to swipe my credit card is a disconcerting one.
There are a lot of talented beer pongers here in the IE satellite event, some of them legends already in a drinking game—also known as Beirut, also called scud—that has risen like a phoenix from college campuses all over America. There are satellite tournaments in places like Missouri, Michigan, Florida, Calgary. Beer pong purportedly originated either at Lehigh University or Bucknell University, depending on whom you listen to, back in the 1980s. Its growing popularity seems inevitable. As with caring for a newborn child, there’s always been an inclination to throw things like wads of paper into your buddy’s beer. Drinking exacerbates the need. It’s innate.
Variations of the game can be traced farther back than the 1980s, for sure—but games like Quarters are similar in concept, and that little game predates Ernest Hemingway; ping pong (with antiquated paddles) goes back to Victorian times. The object is to loft the balls into the cups at the other end of the table, which are removed one-by-one as each is sunk. The first to clear all the cups wins. Your team is allowed two shots per turn (one each); sink both balls and you’re rewarded with a third shot.
If this were a Phi Kappa Psi party, each cup would contain warm domestic lager, and would be consumed after each successful shot, germiphobes be damned. Not so in an organized event like this. In the SCBP tournament, these cups are filled with water and not meant for consumption. This shit’s totally official—by not coercing alcohol, the organizers are free from liability issues. Just to be clear: Beer pong is becoming standardized. All drinking is completely voluntary, and completely ubiquitous.
Of the 62 teams filling out the brackets, none of them carries more mystique than Team Kobe. People whisper and nudge their neighbors when they see Team Kobe pass by. Team Kobe, it just sounds like a dickhead kind of name—but there’s a television crew filming their every move. Former NFL coach Marty Schottenheimer talked about something he called a gleam—“there’s a gleam gentlemen, there’s a gleam . . . go get the gleam.” This tandem has been to the World Series of Beer Pong. They go on unfathomable runs of sinking eight or ten balls in a row, and they never get vocal about it like Ruination or the Big Sausage Krew might. Theirs is a quiet mojo. They also drink beer right out of the pitcher, arms akimbo. One of them is from Irvine, the other Huntington Beach. One wears a backwards Miami Dolphins hat. The other is a film student.
Both have the gleam.
Meanwhile there is a Cinderella (sort of), and Whiffenpoof Song is unlucky enough to draw them in the first round: The Hot Mamas. Teams are being called to their respective tables over the PA by Peter Rusch, co-founder of the SCBP circuit—“Table four, Menace to Sobriety and Suck It Slow . . . table five, Rambo Times Ten and Guys Finger Girls Blow . . . table six, Nigerian Oatmeal and If Rims Counted,” and so on.
On good days, Rusch if forced to call out a name like “This Microphone Looks Like a Penis in My Mouth” or “I’m Giving Handjobs in the Bathroom After This,” which he gamely does to keep things civil. Fellatio is held in utter regard among these constituents. Everywhere you look, people hold table tennis balls in two pinched fingers, lurching half over their tables with one leg jutting out behind them like bird-bath statues.
Whippenpoof Song quickly sinks a lot of balls, so many in fact that there is one cup left. By Whiffenpoof Song, I mean me—Larry Nova misses everything. He is no help, but even still we’re kicking the hell out of these hoochies. Hot Mamas have seven left! Then four (ahem).
Then two.
There’s a Hitchcockian vertigo that comes over you as you miss the last cup a dozen times each. As simplistic as the concept of beer pong is, that last cup can shrink nightmarishly before your eyes. The freaking table sways, too, swear to god. By the 20th miss, this feeling becomes full-fledged existential horror. Other tables are going on to the second and third games, people have changed fundamentally in this time, clouds pass in sped up frames. The Hot Mamas are down to their last cup now, too.
Like Cal Poly with nothing to lose against Florida State football, they easily sink their last cup on the first try with humiliating nonchalance. They do a dumb girl giggle and slap five, no idea how shackled we are, how helpless. There are a thousand blinking eyes watching from a dark backdrop, there’s laughter.
In beer pong, you have one final go round called “redemption.” Since it was the second Hot Mama that sank the shot, we have two shots (one each) to force overtime, where, if we sink it, three cups will be placed back out on each side. All these details don’t matter. Larry Nova doesn’t hit the table; mine comes off the lip. Just like that, we are exposed as patsies by a pregnant girl and blonde friend, who says “I’ve never even played before!” to console us. The sun is up. It’s remarkably sunny. Yet here we are, beaten dogs beneath the hail.
But a silver lining begins to show itself in all of this. The beer begins to report.
There’s a theory among beer pong players—and maybe you’ve had this suspicion, too—that the more you drink, the better you become at whatever it is you’re doing. People have contended this with darts, with billiards, with video poker, with shuffleboard and other recreational pub games. People say it about dancing. I myself believe that I become positively untouchable once into the stratosphere of my eighth beer, but proof of this is always after the vapor point of recollection for those people I run with (the skeptics). This “sport,” as some of the participants call it, comes closest to testing and answering that universal question.
Rusch, who’s been around the game for a few years, says “it might be true that a beer or two helps loosen someone up.” What about a half dozen or two, the more common intake number? “Alcohol impairs function, so I doubt that anyone gets better the more they drink.” So wait—by that rationale, beer pong is a game that is, in its purest form, designed to have its worst games at the end, in the championship rounds, when players are slurring through the brume?
Dude. Finally!
But there’s a key to the attrition of sobriety we’re talking about here, a strategy. It is part tolerance, part moment. As Graham Lasseter of the team the Lone Rangers says, “there’s like a step on reaching a skill level were you’re best, when you’ve had just enough beer to be loose but not too much to get double vision.” Lasseter does concede that for even the most skilled kegsmen, booze sets in at some point. Whether he wholly believes this is anyone’s guess.
“It’s a hard zone to stay in. Some people go it sober—but outside of tourneys they would be ridiculed to all hell. I guess when you stay sober you’re always on the same level—but this is beer pong, it’s half the name. Where’s the fun in that?”
Things take on gravity as the brackets shrink. We play a team with an amiable Rastafarian and a girl—another girl—with a Jamaican rootswear hat and clever haunches. They beat us easily, proving that the first loss was no fluke. Larry Nova shrugs it off. I drink more beer which is, after all, the name of the game. At this point, half the joint is eliminated and loitering about the winner’s tables, some of them riling the feathers of others, some of them throwing down the “sloppy verbal judo”—as the publisher here calls it.
Hot Cheese Soup, who’d beaten the Milk Maids and gave the Lone Rangers its first loss, succumbs to the pressure. They get into a scuffle with another team, a comical sort of fight where security carries a little guy with quick darting animal eyes out. He’s the redheaded genre from before, now far less sober. Just a beer pong casualty, a number.
“When we played Hot Cheese Soup earlier, I had already sort of pegged that guy for a douche,” says Lasseter, he himself with bright pink cloudbursts on each cheek—the first sign of firebelly. Believe it or not, fights are unusual at beer pong tournaments; it’s like college hockey, lot of antagonizing and hooliganism, few fights.
Things accelerate. Stampede squares off with Team America (another dickhead name)—and the Stampede guys fume openly at the exorbitant amount of time Team America takes to throw, which they estimate at “an hour.” I clock it at 23 seconds, but even that can seem like an hour in these altered states.
Team Kobe rushes through its competition just like William Tecumseh Sherman stormed through the South—Guys Fingers Girls Blow (boom); Kick Rocks (boom); Slyfidel (boom). But they couldn’t get past the Lone Rangers.
Team Beirut likewise destroys everything set in its path, until the big showdown with the dawdlingest team in the tournament, Team America, where they lose. The obvious heroism of Team America beating Team Beirut might have registered hours ago, but now nobody thinks about dumb things.
Except me.
From here everything begins to fade. My notes say things like “evil eyes watching each other” and “fifth hour, notes from the underground . . . those MyWicky dudes are buncha yuppie pukes” and other bits of increasingly hard to read drivel. It’s a sickening sort of memory to try and recall Team America’s championship game with MyWicky, who’d won eleven straight games to be there. I only remember the guy in the popped-collar Lacoste shirt walking around in hot hubris sinking an unreasonable amount of shots; the atavistic features of the onlookers treating things pretty casually; the Mercedes necklace worn by the Team Kobe guy, who was now a spectator, making me wonder about materialism; the waitress and the $28 tip.
The Hot Mamas have long gone home; the Hot Cheese Soup guys have been forcibly removed, and the MyWicky yuppies live to see another day at the World Series of Beer Pong in January.
Maybe those bastards will win $50,000 out there. This could be the booze talking, but in beer pong, anybody can beat anybody.
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