Kathlyn Hotynski

It all comes down to this. The shooter must make it to force overtime. The crowd waits in anticipation, buzzing over what is about to happen.

It’s simple: make it and keep playing; lose and take a seat.

The opposition tries to distract him, yelling and waving their arms. Unfazed, the shooter gets in position, lines up the shot, and lets it fly.

Around the rim and out. His team has lost.

Lost what? A chance to go to the Final Four?

No. He has just lost a game of beer pong, one of the most popular drinking games at UW-Eau Claire and around the country.

There are countless games played every Friday and Saturday (not to mention during the week) in student housing. There are weekly tournaments at Shenanigans and the Wigwam. A Google search for “beer pong” produces 889,000 results.

So exactly what is this phenomenon? How did it get so big? And what could be some of the potential dangers?

How to play
For the unfamiliar, the game goes something like this (important note: each house has its own unique set of “house rules”):

Ten plastic cups (or six – again, depending on where you are) are placed on each side of a table, which is roughly the same length as a pingpong table.

The cups are then filled with alcohol – usually beer, and no more than a quarter of the way to the top.

Each two-member team gets two shots to throw a pingpong ball into their opponents’ cups. If they are successful, their opponent drinks the alcohol in the cup the ball landed in before they get their chance to shoot.

If both partners make their respective shots, they immediately get the balls back for another turn. If they make it into the same cup, oftentimes the opponent will have to drink three cups and give up their turn.

The game keeps going until one team has drunk the alcohol out of all ten cups and exhausted their turns. The loser then drinks the alcohol out of the remaining cups of the other team.

Peggy O’Halloran, the director of Eau Claire’s Center for Alcohol Studies and Education, said she had not previously heard of beer pong.

She said, however, that games of this nature often become popular because of the spirit of competition.

“I do honestly believe that because we have such a culture that’s focused on athletics, I think beer pong has taken off . because it’s set up like a game,” O’Halloran said.

Junior Sarah Oelig agreed, saying many play for bragging rights.

She also said it beats other drinking activities such as card games.

“I think it’s something different besides just sitting around,” Oleig said.

On Thursday, Shenanigans, 415 Water St., started its weekly, semester-long beer pong tournament.

The tournament consists of several weeks of competition. The winners of each week’s tournament advance to a final tournament at the end of the year, said senior Jeremiah Bartlett, who took third place in last year’s event and won a free half-barrel at Shenanigans.

Bartlett said turnout was low when it was first started, but it has since gotten so big there are multiple tournaments a night.

“You have to get there an hour-and-a-half early if you want to get in the first tournament,” he said.

Bartlett said that for him, it is the best of both worlds – playing the game and going out to the bars. He said that beer pong is different than other drinking games in that it is straight-forward.

“In general, it’s a pretty active drinking game and it doesn’t have a lot of rules,” he said.

History
Depending on who you talk to, beer pong was invented at least 50 years ago at an Ivy League school. According to a 2005 article in The Dartmouth, the campus newspaper at Dartmouth College (Mass.), it may have started during a game of pingpong when someone put their cup of beer on the table.

While today’s game is full of house rules unique to where the game is being played, the first beer pong games were relatively free of any type of regulation, according to the article.

It also may be hard to imagine it was played with pingpong paddles or that alcohol “was secondary to the game at hand,” according to the article.

Outside of the Upper Midwest, it may go by a different name: Beirut. According to a 2005 article in the Daily Princetonian, that name is based on foreign conflicts in the mid-1980s, specifically a suicide bombing attack that killed 241 U.S. Marines stationed in Beirut.

Since the invention of beer pong, one might say the game has sort of taken off.

Budweiser unveiled “Bud Pong” in the summer of 2005, which promoted Bud Pong tournaments in 47 markets, including many college towns, according to a 2005 New York Times article.

The American Beer Pong Association of America has “undertaken a national tour to promote beer pong and its right to be played anywhere,” according to its Web site.

The World Series of Beer Pong, organized by Bpong.com, was held Jan. 1 through Jan. 5 in Las Vegas.

And so on and so on. However it was invented and whoever invented it, it’s clear that it has become a mainstay in college towns across America.

Proceed with caution
O’Halloran said CASE doesn’t exist to tell students how not to drink.

But she cautioned that it is important for everyone to be sure to keep track of how much they drink, because binge drinking could lead to a number of high-risk situations.

In a game such as beer pong, she said, it could potentially become difficult to monitor how much a person consumed and could lead to “negative consequences,” such as drunk driving, memory loss and hangovers.

“If you’re doing a game like that, you kind of lose control,” O’Halloran said. “You might consume more than you normally would otherwise, and all of a sudden after that game or tournament when you’re going home you get yourself into trouble or hurt someone else.

“I would be happy if all students realized that thinking about drinking as competition maybe isn’t the wisest of choices.”