Beer Pong National Campus Rage

The
bar is packed, the floor is wet, and dozens of glassy-eyed young people
are squeezed around tables trying to lob Ping-Pong balls into cups of
beer.

It is the final round of a beer pong championship, sponsored by a maker
of portable beer pong tables, and all across the bar, as one team scores
points, the other happily guzzles beer.

"It’s awesome," said Chris Shannon, 22, a senior at Drexel University
here. "If you win, you win. If you lose, you drink. There’s no negative."

Ah, for the days when getting sloppy drunk in a
bar full of glassy-eyed young people was "Awesome". Drinking games
are apparently
back on campus big time. From what little we can remember from those
dim, distant days, drinking games were an excuse to get wasted (as though
college students even need an excuse), a social icebreaker (unfortunately,
when the ice breaks one finds oneself soaking in ice water or ones own
urine) and a way to stoke those ever-hungry competitive fires.

This article, from the New
York Times, chronicles the
current rage for a bar game called "Beer Pong" or, inevitably "Bud Pong",
a simpleminded diversion which has spawned an accessory industry including
official rules, tables, balls and glasses, as well as shirts, shorts
and visors, teams, leagues and championships.

In beer pong, each team stands at the end of a table
in front of a triangle of cups partially filled with beer. Players pitch
the ball into the other team’s cups. When a player sinks the ball, the
other team must chug the beer and remove the cup from the table. When
a side runs out of cups, it loses.

How the scene has changed.  When we were undergrads
the favorite parlor game around Winthrop House was called Mystery Drug.  In
Mystery Drug, each of the players gets a paper cup with a psychotropic
substance, which they consume. sight unseen. They then spend the
next few hours trying to figure out who got the acid, who got the Quaaludes,
who
got
the MDA, reds, mescaline, PCP, etc. Hilarity inevitably ensued.

But those were different times, and games in those days
didn’t need winners or losers, or fancy equipment, or rules, for that matter. Nowadays, we
are sure a good Beer Pong player needs an in-your-face ping pong power
dunk to be successful and mystery drug, for us, consists of trying to guess if that pill we just took was our blood pressure, cholesterol or arthritis medication.

from the New York Times