The party started maybe half an hour ago, and already the tiny basement annex is filled. People squish between a washer and dryer and shelves stocked with cleaning supplies as they squeeze in the narrow spaces around the edges of a slightly sagging beer pong table. Plop

The girls on one end of the table sink one, scream, hug and quickly kiss on the cheek. ‘We got one!’ The boys on the opposite end grunt. ‘It’s a fun game,’ said Jennifer, a junior who would not give her last name because she is under 21, after her winning match. ‘It’s more social. I don’t really like drinking that much, but playing makes it more fun.’ There are those who play with paddles, those who swear it’s Beirut and those that would never stoop to a six-cup game. But no matter the style, the sport (for want of a better term), has undeniably spawned many college rivalries, friendships and memories in various hazy conditions. Foggy roots The origins of beer pong are as fabled as the existence of Nessie and as debated as Darwin. The Beirut or beer-pong battle has ignited crusades … or at least inebriated debates. Trying to trace it back leads one down many roads, to every corner of the country in every decade, from when Elvis was still a sexy crooner to when George Michael reminded us we had to have faith.

Despite spending the last year creating rules and regulations and researching the history of the game, Christian Kunkel and Kyle Lininger, founders of the American Beerpong Association of America, have not been able to find details of its origin.

‘We’ve heard a whole lot of stories of people saying it started with them,’ said Kunkel, a Duke University graduate. ‘They’re really excited to think that their family started it or their group started it.’

Wikipedia cites 1983 and 1986 as possible dates and Lehigh and Bucknell Universities as locations for beer pong’s birth, while other versions using paddles are traced all the way back to the 1950s at Dartmouth College.

The ABAA men don’t pretend to know the origins, only stating they know their own fathers played throughout college in the 1950s and 1970s.

‘University of Colorado, Sigma Phi Upsilon in 1973,’ said John Kunkel, father of ABAA founder Christian. ‘We had a pingpong table down in our rec room and I’m sure it had been used before because there were quite a few beer stains on it prior to my arrival.’

Then, it was played with four squares, a cup in each corner and five swings to each glass, John Kunkel said.

But all sources, rumors and tall tales seem to agree the real beer pong started with paddles, and its child, the paddle-less Beruit, is what is now popularly called beer pong.

A November 2005 ABAA survey of 250 North American colleges and universities found that just fewer than 70 percent of students call the paddle-less version beer pong.

‘The nation plays beer pong,’ Christian Kunkel said.

Back at the party, Aaron Kripke, a junior marketing major who has already won a few rounds, is complaining, gesturing at a friend on the table.

‘He always asks me, ‘Did you get ‘rut beer?” Kripke says, heatedly. ‘I’m like, ‘What are you talking about, I want to get drunk!”

For love of the game

The desire to drink, as Kripke pointed out, is not always the driving force of the pervasive game and party favorite.

Most of the reasons people play beer pong and other drinking games are understandable, as long as they are aware of the risks associated with the games, said Kate Carey, a professor of psychology and senior scientist at SU’s Center for Health and Behavior.

‘There are people who are in it because it’s competitive, and people who are in it because it’s a good way to break the ice, and people who are in it because that’s just what their hall does,’ Carey said.

Ask most players if they consider themselves competitive people and they will deliver a resounding ‘yes’ before the sentence is finished.

‘It’s a total skill game,’ said Jason Hughes, the 27-year-old founder of the Central New York Beer Pong League. Both Hughes and the league’s vice president, Dave Kelsey, a graduate of the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry and now seventh-grade science teacher, agree the game has little to do with alcohol.

‘It’s the same as if you played in a dart league,’ Kelsey said.

The ABAA’s Kyle Liniger said there’s no way to have anything less than a good time at the table. The game brings out everyone’s competitive edge and is a way to live a little more dangerously.

‘You don’t see real collegiate athletes playing beer pong,’ Liniger said. ‘You see the guys that wish they were collegiate athletes.’

Friendship is also a major draw to the game. Hughes founded the CNY league as a way for college graduates to meet new people. But what started as a group of strangers playing in Hughes’s Liverpool basement has now grown into a 300-member strong organization that not only plays in tourneys, but also camps together and attends hockey games.

‘It’s about meeting new people, making new friends,’ Hughes said.

The competitive spirit that draws many players can also be the downfall, especially for college students who are newer to drinking, said Carey.

‘No matter how good you are when you start, if you lose, you have to drink more, and you get worse, and you have to drink more,’ she said.

Drinking games, Carey said, fit in more with the way men relate to each other, which can lead women to want to compete with their male counterparts to ‘break the stereotype of drinking like a girl.’

But being accepted as one of the guys can come at a high price; a woman of the same exact height and weight as a man will still reach a higher blood alcohol level, even if the two have the same number and type of drinks at the same pace.

Once college is over though, drinking patterns change, and the large groups of peers and the time devoted to drinking disappear, Carey said. It is a fact evidenced by the downplaying of drinking at the CNY League and ABAA tournaments.

‘We have kids come up all the time and say, ‘I had to tell my partner to stop drinking because this is too serious,” Kunkel said.

Both CNY Beer Pong League and ABAA tournaments actually minimize the amount of alcohol available to players: CNY games are played with water and the average ABAA competitor consumes less than two beers.

‘The nation plays beer pong’

As young people grow older and their decreasing expendable income and free time kill off their ability to drink as they do now, the lingering question is whether college students will grow out of their love for the game or spur its increasing popularity.

‘America is for beer pong and beer pong is for America,’ Kunkel jokes. ‘Give us six years and beer pong will be in the White House.’

With new leagues and clubs forming constantly – a man in Albany recently tried to branch off the CNY League – beer pong has the potential to become huge across the country as more than a college pastime, Hughes said.

‘If you walk into a bar and go up to six guys, you’re not really going to feel comfortable,’ Kelsey said. ‘But if you’re playing beer pong, it’s like ‘Hey, I need a partner.”

There’s no age limit, either. Kunkel and Liniger have played with a 65-year-old woman, and Kelsey has watched a game in which a graying science teacher and his equally graying wife won their round. At one CNY tournament, a 50-year-old competitor even brought his own tables up from Brockport, N.Y. – a good two hours away from Syracuse.

‘The beauty of beer pong is that anyone can play,’ Liniger said.

Back at the party again, a crowd still remains around the table, despite music pounding wildly from speakers and scantily-clad women dancing nearby. Potential players scrawl their names on a dingy whiteboard with a marker that should have been retired after the last party, maybe before. Names are scribbled in slants and down the side, real names mixing with nicknames, perfect strangers and old friends. Joanna Burkle, a fifth-year retail major, has just finished a three-game run on the table. Flushed as much from the excitement as the beer, Burkle is smiling on the sidelines as her new partner fills the cups for the next game. The previous one had been close: the two guys on the opposite end of the table closed the gap toward the end, and spectators had gotten rowdy after several balls hung on the edge of the cups before falling off to the side.

‘I never knew that kid before,’ Burkle says as she nods at one of the defeated boys, the one that had repeatedly told her he respected her throughout the game. ‘But he says he respects my name. It’s funny how you don’t expect it from a drinking game, but when I see him around, I will remember him because of that.’

Published on November 13, 2006 at 12:00 pm