Word: beer
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...beer pong has certainly outgrown its frat-house roots. An early version with Ping-Pong paddles has been largely supplanted by a paddle-free game, which started in Northeastern colleges in the 1980s and was originally called Beirut--in reference to the battle-scarred Lebanese capital...
Whatever you call beer pong, it's ubiquitous. Bars across the country, like the LA Hangout in Lutz, Fla., host weekly tournaments and organize leagues. The Hangout's Sunday-night beer-pong crowd is usually 20 to 40 teams, mostly of players under age 30, including students, teachers and retail workers. "When we started it, no one had even heard of beer pong," says Paul Riebenack, one of the Hangout's two owners. "Now everyone seems to know what it is. Two and a half years later, it's more mainstream...
...some beer pongers, the appeal is the thrill of competition. "I like to beat people," says Chris Clark, 22, who plays on Team Premier, a group of the six best players at the Hangout. "When I come here, I win pretty much 75% of the time, and it's 100 bucks in my pocket." For others, beer pong is a social tool. "You can go into a party where you don't know anyone and just jump into a game, and by the end of it, you know everyone," says student Kristin Catlin, 22. In college, beer pong's acculturative...
With young diversion seekers embracing beer pong, it was only a matter of time before the real-life drinking game spawned a virtual version. JV Games designed Beer Pong, a video game for the Nintendo Wii. But concerned parents and even Connecticut attorney general Richard Blumenthal sent angry letters until the company agreed to change the title of the game to Pong Toss. "We never anticipated such a severe reaction to the word beer," says Jag Jaegar, co-owner of JV Games. Pong Toss hit stores July 28 with a rating of E for everyone...
...Jaeger had been following the beer-pong reaction on campuses, he might have been more prepared. For many parents and college officials, beer pong has become synonymous with binge drinking. Despite current efforts to get the game taken seriously as a sport, the point of most beer-pong games remains to intoxicate your opponent. Last fall, Georgetown University banned beer pong, beer-pong tables and inordinate numbers of Ping-Pong balls in its dorms--even in the rooms of students of legal drinking age. The University of Pennsylvania, Yale University, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and Tufts University have...