It’s New Year’s Day—the night after the day after the drunkest night of the year. The whole world has a hangover. And most of them weren’t even partying in Las Vegas.

But these guys are players, and they came to play. Which is why they’re crowded into a fluorescent-lit ballroom at the Flamingo Hotel and Casino on the Vegas Strip, tossing little white Ping-Pong balls at plastic cups full of beer. It’s 9 p.m. on January 1, when the rest of the country is sitting on the couch watching the Rose Bowl with a Vitamin Water in one hand and Advil in the other, trying very hard not to think about booze. These guys—these warriors—are downing Miller Lite and preparing for battle.

They’re here because tomorrow is the first day of the World Series of Beer Pong, the biggest, longest-running, highest-stakes beer pong tournament on earth. For the next three days, 468 teams from 43 states and eight countries will compete for a $50,000 title and, more important, bragging rights as the best beer pong team in the world.

In an age when grown men playing cards is a ratings blockbuster, beer pong could be the next breakout hit. Depending on which survey you read, anywhere from 50 to 80 percent of American college students play the game regularly. Bars from Ann Arbor to Austin are swapping billiards and dartboards for beer pong tables. Jimmy Fallon does beer pong bits on his show (he narrowly beat Golden Girl Betty White), and last fall saw the release of a beer pong book and documentary. If Will Ferrell isn’t working on a movie yet, he should be.

To much of the country, beer pong is a punch line—the kind of lunkheaded frat-ertainment you’d see at 3 a.m. on ESPN 8 “the Ocho.” But to the competitors, it’s serious fun. Some are top-tier veterans: teams like Ask About Us, Doin Hella Much, Getcha Popcorn Ready—names as hallowed in their sport as Unitas or Namath. They fly cross-country for tournaments, heatedly debate things like shooting mechanics and elbow trajectory, and build ball-return chutes 
so they can practice in the garage. But others are guys like Team Cork Like, David Keany and Owen O’Sullivan, who live in Ireland and bought their beer pong table on eBay. They came to Vegas for New Year’s and spent the night polishing off a liter of whiskey, a liter 
of vodka, and a liter of Captain Morgan (“Irish,” Owen shrugs). This is their first time at the WSOBP, and they’re having a blast. “We’re making loads of friends,” David says. “In Ireland we can’t get anybody to play!”

They also brought a buddy with them, an ethnography professor named Stephen O’Sullivan (no relation). Ostensibly he’s here to do field research, but mainly he’s just drinking. A lot. Hoisting a bottle of Corona, he cracks a smile: “Is this what they call ‘going native’?”

 


Ron Hamilton is one of the best beer pong players in the world. Over the past four years, he and his partner, Mike Popielarski (a.k.a. Pop), have earned more than $300,000 with their pong skills. Neither has a nine-to-five: Pop occasionally DJs, and Ron used to work maintenance at a nursing home, but mainly they live on winnings from cash games and tournaments. Sponsored by the Web site WorldGaming.com, they go by the name Smashing Time.

They’re at a bar on Long Island called Lily Flanagan’s, the first place they ever teamed up. Pop, 25, is tall and lanky, with sleepy-stoner eyes, a warm smile, and diamond studs in his ears. Ron, 26, is a gentle beast: 6'3", 280, with a thin beard framing his Sequoia of a neck. Ron doesn’t normally drink much, but at the World Series he has a tradition. He wakes up around 6 a.m., has a hearty breakfast—and downs an entire bottle of Jack (he mixes it with Coke). “When I’m sober, I think too much,” he says. During games he distracts opponents by smacking his face and beating on his chest like a gorilla. It drives people crazy: They call him an animal, insane. Ron loves it. “When they hate me,” he says, “they’re already out of the game.”

Smashing Time are the WSOBP’s defending champs. Last June they also won the WBPT Atlantic City Championship, the country’s second-biggest tournament. By rights they should be the odds-on favorites heading into Vegas. But at their last big event they finished a disappointing seventh. Word on the street is Ron’s lost his shot, and he and Pop are barely speaking. (“They’re like a dysfunctional married couple,” Ron’s girlfriend, Lori, says.)

Ron has no doubt that they’ll be OK: “The World Series is all about pressure, and no one handles pressure better than we do.” But Pop, a numbers guy who keeps records of every pong dollar he earns, knows the odds of repeating are slim. There’s too much luck involved, too many talented players. “I’m more realistic,” he says. “And for us to win two in a row would just be retarded.”

 

 

Saturday, Day 1. Downstairs at the Flamingo, it looks like…a beer pong tournament. In the lobby there’s one guy with beer pong shaved into his hair pounding Buds, one slurring to security guards, and, in the corner, a guy in a Steelers jersey curled up, clutching a Gatorade bottle like it’s a teddy bear.

It is 10:30 a.m.

Inside the ballroom, there are three sections of 34 tables each, cordoned off by those metal police barricades you see at a protest march, or Mardi Gras. Between each section there’s an aisle for spectators—either competitors in between games or fans who’ve paid admission to watch ($20 a day, $50 for the weekend). At the front of the room, massive projector screens display the latest standings, and DJ Whoo Kid, the in-house DJ for G-Unit, spins tracks like Gucci Mane’s “Wasted,” Jamie Foxx’s “Blame It,” and a couple of songs that actually aren’t about getting drunk.

There are two ways to qualify for the World Series, both of them quintessentially American. The first is to win. The WSOBP sponsors 170 satellite tournaments a year at bars all over the U.S. Winners get automatic entry. The second is to buy your way in. For packages starting as low as $600, your team gets four nights on the Strip, a guaranteed 12 games, and all the beer you care to drink—or not.

Did we mention that at the World Series of Beer Pong, getting drunk is optional? Four of each team’s 10 cups are filled with water, and some of the best players don’t drink at all. The event wants big-name sponsors, and for some reason advertisers are wary of attaching their names to a franchise populated by a bunch of blackout drunks. “I wish it didn’t have beer in the name,” says Billy Gaines, one of the WSOBP’s founders. “That would make it much easier for us. But what are we gonna call it—‘throwing balls into cups’?”

That doesn’t mean things don’t get sloppy. An army of volunteers scurry to refill the pitchers, and by midafternoon about half the room seems pretty well shitfaced. One of the California teams, West Fuckin Coast, has a gofer who fetches Jack and Cokes when his players get too sober, like a corner man at a prizefight. It’s the best of both worlds: the game and the tailgate all in one.

 

 

More than 2,500 years ago, the ancient Greeks played a game they called kottabos. They’d take an empty jug of wine, scoop out the dregs, and try to toss the wad into a saucer (the Hellenic Solo cup) a few meters away. A good player was thought to have cor-re-sponding javelin-throwing abilities, not to mention skills in the bedroom. Sophocles, Euripides, Aeschylus, and Aristophanes all mention the game in their plays; Plato refers to it in his famous Symposium (which literally translates as “drinking party”).
By comparison, the origins of modern beer pong are as murky as a pint of Guinness. Popular lore says the game was born in the ’50s at Dartmouth fraternity houses, where players used Ping-Pong paddles to swat balls into opponents’ cups. For a glorious moment in the ’70s, it was even an official intramural sport. Somewhere down the line, the paddles disappeared and the cups multiplied. Today’s beer pong, also known as Beirut, spread west like Manifest Destiny, through the Midwest, the South, and at some point to Pittsburgh, where, one day in the fall of 1999, someone handed a ball to a skinny freshman named Billy Gaines.

Gaines, now 29, looks like a frattier version of Jim from The Office. 
A high school valedictorian who didn’t have his first sip of beer until college, he fell in love with the game at Carnegie Mellon University, where he was on the swim team. Together with his friend Duncan Carroll, he started a Web site called BPONG.com out of their dorm room sophomore year and soon built it into beer pong’s premier online community. From there it was a short walk to the 
idea of a real-world tournament.

The first World Series of Beer Pong was held in January 2006 in Mesquite, Nevada. Eighty-seven teams showed up, and the winner took home $10,000. Three years later Gaines, an intellectual-property lawyer by trade, left his Chicago firm. Now he runs the World Series and the Web site full-time. Revenues are around $3 million a year, but Gaines says he’s basically breaking even—all the profits are going to “grow the brand.” Gaines says they’ve talked to the big networks—ESPN, Spike, MTV—and that one of them is “very interested.” “We think this can be bigger than poker,” he says. “If a TV deal happens, this could be worth in the tens of millions—if not hundreds.”

 

 

Every beer pong player worth his hops has his own set of house rules, variants on the established framework. These, in a nutshell, are the basics: Each team starts with 10 cups, arranged on a table in a pyramid, like bowling pins. Teams take turns throwing their balls at the cups on the other side: Make one and your opponent drinks. Empty cups are removed until one team has no more. Game over.
Almost. A beer pong game has one more step—a democratic flourish that ensures even blowouts have a dramatic finish. When a team hits the final cup, their opponents get one last chance to try and force overtime. It’s a single shot—miss and they’re done, make it and they throw again. As long as they keep sinking cups, the team stays alive.

Some people call this little coda “the rebuttal.” But there’s also another, more poetic name for it.
It’s called “redemption.”

“I messed up,” Ron Hamilton says. he’s sitting on a couch at Lori’s parents’ house on Long Island, sipping Budweiser out of the can, discussing how far he’s fallen and how badly he needs this win.
Growing up, Ron never had money. His mom worked at the post office; his dad built airplane parts for Grumman. One day, when Ron was in elementary school, his dad had an accident at the plant and his legs were crushed. “In the hospital he got hooked on morphine, then he got hooked on pills,” Ron says. After that he didn’t work.

In high school Ron was a pitcher with 91 mph heat. Some D1 scouts talked to him about scholarships, but he could never get his grades up, so he wound up pitching for a small school in Nebraska. Then, before his junior year, Ron tore the cartilage in his shoulder. His baseball days were over.

Back home on Long Island, Ron realized he was good at something else: beer pong. He started winning small tournaments around town. He met Pop, and the two of them began dominating games all over the Northeast. They went to the World Series twice, both times going undefeated in the prelims only to lose on Day 3. Finally, last year they won it all—$50,000.

“I never had more than a thousand dollars to my name,” Ron says. “I didn’t know what to do.” He’d always had gambling problems: For a while he worked as a janitor at an OTB parlor, and he’d blow his whole paycheck on horses. So when he got his half of the 50 grand, it was only a matter of time.

He lost the first $4,000 in Atlantic City playing blackjack and roulette. Then came online poker. Because he wasn’t working, he’d wake up around three in the afternoon, play for a few hours, and before he knew it be out a couple hundred bucks. Another $15,000, gone.

Ron and Lori have been together for two years. After Ron lost his house, they moved in with her folks to save money. Now she’s seven months pregnant with a girl they plan to name Presley. Ron proposed to her a few weeks ago, and the ring wiped out all his savings. 
“I have zero dollars,” he says. They’re trying to buy a house, and have even picked out one they want—just down the street, so Lori’s parents can baby-sit. But they can’t get a loan because Ron is unemployed. Beer pong doesn’t count. Ron plans to take the NYPD entrance exam in June. But for now, he says, “I need this.”

 

 

Smashing time breezes through the first day 6-0, with a plus-26 cup differential. But on the morning of Day 2, they’re struggling. They lose their first game to Sink and Dethrone, a no-name team from Texas; now two regular Joes from Oregon are taking them to overtime. Ron’s shots aren’t falling, and he paces angrily, his XXL white T-shirt straining across his ample torso. Eventually they escape with a W. Pop celebrates by pouring a beer into Ron’s mouth and crushing the cup between his hands. Smashing Time!

Not everyone takes their pong so seriously. Old School, a.k.a. Roger Gober, 50, and his buddy Bob, 56, are older than last year’s four finalists put together. Roger sells window treatments in Jacksonville (check him out on the August 2004 cover of Draperies & Window Coverings magazine), while Bob, his best friend of 21 years, works in the health care industry but can’t say where, because being in a beer pong tournament might get him into trouble.They’re here for Bob’s son’s bachelor party, and they seem absolutely delighted. “Back in our day we just played quarters!” Roger says.

I also meet Amy and Bobby, a young couple from North Carolina who met at the World Series last year. She watched him hit 11 cups in a double-OT win against the defending champs, and the rest was history. This year they’re competing as a team, and two nights ago Bobby proposed—the WSOBP’s first engagement.

But not the last. As we’re talking, Bobby spots a friend walking through the crowd, disheveled in a basketball jersey and cowboy boots. “This guy got married last night!” Bobby says.

“Congratulations!” I say.

The guy nods but doesn’t say anything. Something seems wrong.

Oh—shit. Was it, uh, planned?

The guy shakes his head.

Ah. Where is she now?

“No idea.”

There’s a nasty-looking gash over his right eye. It looks fresh. I decide to leave him be.

So why are these players here? What possesses them to travel hundreds of—or, in the case of the two Japanese teams, 5,000—miles for a drinking game they could play in their own rec room? Some, like Ron and Pop, are in it for the money. A lot are former athletes—high school stars who never made it big but still have a hunger for competition and nice hand-eye coordination. But most were never stars to begin with. They aren’t the tallest or the strongest or the fastest. They’re plumbers and IT guys, benchwarmers and armchair quarterbacks, and this is their day in the spotlight. There’s a nobility to them—like the 300-pound dude in the American flag bandanna who sinks a shot and chest-bumps his best bro while Kanye West’s “Champion” booms in the background.

 

 

Sometime around 5 p.m., Duncan Carroll comes on the PA to make an announcement. “One thing before we start Round 29: Please do not spit in the water cups. Also, for this round the music will be turned down because Jay Leno’s crew is here filming!”

The crowd is unanimous: Booooooo!

“What, you don’t want to be on Jay Leno?” Duncan asks.

Booooooo!

By now some of the players know they’re going home, so they decide they’ll just get fucked up. (Not necessarily a smart move, as the guy who gets Tasered after clocking an opponent can attest.) 
But since tomorrow is a marathon in which one mistake can spell defeat, the smartest teams start to pace themselves. Volunteers haul out vats of unwanted beer in 10-gallon buckets—sloshing monuments to American excess. Smashing Time finishes 11-1, and they head up to their room to pop some Airborne and get some sleep.

Downstairs the next morning, the change in mood is palpable. In the center of the ballroom there’s a single featured table, ringed by a five-man camera crew and eight-foot-high bleachers. 
The players are less jocular, a little more on edge. The weekend is over. It’s Monday—time to go to work.

Ron shows up in the same white T-shirt, a Jack and Coke–filled Aquafina bottle shoved into his back pocket. He takes off his Yankees cap to reveal a new haircut—a kind of bizarro mohawk with huge chunks missing from the sides. Later he takes off his shirt, exposing a prodigious white belly. He looks like a mangy polar bear.

 

 

Slowly the field gets winnowed. Getcha Popcorn Ready goes out early, losing in a close one to a team they should have beaten. Other top seeds fall: Doin Hella Much, Projectile Dysfunction, Ask About Us. Finally, it’s down to a best-of-three contest between two squads: Since Sliced Bread, a pan-Midwest dream team led by Detroit’s Vince Bolhuis—a lights-out shooter who some say is the best in the whole tournament. And Smashing Time.

Since Sliced Bread takes game one. It’s the first time Ron and Pop have lost since yesterday morning. In game two Pop gets in the zone, and Smashing Time wins by five. The championship comes down to one final game.

Since Sliced Bread jumps out to an early lead. Thanks to some clutch shots by Ron, Smashing Time claws back to tie it up, 9-9.

Usually Pop would be the one shooting at the last cup. But he’s cold, and Ron is hot. Take it, Pop says.

One ball, one cup, $50,000.

Ron takes it. Sploosh.

Pandemonium. Someone hands Ron a cell phone. It’s Lori. “We won, babe!” he tells her. His eyes are wet.
Before they can talk more, Ron gets pulled away into a sea of back slaps and bro-hugs. Smashing Time does the winner thing—interview, giant check, “We Are the Champions.” A few minutes later, away from the crowd, Ron breaks down. “This is unbelievable,” he says. “I needed this so much.” His face is red.

He’s wiping away tears.

I ask him how he’s going to celebrate. “I’m just gonna go back to my room,” he says. “I got a beautiful girl at home. I got a baby girl on the way. I don’t want to do anything stupid.”

DJ Whoo Kid comes up to shake his hand. “You’re the Michael Jordan of this bullshit!” he says.
“I’m having a real moment right now,” says Ron.

Some 3,369 games, 85,000 cups, and 210,000 ounces of beer after WSOBP V began, beer pong has its first dynasty. Ron is exhausted and—yes—very drunk. All he wants to do is go up to his room, lie down, and call his fiancée.

But the fans aren’t having any of it. Slowly, from the bleachers, a chant begins. “One! On! One!” the crowd shouts. “One! On! One!”

It’s Monday night. It’s only 9:30. They want more pong.