It is Friday night. The crowded room buzzes with excitement and chatter. Your teammate urges you to hit this one last shot because your team is assured victory if you do. You’ve been in the zone this game. You’ve basically carried your team on your back. However, the strain of the game is catching up to you, and your focus is deserting you when you need it most.
You concentrate on what will hopefully be the last shot of the game. The opposing team is trash-talking in an attempt to further break your concentration and just said some pretty awful things about your girlfriend.
You take the shot! It has great arch, perfect distance, and a forward spin. Without contention, the ball hits the bottle of the cup you just targeted, your team wins, and the opposing team is forced to drink the contents of every cup on the table.
That is right; the game is beer pong! Many SMU students favor this drinking game as a pastime during college, but they will soon grow up. Some may even forget about their beer pong days. I am here to tell you, however, that you don’t have to grow up and forget about your favorite college sport. There is hope! You may even want to practice more because one day, if you become good enough, you could potentially win $50,000! I know: $50,000 for playing beer pong? I was floored when I found out, too!
Recently, 414 of the best beer pong teams competed in Las Vegas for just that amount in the World Series of Beer Pong. The house rules for the World Series of Beer Pong mandate that only six of the ten cups be filled with the beer of each given team’s choice; some teams choose to play without beer. This rule is the only difference, for the competitors still make crude remarks about the opposing team’s players and their said girlfriends, and, according to ESPN.com’s featured columnist Rick Reilly, “One guy from Jersey ripped his shirt off just before a crucial point!” Unsolicited nudity, therefore, still apparently exists throughout the stages of the World Series of Beer Pong.
How should you go about joining the vaunted ranks of the beer pong elite? According to Reilly, “The best teams hit about 70% of their shots on the eight-foot tables.” So that would help your chances. Other reports suggest that a high tolerance to alcohol is useful, for some competitors draining a fifth of Jack Daniel’s before the competition commences to become “good and drunk!”
All in all, SMU has finally found a sport in which it can dominate! Certainly, there have to be a few SMU students that are beer pong masters. With just a little more practice, these SMU students could apparently make enough money playing beer pong to qualify this pastime as a fulltime job. Talk about going pro in a field you love!
I am asking the many students of SMU to go out and represent SMU in the sport we are most easily able to dominate: beer pong. We are well trained, devoted, and determined in the wide world of beer pong, and now that there is an official World Series of Beer Pong, how can the sport be looked down upon?
As the World Series of Beer Pong gains popularity, more money will be awarded to the winners of the competition. The sport will become more popular in the near future because beer pong is far more entertaining than poker, and we saw how much the purse grew for the World Series of Poker. All we need is ESPN to start showing this competition on cable television. Judging by the escalation the winners received for the World Series of Poker, I predict that in five years the winner of the World Series of Beer Pong walks away with at least a six-figure purse.
And for the last four years I’ve been devastated because I didn’t qualify as a college athlete!
Derek Sangston is a senior political science major. He can be reached for comment at [email protected].
