Beer Pong: Not just a college party game, according to authors

“The Book of Beer Pong”

By Ben Applebaum and Dan Disorbo

Chronicle Books

Let’s… “The Book of Beer Pong”

By Ben Applebaum and Dan Disorbo

Chronicle Books

Let’s pretend you’re at a party. You’re 21, obviously. You have a pretty decent buzz going, and you suddenly feel confident enough to grab some innocent-looking guy stationed in the corner of the basement and drag him to the beer pong sign-up sheet.

You wait a little bit before your turn arrives. You head over to the table. You can already smell victory in the air. You’re ready. You’re pumped — until the realization sets in that, in your 21 years on Earth, you’ve never actually played beer pong.

Your palms start to get clammy, and you glance at your partner with a look of trepidation. You realize that the smell of victory, which has a strange resemblance to Axe body spray, is actually just wafting over from the other side of the table where your opponents are showing off their ability to juggle pingpong balls with their eyes closed.

Panic. What do you do?

“Aim at a specific cup,” Dan DiSorbo said. “A lot of people just go and toss it, but it’s really important to aim at one cup and have a lot of lob in your shot.”

DiSorbo, along with Ben Applebaum, penned and published the veritable beer pong bible last year, “The Book of Beer Pong.” The duo became acquainted while swapping advice for the websites they co-founded — DiSorbo started GetBombed.com and Applebaum created CollegeStories.com. They felt that there should be a compendium of beer pong facts and tips, and so “The Book of Beer Pong” was born.

So how exactly does one set out to write a nearly 200-page book about something often shrugged off as a party game?

“When we started doing the initial outlines it was surprising how much information we collected in a short amount of time,” DiSorbo said. “It took a full year. We wanted to make sure we got information like the origins and history of beer pong right. There are a million-and-one different theories out there.”

DiSorbo explained that their research consisted of interviews with every existing beer pong league in the country and anyone who has ever won a major prize from the sport.

“We actually talked to a professor at Dartmouth who also attended Dartmouth in the heyday of when they claimed they invented it,” he said.

According to the book, beer pong originated at Dartmouth in the 1950s. Young lads would blow off steam by playing pingpong, but to amp things up they would place paper cups on the table and try to knock them over. If successful, the opposition had to chug a cup of beer. The game slowly evolved into the beer pong that today’s college students nationwide know and love.

It’s easy to think that a book going into this much detail about a drinking game would sound like the authors were taking themselves too seriously, but they manage to find a balance by approaching the topic with a sense of humor.

“We wanted it to be taken seriously so the book is packaged that way. But at the same time it is a fun, good-time game so we wanted to have a mock-serious undertone,” he said.

The book includes how-to guides for fixing dented pong balls, being a beer pong photojournalist and successfully distracting your opponent. There are 16 illustrated techniques including one titled “The Cirque,” a motion that dauntingly involves one player balancing on one hand on the other player’s head.

Along with the main chapters, the book is chock-a-block full with entertaining sidebars containing trivia (for example: “The original Ping-Pong ball was a rounded Champagne cork. Keep that in mind next time you are out of balls.”) and tips that you never thought you needed to know. DiSorbo said their ideas “came from sitting around brainstorming and thinking about the nuances of beer pong.”

They outlined the eight archetypal players, including DiSorbo’s own pet peeve, The Rule Nazi, defined as the player who “takes the game way too seriously. And that’s coming from the people who wrote a book on it. Sure, this type helps maintain the legitimacy of the sport. But playing him is not going to be fun.”

One of the book’s major arguments is that beer pong is, indeed, a sport. They sum up their rationale in a 100-word essay and provide these five additional reasons for why it’s the best sport: “’Roids don’t improve game play; Alcohol testing not required; Supports America’s plastic cup industry; No salaries mean no salary caps; The word ‘beer’ is in the name.”

So go forth, young students (who are of age, of course) and embrace the so-called sport of beer pong. And remember — Aim at a cup.