Take a look at the list of recreational activities that our university sponsors on campus, and you'll notice some glaring omissions. Flag football? Check. Basketball? Check. Bowling? Check. Billiards? Check. Beer Pong?
Beer Pong? Anyone? Bueller?
There is not an all-campus Beer Pong league at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Widely considered one of the flagship schools of competitive drinking, and we do not have a tournament, nay, a league? You know what that's like, people? It's like Minnesota without a pro hockey team. It's like England without the Premier League. It's like Chicago without flaming idiots ... eh, I mean Cubs fans. Wisconsin needs a competitive drinking sports league.
This campus is destined to have a beer pong league. Just think about it. We have one of the few student unions to serve opulent amounts of alcohol. We have a movie theater where you can down a Pabst with \The Prince and Me"" or a Bud with your buddy Bill while watching Budd and Bill in ""Kill Bill: Vol.2."" For Pete's sake, we have a laundromat on this campus where you can get blitzed while bleaching your brights! We are the drinkingest schmoes on this side of the Mississippi. So why not a beer pong league/tournament to foster unification under the confines of friendly competition?
If you don't know what beer pong is, here's a quick tutorial. Imagine a configuration of cups set up like bowling pins, each filled with a certain amount of beer. Two teams of two stand opposite of each other, trying to throw ping-pong balls into said cups. The first team to finish all of their opponents cups, wins. Simple as that.
And here's what I'm seeing as a problem on this campus: Hundreds, nay, thousands of my brethren and sisteren enjoying themselves as they are playing this wonderful game. However, when you play in a different setting than your own, you play under different rules, and you can get-well, for lack of a better term ... served. Some are negligible, like the type and amount of beer used, or the size of cups. But other factors are keeping us all divided. Do you believe in bouncing the ball before hitting the cup, or is that disallowed? Do you believe in the concept of re-racking the cups at six and three? Also, the size of the table is key. I have played on tables ranging from five feet across to 15. To put it bluntly, the lack of uniformity is what keeps us from feeling truly united under one lovely activity.
You think this is a joke? That we shouldn't have a unifying drinking game and traditional tournament for Madison? You don't think it could rally the students? Tell that to Carleton College, where every spring they play a modified softball drinking game with an inning for every year of the school's existence (and for your information, they've been around since 1866). Do we have something like this? Halloween has turned into an excuse to let out-of-towners riot and trash our beloved State Street. Mifflin is fantastic, but there is something to say about the self-satisfaction of knowing that you overcame all odds (most of them accounting from your drunken stupidity) in order to win a competition.
So, today, I sound the call for those of us who play and enjoy this sport in anonymity to step forward and create a campus-wide event where those drunk and sober, athletic and uncoordinated, women's studies majors and ... anyone majoring in something based in logic could come together and compete for the greater glory of beerletic competition. The tradition starts now people! Because if not us, who? If not now, when?
Michael Jones is a senior majoring in political science and international studies. He can be reached for comment about anything from beer pong to beer bongs at michaeljones@wisc.edu.
