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At my alma mater we played a drinking game called pong, which is basically slow pitch table tennis with vomiting. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I must have loved pong, because now I miss it and I’m doing whatever I can to get it back.
Beirut (Sucks)
Other schools play Beirut, which is sometimes (mistakenly) called pong, but Beirut is to drinking games as bird baths are to hot tubs. Beirut is played on a pong table, but participants don’t use paddles. They just throw a Ping Pong ball back and forth, hoping to land their ball in one of the opponents’ cups. Beirut isn’t as nuanced or cerebral as pong. Walking up to a pong table and deciding to play Beirut would be like bringing ten guys to a basketball court and choosing to have a free throw contest instead of playing a full court game.
Pong is way better.
Me and Pong
I wasn’t the best pong player on campus. I was probably somewhere close to average. Other kids played it more often and dedicated a greater slice of their lives to the sport. Unlike some people I know, I never changed my IM buddy icon to a pong-playing stick figure. But the game has left its mark on me – maybe on my liver, but probably on my soul.
A Career in Pong?
I like pong so much that a fraternity brother and I are trying to pitch the game as a televised sports/comedy/reality series to several major networks. We don’t know how to get in touch with these networks yet, but when we find out, they’re going to love it. We call the series Überpong.
Here’s the opening paragraph of our proposal:
Überpong is the fusion of Extreme Table Tennis and Jackass. It’s part sport, part reality show, part spoof. Imagine a televised sporting event that combines the skill of professional Ping-Pong with the drama of an especially rowdy installment of The Real World. Now imagine all this action taking place in a spring break environment with the announcers from Best in Show providing the commentary. Imagine Überpong!
Sounds good, doesn’t it?
Microsoft Paint
I even designed a logo for Überpong using Microsoft Paint. I made the umlaut look like a moving pong ball. It’s probably the sickest thing I’ve ever drawn on a computer. I wanted to upload the logo to my website, but I was having trouble so I gave up.
Taglines
Right now the tagline is "It' not a drinking game. It's a drinking sport," but we're not sure how much we like that. Cro, my colleague, suggested some other good ones:
"Sink it or drink it" (Cro says he saw this on a t-shirt somewhere.)
"Go balls deep" (Cro admits that this one makes no sense. I kind of agree.)
"The battle of paddles" (Pretty funny just because it’s so bad.)
"Fight to the death" (My personal favorite even though it doesn’t come close to making sense.)
I suggested combining several of these taglines into one übertagline. For example, “Go balls deep and drink it.” Or, “A Paddle Death Battle.” Or, “Use your paddle to cut your opponent’s balls off.”
Actually Playing Pong
Even though I’ve been working on a proposal for a television show about pong, I haven’t played the game since I graduated. It’s been almost two months now. But yesterday I gathered with a couple old college buddies (I can say that now, which makes me sad) and we collectively were feeling the itch. There was only one problem: we didn’t have a table.
The Ole Table
Luckily I am now living on the same island (Martha’s Vineyard) that I lived on three summers ago. That summer, the first one of my college career, I lived with five friends from high school and we kept a pong table in our basement. Admittedly we played some Beirut on it too, but a lot of good memories were made and then immediately lost near that table.
That summer we had everyone who played on the table sign it with a Sharpie. By the end of August it was warped, covered in scribbles, and saturated with old Bush Light. But it was important to us, like a collective diary that only received drunken entries. We wanted to bring the table with us, frame it (even though it’s 4’ x 8’), and mount it on a wall somewhere, but we didn’t have a car big enough to hold it. The pong table couldn’t come with us, so we said goodbye, hid it under our house, and drove away. I never thought I would see it again.
But I Did See It Again
Fast-forward to present day with me and my old college buddies needing a pong table. Like an alewife fish swimming upstream to lay eggs, I knew I had to revisit my old house. The table had probably been junked, incinerated, or at the very best, completely destroyed by termites, but I always said I would go back for it, so I went back for it.
I knocked on the door of the duplex where I used to live and an Eastern European man answered the door in his boxer briefs. I explained to him that I had hidden a board under his house three years ago and I wanted to look for it, and he said he had no idea what I was talking about. After a second, slower explanation, he kind of understood and we walked through the living room toward the porch.
I crawled behind the house and peered under the porch. To my pure delight, the pong table was there. And it looked beautiful. Even the Sharpie notes were still legible. It was like finding the Dead Sea Scrolls, but even better because my scroll was a piece of plywood and it said things like “Keely Rules” and “Team Super Sweet.”
Table Talk
So yes, there were some regrettable phrases written on the table. Seeing “Team Super Sweet” was disappointing because I recognized the penmanship as my own. Was I actually on a team that named itself Super Sweet? I felt exactly as I had during my senior year of high school when I opened a time capsule and found out that my freshman self had listed Smashmouth as one of his favorite bands. To this day, I’m not sure if I actually liked Smashmouth when I was fifteen or if I was just playing a joke on future self. Not funny, freshman self. Not funny.
Also on the table:
- “Wait, wait, I found it.” Perhaps one of my roommates can explain this quote. I remember the phrase vaguely, but the etymology is a mystery. For some reason I feel like “it” was a penis and “I” was someone who had just visited the beach.
- “GO BIG OR GO HOME.” The only time in a male’s life when it’s permissible to write a phrase such as “GO BIG OR GO HOME” on a table is the summer after his freshmen year of college. I believe that all of us, during that summer, would have called our adopted slogan “clever.”
So I Had The Table and It Was Finally Time to Do Something with It
We played pong last night and despite a few setbacks (the cups were too big and the ball I bought turned out to be closer to an inflated condom than a regulation pong ball), it was glorious.
It’s Good to Have Pong Back
And I think we can make it last this time.
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