What’s the most American game you can think of? I’ll give you a hint, it’s not baseball. If you guessed football, you’re wrong again. If you guessed Beer Pong then congratulations you read the title.

Flashback to the 1960’s at Dartmouth College in the beautiful state of New Hampshire, with easily the most bad ass state motto: Live Free or Die. The fraternities there put their Ivy league brains together and modified the game of Ping Pong to include cups of beer on the table that the players would try to hit the ball into. Thus birthing Beer Pong. This stroke of inventive genius would forever change the way college students consume their alcohol.

Then in the 1970’s in the state of brotherly love, Pennsylvania, fraternity brothers at Bucknell University weren’t loving beer pong as it was. They decided to get rid of the paddles completely and just throw the ball into the cup. After long discernment they decided to call this new game Throw Pong.

In the 1980’s The game evolved as another college, Lehigh University adopted these throwing rules and continued adding their own to resemble the game we all play today. Things like the 10 cup pyramid formation on each side, “re-racks”, “balls back”, bounces, and rebuttal.

Lehigh University’s Theta Delta Chi fraternity also renamed the game to Beirut after the capital city of Lebanon. The reason being, there was a civil war going on over there at the time and the college students thought the balls hitting the cup racks kind of resembled bombs being dropped over a city. Sounds harsh but it was actually meant to pay tribute to the fallen American Soldiers in Beirut. Kudos.

So there you have it, the long and glorious history of beer pong. Next time you’re at the BP table you can impress all your friends by giving them the run down. You can also tell them that there are over 40 different kinds of re-racks. That cute guy or girl you’ve been trying to get to notice you will think you’re smarter than you actually are.

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