Beer Pong

Dr. J and I love watching documentaries. There is something about watching ‘real life’ that satiates the voyeur in me. I especially love watching shows or movies that are completely opposite of any of my own life experiences. It is for this reason that we watched the movie Last Cup: Road to the World Series of Beer Pong.  Anyone who has gone to college in the United States can explain what beer pong is. I however went to university (for that is what we call it) in Canada. For us fraternities and sororities are not especially popular and if there ever was a game of beer pong I never saw it.
The first time I saw a beer pong game was when Dr. J and I lived in Detroit and we were taking our monkeys for a walk in the lovely town of Birmingham, MI. We walked right by a garage where there were about twenty college aged people playing, in the middle of the afternoon.
Beer pong is generally played on a ping pong table by teams of pairs. The teams stand at opposing ends of the table and toss ping pong balls into six or ten cups which are placed in a pyramid at either end of the table. Players attempt to toss or bounce the balls into the cups filled with 1/3 of a beer. When a player makes ‘a shot’ into a cup of the opposing team, a player from the opposing team drinks the contents of the cup and removes it from the table.
Morgan Spurlock, the director of Super Size Me (where he eats only McDonalds) made this film about the 'World Series of Beer Pong' which is an annual event in Nevada. If you have seen the mockumentary Best in Show you might be able to appreciate this film in the same spirit.
The movie is described as: “America’s wooziest subculture and the quest to conquer the fun and frothy sport of competitive beer pong.” To be fair there were Canadians in the tournament but I believe that it is an American invention. This tournament would be my nightmare- if I was forced to attend- but watching it from a distance gave me a perspective of a world I would never go near.