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• The Spot

Matt and Shawn were beer ponging it up. (Liz Stolz for The Star)

Oh my, I see beer pong! (Max Williams for The Star)

I'm no biblical scholar, but when Paul of Tarsus wrote, "When I became a man, I put away childish things," I believe he was in part talking about drinking games.

Alcohol consumption among adolescents and college students is marked by such drinking games as Sink the Biz, Flip Cup and Beer Pong, but I assumed drinking games fell by the wayside when people graduated, put their Greek paddles in storage and started paying their own rent. Turns out that I was wrong.

There are several urban legends about beer pong's derivation, and the student bodies of Dartmouth and Lafayette colleges and Bucknell and Lehigh universities all take credit for creating this binge-drinking bonanza of bacteria exchange in the early 1980s. Beer pong is popular enough that at least one local bar, The Spot, covers several pool tables with plywood so that crowds can play the game. And on June 5 through June 9 of this year, Bpong.com hosted a $10,000 Summer Beer Pong Classic in Jamaica.

The game involves throwing ping-pong balls into your opponents' beer-filled plastic cups at the opposite end of the table. The purpose of this brain-soaking war of attrition? To force them to drink all of their beer before you have to drink all of yours. (Make a shot, and your opponent has to drink his/her beer.) The balls are typically dipped in water after landing in beer, which removes the beer but not the bacteria acquired from the players' grubby hands.

There are no hard and fast rules for board setup and game play, but as is the case for most frivolous pursuits, detailed diagrams of playing surfaces, rules, and pong-ball trajectories can be found online.

I must be an old fuddy-duddy because when I asked Indy.com members about the game, user Dexter quickly posted that "Beer pong combines my love of competition with the activity I would be doing anyway ..... drinking." Victory33 cut to the core of the matter when he wrote that "it makes drinking a lot of alcohol pretty easy."

So there it is. Beer bonging and ponging hold little appeal for Taffy and the grown folks he trucks with, but it seems that among my peers I am in the minority of those who turn up their nose at the game -- a game where even if you win, you're still a total loser.