by Rick Reilly
“Oh, my God!” TLC said, mouth open.
I advised her to keep it closed, lest he do it again.
This modern-day Horkules (10) was a University of California–Berkeley premed student named Brent (Hurtsauce) Yeung. Over the next twenty minutes, we saw this Duke of Yorking (11) do amazing things. For instance, even beforehand, he could pick out not just the poor unknowing bastard he was about to gak (12) upon, but where exactly he would hit them. “Fat guy,” he would say. “Crotch.” Next thing you know, some guy would be looking at his swimsuit in horror, then looking up to see Hurtsauce cackling.
“I didn’t really know I had this talent until I came to this thing,” recalled Hurtsauce. It was an amazing statement, like Van Gogh saying, “I didn’t know I was artistic until somebody gave me a brush.”
And as we watched him pukepaint (13) another poor soul from twelve feet away, I kept wondering what kind of doctor he was going to make.
Nurse: Dr. Yeung! Come quick! The ICU is on fire!
Dr. Yeung: Brrrrrraaaaaaaaawwwwwwnnnnnggh!
Nurse: Thank God!!
All around us now, buff guys in swimsuits were standing in circles, waiting to see who was going to barf (14) on whom and with what style points. One guy would suddenly just lurch (15) and coat his buddy in innard juice (16). And the buddy would laugh hilariously and chug some more, hoping his innards would soon involuntarily fire back. And I was watching all this when it suddenly hit me. Oh, shit. I’m standing in one of these circles! And that’s exactly when I looked up to see a man do a kind of Rainbird lawn sprinkler imitation, blowing chunks (17) in a 180-degree circle that got Yours Truly directly in the chest.
(Note to editors: I’m definitely going to need a bigger advance.)
I remember—as I was sprinting madly to the ocean—that it felt warm and surprisingly odor free. Sort of like having a baby throw up on you, only the baby is 180 pounds and has a goatee. My sprayer’s name was Jason Norvelle, twenty-nine, a restaurant manager in Los Angeles. “Sorry, dude,” he said, clasping my shoulder. “But it had to be done.”
And I suppose he’s right.
Just as this had to be done: Jason Norvelle has sex with farm animals.
The event on Hurlmosa Beach opened my eyes to a world of competitive drinking and Technicolor yawning (18) I never knew existed. And so I began collecting them. This was easily done during my work visits to America’s college campuses, where these games seem to be more popular than sex and pizza combined.
And while I realize binge drinking on campus is a problem, I have to point out that not once did I see a single college kid participate in one of these games and then get behind a wheel. Most of them were in campus bars and just stumbled back to their dorm rooms, realized they were in the wrong one, and slept there anyway. Doesn’t make it right, only makes it slightly less dumb.
Anyway, I have narrowed the best college drinking games to these:
Weakest Bladder
This was invented by a clever bar owner, but nobody can seem to remember which. There is a reason for that.
At 9 P.M., all bar doors are closed and guarded. The drinks then become free and remain free until the first person pees. Drink up, even guzzle if you want, but as soon as someone urinates, it’s back to $5 beers and $11 martinis. Can you imagine the greeting the offending small-bladdered turncoat gets when he comes out of the restroom?
Damn, dude! You never heard of Flomax?!?
But I know a way to break the backs of these clever bar owners. It’s called Stadium Pal. It’s a device that allows you to pee into a catheter—the urine collecting in a plastic bag strapped to your leg—without anyone knowing but you and—if you screw up installing it—your dry cleaner. It was invented by a Philadelphia Eagles fan who didn’t want to miss a play. I tried it at a Dodgers game and was able to drink eight beers over seven innings and never miss a—well, it’s baseball, so nothing happened anyway—but still! At only $30, this thing could pay for itself in half a Weakest Bladder night!
Family Feud
Two teams of five guys each bring a thirty-pack. First team to finish wins, with one proviso: Each player can chunder (19) only once. If you do it twice, you’re out. And this is what your average college guy thinks when he hears that rule: You mean I get one free cookie toss (20)!?! Cool! As in the Iron Man, the vomit (21) becomes a weapon, the more colorful, the more pointed, the better. My son, Jake, a graduate of the drinking-games capital of the world—the University of Wisconsin—says he has one friend who eats an entire Domino’s pizza beforehand just to give his gak (22) real texture and flair.
Apple Ball
The competitors stand in a circle and bat around an apple. You can’t catch it, only slap it toward one of the others. It’s like pepper in baseball. If you let it drop or it gets by you, you must chug. If you chug three times, you must assume the position—hands and knees on the ground. Then the person who last touched it before you screwed up lines up and smashes the apple into your cranium, splattering it all over your forehead and the room.
You can only hope you are not playing with Roger Clemens.
I imagine a person who is very bad at Apple Ball could even get rather good at it, if he lived. “Oooh, that felt like a McIntosh, maybe three weeks picked? Not quite ready for pie, though.”
The Ray Charles
Blindfolded, you throw three pennies at the bar. Whatever bottles you hit, that’s in your shot. Not really a game, I guess, but I keep waiting for a guy to hit whisky, schnapps, and Windex.
Kings
This one is sinister. Everyone sits around a table with their drink. There is a deck of cards. Each card has a certain predescribed value. If you are dealt an ace, it might mean you must drink half of the beverage of the person on the left. A 3 might mean you can never say first names, under penalty of chugging. But a king? A king is nasty. When you get a king, the rest of the group gets to go into your cell phone and make you call anybody on your contacts list. Might be your alcoholic uncle. Might be a guy they know you owe money. Might be your ex. You must speak to that person for at least two minutes and—most importantly—cannot mention you are playing a game.
You: Uh, Amber? Yeah, it’s Tom.
Amber: Tom? What are you calling me for? I thought you said you needed space.
You: Yeah, yeah, I do, I do. But I just, you know, needed to call.
Amber: See, I knew this would happen! You still need me! I knew we couldn’t stay broken up!
You: No, no, we are! We ARE broken up!
Amber: Then why are you calling me? Because you miss me! That’s why! See! I knew it! I told my therapist—
You: No! No! Seriously, we are totally over. It’s just that I had to call—
Amber: Oh! I knew we’d always be together! I knew it! I can’t wait to tell Mr. Wiggles! And Midnight! Did I tell you Marshmallow came back? That’s seventeen! All seventeen of my babies are back! Eighteen including you! Oh, I’m so—
Click.
Guess Who’s Drinking?
Everybody gets clear water in their cup except one, who gets straight vodka. Everybody chugs. If anybody can tell it was you who had the vodka, you lose and must chug another. If someone accuses the wrong person, he loses and must chug. One flaw in the game: People get bored with being right and start guessing wrong on purpose, just to drink.
Eat Shit
You fill a simple one-pint beer glass with water and put it on the table. You float an empty shot glass in it. Competitors then try to bounce quarters into it. Each person gets ten shots—three points for getting the quarter into the shot glass, one for just getting it into the beer glass. If in ten shots you don’t score any points at all, you must move away from the table, assume a push-up position, and eat something off the floor. And in college dorm rooms, that could be anything from a suspicious Vienna sausage to a moss-covered Cheeto. In fact, the item you eat might not even have been dropped there by the current residents. It could’ve been three renters back. Disgusting to you and m
e, Tuesday to drunk collegians.
“I’ve had to eat shit off a guy’s floor before,” one young man told me.
“Not too good at that game, huh?” I sympathized.
“Game?” he said.
Hockey
Somebody spills a drink and someone else hollers “Zamboni!” You must immediately stoop and suck all the beer up off the table. A very skilled player is apparently Tonya Harding.
Tourette’s
Maybe my favorite. The usual setup: Table. People. Drinks. Before each person is dealt a card, he must declare what his Tourette’s affliction is. In other words, he must declare what must be blurted out without thinking when the time comes. Some samples:
Priest pick-up lines
Porn names not currently in use
Places you’d hate to own a time-share
Now the cards are flipped up one at a time to each person in turn. As soon as two cards match—say, you and your buddy, Tank, each get a 7—you must blurt out Tank’s Tourette before he can blurt out yours. So if you holler: “Ready for the Second Coming?” before Tank hollers: “Fallujah!!!” then you win.
Ridiculously fun.
The Boot
Featured at Madison, Wisconsin’s Essen Haus—one of the happiest places on earth—where half the restaurant is playing it at any time, including 11:45 a.m.
Delicious, frosty German beer is poured into two-liter glass boots and delivered to the table, where as many as twelve people sit thirstily. A live polka band plays. Huge plates of wienerschnitzel drift by. Buxom waitresses in St. Pauli Girl getups lean coquettishly forward without bending their knees. Many people have asked to be buried there.
The game begins with one person taking a huge chug of the boot and passing to the left. Each chugs, but takes care not to be the second-to-last chugger. If you are, you must buy the next boot ($20). So as you lift the great chalice to your lips, you think to yourself: Do I chug this whole goddamn thing? If I don’t, the next guy might! Or do I take a small sip and leave him with more than he might be able to chug? If I chug this whole goddamn thing, I will trig (23) worse than Linda Blair in The Exorcist. But if I take a small sip, I will be known across campus as the biggest pussy since Garfield.
You’re thinking all this as your whole table is pounding their open palms on it, trying to coerce you into chugging. In fact, sometimes the whole damn restaurant is pounding, especially for any competitor at the crucial to-sip-or-tip point. The crowd wants to see him chug and then chum (24). It takes a village to raise a ralph (25).
One night during our research, there was a table of eight guys near us playing Boot. One scholar was so hammered that nothing he was saying made any sense. He needed to buy a vowel. He was so near the gag (26) point, you could almost see the rouladen peeking up above his epiglottis. The boot came to him and it was at least half full. Keep in mind: that’s more than a quart of beer. He set his jaw and locked his knees into a stand. The entire restaurant pounded. I slid my chair back five feet.
He raised the boot to his flush-red face, closed his eyes, took a deep sigh, and began chugging. And against all sense and logic, he did not stop until the glass boot was empty. He slammed it down and started to stagger away. His buddy to the left leapt up to try to hold him up. They instantly headed for the bathroom, hoping not to boot (27) the boot before they got there. The floor under him turned to a roiling sea. He took three steps sideways for every one he took forward. Somehow, he got all the way to the men’s room. Its swinging door had not quite yet closed behind him when we heard the roar of his powerful egress (28). It sounded like a DC-10 engine firing up. Naturally, the crowd erupted in joy.
The buddy to his right—the one who was stuck buying the next boot—looked at me and declared, “That’s called showing your tits.”
It was very emotional.
Beer Pong
This is the most popular drinking game in college, by far. Some people call it Beirut. It’s played on Ping-Pong tables, picnic tables, and, at med schools, operating tables. I’ve seen guys take the doors off their rooms and set them on two old kegs. It’s played by teams of two. Ten cups—half-filled with beer—are set like bowling pins at each end. Each team takes turns trying to throw a Ping-Pong ball into the other team’s cups. If they sink it, you must chug it. That’s when an all-out Noonan breaks out. Guys begin doing the pogo stick, yelling unspeakables about your sister, and just generally acting like Alec Baldwin in custody court. First team to sink all ten cups wins.
I’m telling you, this could be the next poker. People get addicted to it. People play it every night. But it all took a giant leap forward when TLC looked up from her laptop and said, “Did you know there’s a World Series of Beer Pong? In Las Vegas? With a $50,000 first prize? And it’s open to anybody?”
Lightbulb!
We knew we were in the right hotel when we saw a scruffy guy going up to his room with a box of two hundred Ping-Pong balls in one hand and a thirty-six-pack of Natural Light in the other. These guys were pros. One team—Smashing Time from Long Island, NY—had won nine different satellite tournaments. Both guys had quit their jobs just to play beer pong full time—in tournaments, in bar games, in money games. “We make about seventy percent of our shots,” says Mike (Pop) Popielarski, twenty-five, of Massapequa, NY.
Wait. Seventy percent? Throwing a 2.7-gram ball into a four-inch-diameter cup from eight feet away, half crocked? That’s like throwing your key card into your hotel-room door seven times out of ten. Try it tonight at home. If you make 30 percent over a full game, I’ll tongue-bathe your cat.
The next day in the giant ballroom of the Flamingo Hotel there arrived 414 teams—most of them hungover twentysomething males, all of whom forgot to pack razors. There were maybe six female teams, and three of those were wearing ultra-hot pants and ultra-low-cut tops, the better to distract the guys with. I mean these shorts were short. I’ve seen doilies with more material.
Anything went. One team dressed as a sex-obsessed octogenarian couple. One guy would whip out his package as the other team shot. Guys would cabbage patch, moon, howl, clap, whistle, even rip off their shirts just as their opponent shot. It was all perfectly legal. It was even in the official rules: “No player may take offense to anything said or done during a game, even if it involves their mother.”
The team names were good, too. There was:
Shortbus Superheros
Chase’s Mom’s ATM
White Men Can’t Pong
Josh’s Mom Is Dirtier and Sluttier Than Ever
My Couch Pulls Out but I Don’t
The sentimental team was The Iron Wizard Coalition, mainly because they had been in the finals the year before, thought they’d sunk the winning cup with their opponents still four cups behind, and immediately went triple Grammatica, including falling on the floor in delirium. But the beauty of beer pong is the diabolical “rebuttal” rule, which states that the losing team gets one final chance to tie as long as they never miss again. Four cups in a row, under pressure? Impossible! Except that’s exactly what LA’s Chauffeuring the Fat Kid did, then won in overtime. It remains the Bobby Thomson home run of beer pong.
Second-place prize for the Wizards? Nothing. Beer pong is winner take all.
Ouch.
“I had that money spent,” says Mike Hulse, twenty-eight, of the Wizards. Worse, less than a month later, his fiancée left him, sticking him with a $6,000 custom-made engagement ring he was able to sell for only $1,000. “Have I thought about last year?” Hulse said between games. “Every time I pay a bill. Every freakin’ time.”
There was one team there that was even older than me. Their best player was fifty-four. “I knew I was in trouble when I signed up online,” the guy said. “The ‘birth year’ choices didn’t go back far enough to my year. It only went back to 1960. I needed 1954.” Cruel.
The rules allowed for teetotaling teams, too. Anybody could put water in their cups—if they could stand the verbal abuse they’d take for it—but w
e found the only team that did: Mrs. and Mrs. Lara and Kristin Mendez. That’s not a misprint. They’re a married lesbian couple from New York. “Our strategy was don’t drink at all,” Kristin said. “That way you’ll have the advantage because you’re sober. But we lost so much the first day, we gave that idea up. It just felt unnatural.”
Just to recap: The lesbian married beer pong team hates anything unnatural.
My favorite team, though, was François the Butt Duster, mostly because they were my sons—Kel, twenty-three, and Jake, twenty-one. The name comes from my days going to the Sports Illustrated swimsuit shoots. There was a body-makeup man there we called François the Butt Duster. He was allowed into the dressing rooms and the tents with the naked supermodels because he was gay and French. He’d be in there with a stark-naked Heidi Klum or Elle McPherson, dusting their butts with his little French-maid feather duster, applying makeup, and cooing, “Oh-la-la, Tyra! Your bottumm—eet eez parfait!” Afterward, though, you’d always want to have beers with François because in actuality he was neither gay nor French. He was Frankie from Yonkers. “Cindy Crawford is hotter ’n the Fourth of July!” Frankie would say to his rapt audience. “Fuggedabouddit!”
Not since a Jose Canseco BBQ have you seen so many big guys and so many small balls. It was sloshy and loud and smelly everywhere you went. And all of it under fancy crystal chandeliers. It was a parent’s hell. You half expected to have some mom come in, turn off the music, step to the mike, and go, “All right. You boys go outside and get some fresh air now. I need to vacuum.”