No joke

Adam Rusch is a tall, gangly, mild-mannered and quick-witted mechanical engineer. His roommate, Danny Simpson, is an equally sharp, shorter and stouter med student. Both are recent undergraduates of UC San Diego, and neither is letting his education go to waste.

Sophomore year, Rusch and Danny dismantled their closet door and used it as a makeshift beer-pong table. They lined up red plastic party cups-10 in a tight triangle formation on either end-filled each cup a third of the way with beer and lobbed ping-pong balls in the direction of the pyramids, acheiving victory one cup at a time.

The pair's hobby paid off. Last month, Rusch and Simpson took home the $500 first prize at the Southern California Beer Pong (SCBP) Tournament, a competitive 32-team, double-elimination tournament in Los Angeles.

And even though the two were called "pussies" by competitors for using water instead of beer during a few matches-a perfectly legal move, according to SCBP's official rules-team "Don't Pee in the Fish Tank" came away from the tournament confident enough to defend its title when SCBP brought the game to San Diego last weekend.

"People let their emotions take hold in beer pong," Simpson says, explaining away the name-calling incident and sipping a Guinness at 11 a.m. at 'Canes Bar and Grill in Mission Beach last Saturday. "People take it seriously. I guess when you're playing for money, you take it a bit more serious."

"I just like to play," murmured Rusch, who says he plays better with less beer in his belly.

The two warm up before the tournament, sinking ping-pong balls into plastic cups at an impressive pace as the bar begins to fill with guys and gals-mostly guys-ready to play some serious beer pong.

Rusch and Simpson size up their competition, quickly shrugging it off.

"I think our chances are pretty good," Rusch says.

Beer pong's roots twist, turn and spin like most peoples' heads after too many pints, making it nearly impossible to get a clear handle on the game's history. A truly underground cultural phenomenon championed by frat boys with competitive streaks and a penchant for pounding brewskis, popular lore has beer pong beginning at New Hampshire's Dartmouth College, where a history professor there says it was most likely invented when two people playing ping pong and drinking beer accidentally knocked a ball into a cup.

From its purported East Coast roots, beer-pong lore continues. The 10-cup triangle was instated, and competitors used ping-pong paddles to knock balls into cups one at a time in teams of two. Frustrated by the lack of control the paddles provided, someone somewhere decided to toss the balls by hand instead. Beer-pong purists didn't like the new technique. They labeled the new strain "Beirut," reportedly because the lobbed balls resembled dropping bombs. The nickname likely dates the game back to the 1980s, when U.S. Marines were attacked in Lebanon.

Keep in mind that this is only lore. Depending on where you are and who you ask, beer-pong history differs-there's a strong constituency that credits Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Penn., with the invention-but most everyone agrees that the game was started on a college campus somewhere on the East Coast. The spread of the game westward is a relatively new development.

The history and present state of beer pong is the subject of a soon-to-be released documentary by Film 101 Productions, an L.A. company whose interest in the game was sparked when it caught wind of the World Series of Beer Pong, a tournament offering an impressive $10,000 grand prize held in January 2005 in the outskirts of Las Vegas.

"When I first heard about it," says Film 101 producer Josh Otten, "like most people, I thought it was a joke."

The only thing funny about the topic now, says Otten, is that he didn't pick up on the phenomenon sooner. For the last year, Otten and crew have been following 10 teams from around the country, focusing on the characters behind the game. Characters like Shawn Foster, a guy in Maryland who took a Bingbong Table-the official beer-pong tables used in most tournaments these days-put a net around it, cut holes in a piece of plywood, strapped the wood on the table, put bottomless cups in the holes and mounted the contraption on a ramp so, for training purposes, he can continuously chuck balls and have them roll back to him. Foster also developed a computer program that tracks his beer-pong shooting average, and he recently quit his job to develop tournament-tracking software.

Foster isn't the only guy trying to make beer pong his profession. Bingbong Tables were started by a group of college buddies from Penn State in 2004. They recently cut a deal with Spencer's Gifts, and now, making and distributing beer-pong tables is their full-time gig.

Bpong, the company behind the World Series of Beer Pong, which offered a grand prize of $20,000 at this year's tournament, hasn't quite figured out how to make beer pong profitable. Though, Billy Gaines, one of two Bpong founders, says he isn't in any rush.

"We deserve some money at some point," he says, "but right now, we're just trying to build our dream and support the sport we love."

Gaines says he's seen a lot of competitors pop up within the last few years-companies that see beer-pong aficionados as a new target market. They set up tournaments, he says, charge teams pricey buy-ins, offer what seems like a big cash prize and walk away with thousands of dollars.

"They're trying to ride a craze that's kinda starting across the nation," says Gaines with an air of disappointment, "and you can just tell, some of them are just about making money."

The duo behind Southern California Beer Pong says that, for them, it isn't about the money. Last week's San Diego competition was only their third official tournament, but they've already set their sights high. They're currently taking sign-ups for an official beer-pong bar league in L.A., and they want to start one in San Diego, too. Ideally, the two leagues would run concurrently and end with a playoff between the two cities.

It may not take much to get Southern California Beer Pong's dream off the ground. The San Diego tournament filled up quickly and Tyler Green, co-founder of Southern California Beer Pong, says he eventually had to turn teams away.

"There's this whole kinda beer-pong subculture," Green says. "People love the competition. Most of us gave up playing to get drunk in college-now it's more a skill game than a drinking game."

Rusch and Simpson, by the way, didn't win the tournament. They were shut down by early afternoon.

"It just wasn't flowing for us, I guess," Rusch lamented.