For the past year or so, brewer Anheuser-Busch has been running promotions in which patrons at various establishments are given balls, paddles, a table, a net, and glasses adorned with Anheuser-Busch logos... and said patrons are invited to fill their glasses with water and play a game that very closely resembles one that some of you no doubt remember, if only hazily, from your college fraternity basement days. That game, of course, was Beer Pong, and it involved consumption of, well... beer!... often in significant quantity, and well into the wee hours of the night. Most often it involved the cheap stuff, because with balls and paddles flying around, not to mention the occasional balance problem experienced by players (due, of course, to fatigue), spillage was a serious risk, and the cheap stuff was Bud. The cheapest stuff was Busch.

Ah, yes... Beer Pong. I remember it well. Not all of it, of course, as the ends of many a night of play are a bit of a blur....

Beer Pong was more than a game, really. It was a culture. No!... It was a set of cultures, as it varied from campus to campus, and even from fraternity to fraternity. In my house, we had a vocabulary ("Helen!", "Zamboni!", "MasterPaddle!"...) and ritual built up around our games that was unique, colorful, unlikly to be understood by outsiders even if they were well-versed in the standard forms of Beer Pong, and most of alll... we were dedicated to the proposition that in our "friendly game" there were no losers, because everybody got to drink if they wanted to And my understanding is that where the Beer Pong culture flourishes today -- still mostly in fraternity basements, I would venture to guess -- it has evolved into forms that players of my own generation would hardly recognize... except for the drinking. That has remained pretty much a constant, despite the fact that most college students fall below the legal drinking age.

But I digress.

I propose a believabilty scale from 1 to 10. 1 stands for "Absolute Truth", 3 stands for "I Saw It On Final Jeopardy Last Night", 5 stands for "Wikipedia Says So", 6 stands for "I Read It On A Blog", 8 stands for "Utter Nonsense", and and 10 stands "Proven False". On that scale Anheuser-Busch's recent announcement about Bud Pong rivals only some recent political news ("I don't recall who told me her name", "I've never talked to anyone about that case", and of course the old classic "I have not had sexual relations with that woman") for its sheer chutzpah! They come in at 11, which stands for "How Stupid Do They Think We Are?!"

And what did Anheuser-Busch announce? Why, they announced that they are withdrawing the Bud Pong promotion because they have recently found out that some people may have been playing Bud Pong with... Hold on!... You'll never guess this in a million years!.... Beer!

As quoted in the New York Times, here's what Anheuser-Busch's VP In Charge Of Insulting The Public Intelligence actually said:

Despite our explicit guidelines, there may have been instances where this promotion was not carried out in the manner it was intended.

...

As a company that has invested more than $500 million to promote responsible consumption among adults and to discourage abuse, we believe it is important that our intentions with Bud Pong not be misperceived.

(Emphasis mine.)

What a Clydsedale-sized load of hooey!!!!

Now, I know that some of you readers have probably caught onto the ultimate irony in this story, which can be expressed in five simple words: "Bud? Water? What's the difference?", but that's really beside the point.

If Anheuser-Busch believes that anyone, anywhere -- even the most gullible yokel on the planet -- actually believes that they didn't know, expect, and fully intend that people would play Bud Pong with Bud.... if they really truly believe that... then sell your stock, everybody! Better yet, buy their stock, take over their Board and fire the whole lot of them for incompetence! No, not incompetence, actually. Fire them for being brain-dead.

If they believe what they're spouting, then you can believe that I never once... in all the time I spent in fraternity basements... never, ever, played Beer Pong past 10 PM on a school night.

1. Andy J. Williams Affleck10/20/2005 02:26:53 PM
Homepage: http://www.raggedcastle.com/webcrumbs/

Very funny critique. I'm sure there shock and outrage is 95% to be a CYA in case of lawsuits. In fact, I'm convinced that 95% of anything I read which falls into the "What were they thinking?" category can be explained by legal CYA.

And 95% of my usage of 95% is actually arbitrary, made up numbers.

THE WEEKEND BEGINS TONIGHT!

2. Derek LeLash10/21/2005 01:39:28 AM

TABLE!

3. Robert P "mrob" Munafo '8612/08/2005 11:02:04 PM
Homepage: http://www.mrob.com

My god. There was BEER in those taps? We were drinking! Get me a defense attorney -- what's the statute of limitations in New Hampshire?

4. Jon Z02/24/2006 02:14:42 PM
Homepage: http://www.geocities.com/zucker0615/

I'm shocked -- shocked! -- to find that drinking is going on.

5. Beer Pong Tables09/09/2007 06:51:17 PM
Homepage: http://www.beer-pong-tables.com

I attend SUNY Albany in New York and they are very strict about beer pong on campus. Although you are allowed to drink and have alcohol on campus if you are 21, you are not allowed to play beer pong, citing claims that promotes binge drinking.

I don't really think it promotes binge drinking. A game of beer pong, between 2 averagely skilled teams, takes about a half hour usually. In that half hour each player will have drank 1 beer. 2 beers an hour isnt binge drinking. Also, the losing team gets off, so even good teams usually dont last longer than 2 or 3 games before they are removed. 3 beers in an hour and a half isn't binge drinking, the average college student drinks more sitting around watching football or hanging out at a party.

6. Richard Schwartz09/09/2007 08:21:49 PM
Homepage: http://www.rhs.com/poweroftheschwartz

Hello, Mr. "Beer Pong Tables".

The game you describe on your site bears zero resemblance to the game of beer pong that I know. It seems to be more akin to tiddly-winks with ping pong balls and beer cups, than it is to the true game of beer pong. C'est la vie, I suppose -- but someday you might want to actually play a beer pong game with paddles, the way it was first played on campuses many years ago, and how the Beer Gods intended for it to be played :