The Origin of Pong Revealed
Hear ye, hear ye! Ladies and gentlemen, guys and gals, beirut and pong lovers alike, it is my distinct honor to inform you that the debate is officially over — Dartmouthisin fact the birthplace of beer pong.
Questions have been asked, memories have been jogged and plaques have been constructed (seriously). I’m here to tell you that the first game of beer pong was played in Sigma Delta sorority’s basement in 1957.
For the most part, Wikipedia got it right —beer pong did originate at a Dartmouth fraternity in the ’50s. But what Wikipedia doesn’t know is that it began on a cold winter night in the Phi Gamma Deltafraternity house(now Sigma Delt’s house). Bob Marchant ’57 told me it went a little something like this.
Phi Gam’s Dave Smith '57“was arguablythe best ping-pong player of the College at the time,” Marchant said. He had a huge tournament coming up and needed some practice, at which point Bob Shirley ’57, another Phi Gam brother, offered to challenge him. Shirley walked up to the ping-pong table and set his beer cup down beside him. What happened next changed the history of basement frat parties forever.
As Marchant wrote in an article for his class alumni newsletter,"Dave then served right into Bob’s cup. Bob was not happy about the dirty ball landing in his cup but drank it anyway. For the standing-room crowd watching this was a light bulb moment."
And voilà, America’s favorite drinking game was born.
Dartmouth was lucky enough to have Marchant return to campus last week at Homecoming, when he presented Annie Gardner ’15, president of Sigma Delt, witha plaque commemorating the birth of beer pong.
Back at the Sigma Delt house, the sorority sisters invited Marchant to play a game of pong. He gracefully rejected their invitation, but did have a beer … or two.
When I asked him about the differences he noted in today’s version of pong, Marchant said that the original game was played with a net and thatthe paddles had handles.
“There are much more cups on the table now than we used to have,” he said. "And of course, there wasn't any loud music ordancing."
Here at Dartmouth, we pride ourselves on the fact that we play “real” pong. And by real, I mean we at least use paddles.Marchant was surprised to learn that most American universities play pong without paddles and simply throw the ping-pong ball across the table, in a game sometimes called “beirut.”
“Then it’s not beer pong anymore, as far as I’m concerned,” Marchant said. "It distorts the game. Hitting the ball takes more skill, it’s more fun and it’s more like ping pong.”
When I spoke to Marchant, my biggest question for him was, “Why now? Why step forward 57 years after thegame was created?”
“I ask [students] from time to time, ‘Do you realize that beer pong started at Dartmouth?’” Marchant said. “And what I get is, ‘No, you’re kidding!’ So I thought, ‘Why not establish this now?’”
And that’s exactly what he did. After several back-and-forth discussions with his fellow ’57s, he decided to come back to Dartmouth and let the world know who the real pong legends are.
“What I was trying to do was nail down the facts so that we could claim that the beer pong game started at the Phi Gamma house,” he said. “We don’t have actual [hard] evidence … Nobody has recorded this or anything else. But the people who were there at the time all agree that the game had started at the Phi Gamma house.”
Though it’s true that there is no actual documentation of thatnight, Marchant didmake a plaque … and a plaque isgood enough for me.
So there you have it, folks, straight from the horse's mouth.The mystery has been solved, the code has been cracked, the case has been closed. Marchant presented Sigma Delt with a plaque and became an official pong historianin one fell swoop.
“I made a fact out of something that’s legend,” Marchant said.
After shattering history as we know it, Marchant got behind the bar, served a couple of drinksand reminisced on his time here at Dartmouth.