It is rumored that no one actually knows for sure where or when beerpong evolved. Several college frats from the early and mid 1980's claim to have invented the game themselves. Nothing is certain, but one thing can be for sure: beerpong is a mix of several other sports, therefor making it have no true date of invention.
If you think about it, beerpong is a mix of basketball, bowling, and in the case of the "real" beerpong: tennis. All of these sports have been around for hundreds, even thousands of years. You could credit jesus' apostles for inventing it as much as you could credit a frat from the 80's.
The history of beerpong, in some accounts, dates back to the 1950's, when college frats played ping pong all day long. Obviously while drinking, the frat brothers would stand around and work the paddles. One day, while resting his beer on the ping pong table and engaging in an intense ping pong battle, the opposing ping pong player hit (insert stereotypical 1950's name here)'s beer. Thus the game was born.
as the years progressed, people wanted to play this game more and more. Ping pong tables were rather expensive back then, so people began to make their own. Sometimes the frat houses didn’t have ping pong paddles, so they would improvise by throwing the ball with their hand. Beer bottles and cans turned into 16 oz cups, rules and standards were invented, and the game has evolved into what it is today. Like i said, this is just one account.
The other history and the more popular of the two, of beerpong goes something like this. In the early to mid 80s, Pennsylvania colleges began inventing new drinking games to fit the times. Dartmouth has been given the most credit in terms of "starting" the game of beerpong. They even had a school sponsorship in the 1970's to recognize it as an intramural sport. However, the school eventually desanctionized it, thus reducing its popularity. However, it still clearly existed.
As other schools caught on to the insight of Dartmouth, they began to develop their own drinking games, similar to beerpong. One of them was entitled "slam pong." This intense game required two people per side, on a ping pong table, and consisted of one team mate giving the other team mate an 'ally-oop' with the ping pong ball, in which the receiving team mate would slam the ball with the paddle into the opposing team's cups. This obviously resulted in gallons of spillage, and the breaking of paddles. This game faded out and "lob pong" took its place. Lob pong eventually evolved into the beerpong game that we play today.
There's really no other way to describe the history of beerpong. Like I said earlier, many frats claimed to have ultimately created the sport through their own means... but who knows. The true start point in the evolution of beerpong will forever remain unclear. Like the question of who invented Microsoft, the world will never know.
Sources used for this article:
http://www.beerpongworldwide.com
http://www.personal.psu.edu/users/j/d/jdb5001/isearchdraft.htm
http://www.dailyprincetonian.com/archives/2004/11/19/opinion/11525.shtml
