Seeing your pong partner play with someone else is worse than your girlfriend cheating on you.
Isn’t it though?
On all levels of beer pong, it sucks when your partner leaves you for someone else. Sometimes, it’s a matter of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. In other cases, you’re getting dropped for a better player.
Remember that time you were running the beer pong table at some house party, left the table to go to the bathroom, came back and found your partner playing with someone else? Couldn’t they have just waited a few minutes? You’ve got to go scrambling to find someone to call next with. Or there’s some girl or guy begging to get on the table and your partner just can’t resist. But at the end of the day, it’s just a house party so it’s not the biggest deal in the world.
Losing a partner in the competitive beer pong world stings a little worse. It’s easy to simplify the simple game of beer pong and completely dismiss the idea of a serious partner, but make no mistake, the best beer pong partnerships are true relationships. Chances are that you aren’t going to win the Masters of Beer Pong tournament with some guy you picked up off the street. Well, unless your name is Ross Hampton.
In the course of a full year, you are probably spending as much time with your pong partner than your significant other. That’s kind of a scary thought. And beer pong relationships are significantly different than intimate ones. When you are playing for high stakes, with alcohol involved, things will get heated. You’re going to get slapped, spit on, punched, or all three in the course of one tournament (thanks Mantis). It’s just the way it is. But when the coin gets flipped for the next round, it’s all love again and you start fresh.
Sometimes, the most dysfunctional partners make the best teams. Look at Michael “Pop” Popielarski and Ron Hamilton. Their team, “Smashing Time,” won back-to-back WSOBP titles, took a break, and came back to make the final table at World Series of Beer Pong VIII a few years later. Lock them in a room together they are likely to kill each other.
Like a bad relationship, you complain about your beer pong partner all the time, but when they finally leave you, you want them back. You forget about that time you misrepresented your shooting percentage while throwing them under the bus, or the time you passed off that last rebuttal because everyone was watching and you didn’t want to be the one that missed. Like looking for a new job, you start putting out applications before you give your two-weeks notice. No one has dropped a solid beer pong partner without having a back-up plan.
Eventually, the time comes when a partnership has reached its end. Sometimes it’s mutual, but in a lot of cases it’s not. Then what?
I’m sure everyone is different, but for me personally, I want to bury my ex-partner. You want to measure your success against his (or hers). You want to advance further than them, shoot better than them, and appear that you are having more fun than them. Yeah, you may be “happy” for them if they win the $100,000 prize, but would you really be? Maybe you’re a better man than me, but I don’t know if I really would be.
I’m going to make a broad generalization here, but competitive beer pong is a “catty” sport. Let’s face it, most of us who play seriously are guys. Most of us weren’t involved in the day-to-day high school drama most girls went through growing up. But the way some of us talk about our beer pong partners, you’d think we were women in a salon.
And we hate seeing our exes with someone new.
