When Did Beer Pong Become Popular?

Going Viral – According to Thrillist, students at Dartmouth wrote to the New York Times in 1972 to ask who held the world record for beer pong. Then in the late 70’s road tripping students introduced beer pong all across New England and eventually to rival Ivy league schools like Princeton University and University of Pennsylvania.

From there, beer pong made its way to central Pennsylvania to Bucknell and Lehigh, which are often given credit for inventing the game of beer pong, also known as “Beirut.” In 1979 Lehigh published a “co-ed’s song of woe” in the school paper where a student recounts losing games of “beer pong, flip the cup, and tales” to a visiting Fraternity.

The nature of beer pong, sometimes known as “Dartmouth Pong” during that time, is still open for debate: how many cups did they use and how were they arranged? What kind of tables did they use? And most importantly, were they even using paddles? It probably wasn’t until the early 1980’s when people started throwing the ping pong balls,

• Some say a Lehigh student visiting friends in Bucknell and joined the fun of playing without paddles, others say it was the other way around.
• While Lehigh had the first documented mention of the game, some argue that “throw pong” originated at Bucknell because of this photo taken at a 1980 house party at Bucknell thrown by fraternity Delta Upsilon.

So maybe someone brought it to Lehigh first but Bucknell was the first to start throwing? Either way, the 80’s was the era of throwing the balls in beer pong. And throwing “bombs” into the opponent’s cups was what led to giving beer pong an alternative name

When was beer pong popularized?

Origin and name – Members of Delta Upsilon playing Throw Pong at Bucknell University during the House Party weekend of 1980 The game was originally believed to have evolved from the original beer pong played with paddles which is generally regarded to have had its origins within the fraternities of Dartmouth College in the U.S.

• In the 1950s and 1960s, where it has since become part of the social culture of the campus.
• The original version resembled an actual ping pong game with a net and one or more cups of beer on each side of the table.
• Eventually, a version without paddles was invented and the names Beer Pong and Beirut were adopted in some areas of the United States sometime in the 1980s.

In some places, Beer Pong refers to the version of the game with paddles, and Beirut to the version without. Bucknell University ‘s student-run newspaper, The Bucknellian, claims Delta Upsilon fraternity members at Bucknell created “Throw Pong”, a game very similar to beer pong, during the 1970s, and that “Throw Pong” was then brought to Lehigh University by fraternity brothers who visited Bucknell and this led to the creation of the version of beer pong that is played today.

What was beer pong originally called?

Everything you’ve read about the history of beer pong is bullshit. I’ve read countless articles about the history and origin of beer pong. It seems that every one comes back to some particular fraternity or college. Apparently, modern day beer pong was invented in almost every small liberal arts college up and down the East Coast.

1. To think, some college kids just looking to entertain themselves when it was freezing outside decided to invent a drinking game to play inside.
2. What a groundbreaking revelation! According to Wikipedia, which is the definitive source for any kind of research, beer pong started at Dartmouth College sometime in the 1950s and 1960s.

But at the same time, Bucknell University claims to have invented the game in the 1970s. They called it “throw pong.” What kind of stupid name is “throw pong,” anyway? These are college kids, and the best they can come up with is “throw pong?” The whole name debate also bothers me.

• I’ve met maybe a handful of people my entire life who referred to the game as “beirut.” It’s called beer pong.
• There is no game called “beirut.” If you use a paddle, it’s called ping pong, not beer pong, not beirut.
• Beirut is the capital of Lebanon and probably not the best place to spend a Friday night with a 30-pack of Keystone Light.

Ping pong is played with paddles and does not include beer, unless you are drinking it on the side. Forrest Gump used to hit ping pong balls into a bedpan during the Vietnam War. You mean to tell me Forrest Gump was playing one of the earliest forms of beer pong ever documented? I may not be a smart man, but I know what beer pong is.

Too many people try to complicate the simple game of beer pong. It’s not rocket science, guys. Beer pong is throwing a ping pong ball into a cup. If you’re at a house party, you’re probably drinking the contents of said cup afterward. If you’re playing WSOBP rules at a bar, you probably aren’t drinking the cup because that would be illegal in some cities.

Beer pong is like ramen noodles, everyone has their own way. Personally, I don’t like to follow the directions. I boil the noodles, drain the noodles, add the chicken seasoning and add some cayenne pepper and call it Buffalo Chicken Ramen Noodles. It’s delicious.

I know a guy who breaks an egg into his while it cooks. That’s good, too. Not to get sidetracked, but I’m always looking for good ramen noodle recipes, so please share your favorite. But the fact remains: There is no wrong way to play beer pong. Sure, there is a World Series of Beer Pong which has its own set of rules, but that’s not the only way to play.

In case you live under a rock, WSOBP rules basically consist of playing with 10 cups and a special rack to keep the cups in place. There are automatic re- racks on the six-cup, three-cup, and one-cup formations. If you make both shots, you get one bring-back.

When the last cup is made, the opposing team generally gets a one ball and a shoot-till-you-miss opportunity. It can get more complicated, but that’s the basics. Oh yeah, there is no elbow rule. We’ll save that discussion for another time. While WSOBP rules are fun and all, I still have love for “house rules.” Most of us grew up playing beer pong according to specific house rules.

From my experiences, I’ve found most house rules consist of playing with 6 cups or 10 cups, depending on how many people are waiting to play. Usually you get unlimited bring-backs, shoot-till-you-miss rebuttal shots, and rules dictating that you have to drink before you shoot.

Where is beer pong popular?

Beer Pong is a popular drinking game that is well-loved by college students and adults. It’s easy to play and is popular at college campuses and fraternity parties. Although many people know the game’s basic rules, you might not know some of the below-mentioned facts about this popular party game.

When did beer bong start?

We humans have been drinking beer for thousands of years and we’ve also had funnels for thousands of years, so it’s no wonder that the very first person to think of combining the two is lost to history. There’s also the fact that, while other great minds of the ancient world, like Plato or Pythagoras, had the wherewithal to write down their discoveries, whichever innovator first funneled booze into his gullet likely passed out and spent the next day recovering from a massive hangover, totally neglecting to record his findings for posterity. There are also artifacts known as ” rhyta ” which are, essentially, ancient Greek beer bongs shaped like animals. They were meant to hold a more religious significance than the modern beer bong, but the funnel-shaped cups were poured in from the top and emptied out from the bottom, which would require immediate consumption. Then there’s this industrious gentleman, whose story was covered in New Jersey’s Matawan Journal on November 29, 1900, and was appropriately titled “Got More Than He Wanted”: “Frank Dobson of Cliffwood went into Omerod & White’s market in Keyport a few days ago and introduced a new method of drinking cider through a funnel.

He lay on his back on the floor with his mouth under the faucet of the cider barrel and then placed the funnel in his mouth. Someone turned on the faucet and Frank was nearly strangled by the cider, which caused him to sputter at a great rate as he choked and gagged. The attempt was a failure, of course, but Dobson thinks he could do better after a little practice.” Whether or not Dobson mastered his skill isn’t known, but I, for one, like to believe he did.

In my own imagined history, I picture Dobson perfecting his funnel technique a few months after this embarrassing incident at Omerod & White’s market, but having been lampooned in the paper, deciding not to share his gift with the world. Instead, he kept it to himself, passing down the technique only to a trusted few, where it would remain a guarded secret until sometime in the 1980s, when the technique finally became more public. Merriam-Webster’s dictionary cites 1982 as the earliest such use of the term, but I found an earlier example in a 1981 issue of the New York Daily News, The article was about a handful of teenagers on prom night, who are later lamenting a costly bill at Trader Vic’s,

A passage reads, “Most of the guys remembered how much cheaper and easier it had been to get drunk on the beer bong they had rigged up a few months back.” What’s curious about the reference was the lack of explanation for what a beer bong is, which suggests that the invention came sometime earlier and that it was already somewhat common knowledge by 1981.

This is backed up by the film Dazed and Confused, which features a beer bong in it — the movie was made in 1993, admittedly, but it takes place in 1976. While the beer bong’s inclusion could have been a simple anachronism, the dates do line up, which means the term “beer bong” was likely born in the late 1970s, spread in the 1980s and became mainstream in the late 1990s.

Other early references to the beer bong exist throughout the 1980s. For one, The Daily Tar Heel of North Carolina makes several references to it at the start of the decade, including instructions on how to make one in 1982, The Baltimore Sun pictured one in 1983, and three years later, a medical journal on alcoholism wrote about the device for what seems to be the first time, referring to it as ” a modern variant of a drinking party practice of classical Greece,” With the exception of a reference to a beer bong in the 1987 book Rules of Attraction, most beer-bong references in popular culture seem to begin in the 1990s.

Earlier examples of beer bongs on film may indeed exist, but aside from the aforementioned Dazed and Confused, the next earliest example I could find was in 1996’s Scream, where it made a brief but memorable appearance at the hands of Matthew Lillard,

1. And, since Scream was such a massive hit, this appearance might have contributed to the beer bong’s explosion in popularity in the late 1990s, as well as a 1996 appearance in The Real World and a 1999 appearance on Freaks and Geeks,
2. It would be the early 2000s, though, where the beer bong would truly shine on film.

One was featured in 2000’s Scary Movie, but 2001’s Saving Silverman had a more memorable beer-bong scene, where the device is pictured in the hands of rising star Jack Black, who played a beer-guzzling — yet notably polite — beer-bong enthusiast.2003, however, would bring about film’s greatest appearance of the beer bong.

The movie, of course, is Old School, where Will Ferrell plays Frank the Tank, a man reliving his college glory days by streaking and binge-drinking. In a scene many still cite as one of the greatest drinking moments in movie history, Frank initially resists a shot at the beer bong, but then downs it like the old pro he is, leading to a night of further debauchery.

Just three years after this, a beer bong made news when soon-to-be presidential candidate John Kerry was pictured along with one when he stopped by a tailgate party. Unsurprisingly, Kerry didn’t partake, but that didn’t stop the photo from becoming a national news item for days, The thing is, after Frank the Tank, the beer bong seemed to enter a new era where it wasn’t enough. That’s not to say the beer bong faded from college parties — it would continue to be ( and still is ) a staple at such festivities — but people seemed to want more than just a beer bong, so they upped the ante with pressurized beer bongs, multi-tentacled beer bongs and combination weed/beer bongs,

1. They also competed for the ” longest,” ” tallest ” and ” biggest ” beer bongs.
2. This would also be mirrored in popular culture, like “the beast” in the TBS comedy Glory Daze and a tree-mounted beer bong in the movie Project X,
3. Also, beer-bong puking videos and even butt chugging seem to be a product of this beer-bong one-upmanship.

In a way, it seems Frank the Tank said all that needed to be said about the simple, beautiful device — after that, the only way to move forward was to get weird or crazy. In The Tank’s initial aversion to, and then great enthusiasm for, the beer bong, he summed up the experience of so many who have partied with one.

How did Pong become so popular?

Pong wasn’t the first game video game on the market, but it did become the first big hit after its release in 1972. Why was it so popular? – Part of it was this simplicity, the ease of play and the fact that it didn’t require a lot of skill to be built up in the player.

• It was obvious what to do.
• It was fun, it was familiar, and people wanted to keep playing it.
• Nolan Bushnell, an entrepreneur who started Atari, said that a good video game would reward the first quarter and the 100th like it was something fun to play each time.
• And then you could get better at it.
• So I think a lot of games like that, they appeal to you immediately.

But then you also want to keep getting better at them.

Is Pong the oldest game?

Inducted Year: 2015 By most measures of popular impact, Pong launched the video game industry. Atari Pong Flyer, 1972 A simple game involving two paddles and a ball, Pong introduced millions to the joys of playing video games. Although it was not the first electronic game, and the Magnavox Odyssey home console already featured a similar tennis game, Pong was the first game to grab wide-scale public attention.

Its success launched Atari into a preeminent role in the video game industry. Atari founder Nolan Bushnell conceived the idea of a video version of Ping-Pong in 1972 and assigned engineer Allan Alcorn to create it. Within several months, Alcorn developed a prototype for a coin-operated arcade version so engaging that users testing it in a neighborhood bar filled its coin box to overflowing.

Soon Atari had tens of thousands of copies of the game in restaurants and bars all over the country. The arcade era of video games had begun. Pong assembly drawing, 1973, from the The Strong’s Atari Coin-Op Division corporate records In 1975, Atari used the Sears Catalog to introduce a home version just as easy to understand and fun to play as the coin-operated arcade machine. Home Pong became the hot Christmas gift, selling hundreds of thousands of copies, introducing millions of children to video games, and transforming the TV from a passive medium into an interactive plaything.

What was Pong called in the UK?

#OnThisDay 1972: Atari unveiled Pong, perhaps the most iconic videogame of all time. According to Nolan Bushnell, in the UK it was called Ping

What is a fun fact about beer pong?

History of Beer Pong Day – The day was first organized at The University of Arizona in Tucson, Arizona, on May 6, 2006, by Mr. Beer Pong (Jack Brosseit) and Mrs. Beer Pong (Mary Brosseit), and their oldest daughter. It was to celebrate the graduation of their youngest daughter, Miss Beer Pong.

While Beer Pong Day is not that old, the game itself goes far back in time. Beer pong came into existence, not via invention, but via evolution. And this evolution required some significant occurrences. Beer pong wasn’t invented at a college, like you’d be inclined to believe, but the game actually evolved from something similar to ping-pong, a game called Beirut (yes, like the capital of Lebanon).

Beirut involved using a paddle to hit a ping-pong ball into cups. Boston, Massachusetts, is often credited with adapting Beirut during the ’60s and ’70s to become beer pong, i.e., removing the paddle and aiming the ball at a beer cup. Thus, modern-day beer pong came into existence.

Beirut, the game, was already popular there.Ping-pong, paddles, and beers were already popular in various social clubs.The domination of the Boston Celtics in the NBA was the result of the growing popularity of Basketball in the U.S. This is what made people get rid of the paddles and use their hands instead.

Drinking games were always popular. But with the increasing popularity, beer pong tables and balls spread across North America and the United Kingdom as well.

How popular is beer pong?

Study Reveals the Most Popular Drinking Game at Every College Drinking games are a right of passage for college students. Every school and group of students have their own traditions and rules — whether it’s for,, or quarters. Yet despite all of the differences, one thing remains the same: Students post pictures of themselves playing whatever their go-to drinking game is on Instagram.

1. That’s what found after collecting drinking games related Instagram posts within a one-mile radius of American colleges with at least 4,500 students.
2. If what the kids these days are putting on their social media is any indication, beer pong is the most popular game by far, and New York students really like to show off how much they drink.

Students in New York mentioned a drinking game 193 times per 100,000 residents. That blew the second and third highest — Illinois with 60.6 and California with 60.2 — out of the water. Beer pong, quarters, and flip cup were the three most popular with 32.9 percent, 20.7 percent, and 20.1 percent of all drinking game Instagram mentions, respectively.

The top five drinking game colleges by number of posts were Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, N.J., Rutgers University in Camden, N.J., Savannah College of Art and Design in Savannah, Ga., Chapman University in Orange, Calif., and Strayer University in Arlington, Va. Don’t count out the Ivy Leagues and highly regarded academic colleges, though.

Brown had the third most beer pong pictures, MIT had the third most quarters pictures, and Yale had the third most flip cup pictures per 1,000 students. Of course, the data isn’t perfect. The hashtags used — #BeerPong, #BeerOlympics, #BeerRoulette, #3man, #ThreeMan, #Drinkapalooza, #DrinkingGames, #DrunkJenga, #Edward40Hands, #EdwardFortyHards, #FlipCup, #KingsCup, #PowerHour, #Quarters — could have been used by people who aren’t college students as well. : Study Reveals the Most Popular Drinking Game at Every College

Why is it called gentleman’s beer pong?

Gentleman’s Re-rack – When you get down to just 2 cups left, no matter where they are, you can ask for a “gentleman’s.” This means the cups will be arranged into a line (perpendicular to the end of the table) for easier aiming. This doesn’t count towards the two re-racks typically allowed in a game of beer pong.

What is the history of beer pong?

Beer Pong and Beirut? – Whether you’re a current frat bro, aspiring frat bro, recovering frat bro, romantically involved with a frat bro, the parent of a frat bro, or friends with or enemies of or otherwise acquainted with a frat bro, you probably have some familiarity with a few beer-soaked drinking games.

Chances are, one of those drinking games includes cups of beer, ping-pong balls, and drunk people trying to get said ping-pong balls into said cups of beer. But is that game beer pong, or Beirut ? Were the frat stars who poured beer on themselves and pounded their chests and declared themselves the champions of it actually using the correct term? Like many things that involve heavy amounts of alcohol, the answer is fuzzy.

The first games of beer pong were played up at Dartmouth in the early 1950s, when people were playing ping-pong and left their cups of beer on the table; someone decided it would be a good idea to aim the ball at the cups, and a drinking game was born.

1. The game evolved into a competition in which opponents use ping-pong paddles with the handles snapped off — no handles equals more accuracy — and aim at cups arranged in varying formations, such as Shrub, Tree, Ship, or Line.
2. Hit the side of a cup with the ball, and your opponent drinks half the cup; sink the ball successfully, and your opponent drinks the whole thing.

Beirut — a game with a similar outcome (drunkenness) but different rules — came about in the 1980s, at either Bucknell or Lehigh. (There are disputes as to where it was played first.) In Beirut, 10 cups are arranged in a pyramid shape on both sides of a table; the competitors then stand at either side and take turns throwing the ping-pong ball across the table, rather than paddling it.

• If a ball is sunk into a cup, one of the opponents has to chug it.
• But what’s the deal with the name? The game was popularized during a time when Beirut, Lebanon was in the news: in 1983, suicide bombers killed 241 U.S.
• Marines stationed in barracks at the Beirut airport.
• Supposedly, people at Lehigh felt that the U.S.

should’ve bombed Beirut in retribution for the attacks, and thought the ping-pong balls dropping to the other side of the table resembled bombs being dropped on the Lebanese capital. They started calling the game “Beirut,” and it caught on. But as the game started to spread around the United States, to areas unfamiliar with the original Dartmouth version, people started to drop the name “Beirut” — and called it “beer pong” instead.

You gotta say, the name intuitively makes sense, even without the use of paddles.) So now wait for it both are called beer pong, Some may still use the name Beirut — and if they do, you know which game it is — but if you hear the term “beer pong,” it could mean one of two things. A messy history, an unsatisfying conclusion: sounds about right for a drinking game.

Cheers! • What’s the Difference Between Beer Pong and Beirut?

Who popularized ping-pong?

The name ‘Ping-Pong’ was invented by the English firm J. Jaques and Son at the end of the 1800s and later trademarked in the United States by Parker Brothers, the board game company. The game quickly caught on, and as early as 1901, tournaments were being conducted with over 300 participants.

When did table tennis gain popularity?

The rise of table tennis in Asia. In the 1950s, table tennis became integral to the countries of Asia. The Japanese excelled at the World Team Championships between 1954 and 1959. This domination was bolstered by the introduction of foam, which transformed classic bats.

What is the oldest known game?

Africa – Pit marks supposed to be ancient Gebeta (i.e. mancala) boards in the base of an Aksumite stele, Axum, Ethiopia The most widespread of the native African games is Mancala, Mancala is a family of board games played around the world, sometimes called ” sowing ” games, or “count-and-capture” games, which describes the gameplay.

• The word mancala:منقلة comes from the Arabic word naqala:نقلة meaning literally “to move”.
• The earliest evidence of Mancala consists of fragments of pottery boards and several rock cuts found in Aksumite in Ethiopia, Matara (now in Eritrea ), and Yeha (also in Ethiopia), which have been dated by archaeologists to between the 6th and 7th century CE.

More than 800 names of traditional mancala games are known, and almost 200 invented games have been described. However, some names denote the same game, while some names are used for more than one game. Today, the game is played worldwide, with many distinct variants representing different regions of the world.

What is the oldest classic game?

1. The Royal Game of Ur – The, Wood and shell, found in the Royal Cemetery of Ur, south Iraq, 2600–2400 BC. The Royal Game of Ur is the oldest playable boardgame in the world, originating around 4,600 years ago in ancient Mesopotamia. The game’s rules were written on a cuneiform tablet by a Babylonian astronomer in 177 BC.

What came first ping pong or Pong?

table tennis, also called (trademark) Ping-Pong, ball game similar in principle to lawn tennis and played on a flat table divided into two equal courts by a net fixed across its width at the middle. The object is to hit the ball so that it goes over the net and bounces on the opponent’s half of the table in such a way that the opponent cannot reach it or return it correctly.

The lightweight hollow ball is propelled back and forth across the net by small rackets (bats, or paddles) held by the players. The game is popular all over the world. In most countries it is very highly organized as a competitive sport, especially in Europe and Asia, particularly in China and Japan,

The game was invented in England in the early days of the 20th century and was originally called Ping-Pong, a trade name. The name table tennis was adopted in 1921–22 when the old Ping-Pong Association formed in 1902 was revived. The original association had broken up about 1905, though apparently the game continued to be played in parts of England outside London and by the 1920s was being played in many countries.

1. Led by representatives of Germany, Hungary, and England, the Fédération Internationale de Tennis de Table ( International Table Tennis Federation) was founded in 1926, the founding members being England, Sweden, Hungary, India, Denmark, Germany, Czechoslovakia, Austria, and Wales.
2. By the mid-1990s more than 165 national associations were members.

The first world championships were held in London in 1926, and from then until 1939 the game was dominated by players from central Europe, the men’s team event being won nine times by Hungary and twice by Czechoslovakia. In the mid-1950s Asia emerged as a breeding ground of champions, and from that time the individual and team events (for both men and women) have been dominated by athletes from China.

• The popularity of the game in China was notable for giving rise to so-called “Ping-Pong diplomacy,” a period during the 1970s in which Cold War tensions between China and the United States were eased via a series of highly publicized table tennis matches between athletes from the two countries.
• The first such event—held in Beijing in 1971—is widely credited with paving the way for U.S.

Pres. Richard Nixon ‘s historic visit to China the following year. In 1980 the first World Cup was held, and Guo Yuehua of China won the $12,500 first prize. Table tennis became an Olympic sport in 1988, with singles and doubles competition for men and women.

What was Pong in the 70s?

Pong, groundbreaking electronic game released in 1972 by the American game manufacturer Atari, Inc. One of the earliest video games, Pong became wildly popular and helped launch the video game industry. The original Pong consisted of two paddles that players used to volley a small ball back and forth across a screen.

1. The German-born American television engineer Ralph Baer laid the groundwork for Pong in 1958 when he proposed making simple video games that people could play on their home television sets.
2. The Magnavox Odyssey, known as the first console video game system, was released in 1972 and offered a game of table tennis, or Ping-Pong.

Atari founder Nolan Bushnell created Pong, his version of this concept, as an arcade game. A small company at the time, Atari began manufacturing the games in an old roller skating rink, and by 1972 the company had sold more than 8,000 Pong arcade machines.

In 1975 Atari turned Pong into a console system game. After striking an exclusive deal with Sears, Roebuck and Company, Pong was soon in the homes of many American families. Pong ‘s popularity declined in the 1980s as video games temporarily went out of style, but it had already secured its place in history as the most popular arcade game up to that time.

In 1974 the makers of the Magnavox Odyssey sued Atari for stealing the concept for Pong, Magnavox won the lawsuit in 1977, upholding the company’s patent, but by then Atari had already licensed the patent for $700,000. This article was most recently revised and updated by William L.

When was ping pong popular?

All About Table Tennis – Like most other sports, table tennis had humble beginnings as a “parlor game,” open to anyone with access to a table, paddle, and ball. The game began in the 1880s, when lawn tennis players adapted their game to play indoors during the winter.

Ping-Pong is a trademark name for table tennis and associated equipment. The name “Ping-Pong” was invented by the English firm J. Jaques and Son at the end of the 1800s and later trademarked in the United States by Parker Brothers, the board game company. The game quickly caught on, and as early as 1901, tournaments were being conducted with over 300 participants.

The Ping-Pong Association was formed but was renamed The Table Tennis Association in 1922. In 1902 a visiting Japanese university professor took the game back to Japan, where he introduced it to university students. Shortly after, a British salesman, Edward Shires, introduced it to the people of Vienna and Budapest, and the seeds were sown for a sport that now enjoys popularity all over the world.

1. In Britain, table tennis had also begun to spread outside the distinctly middle-class confines of London, and leagues sprang up in provincial towns as far apart as Sunderland and Plymouth.
2. In 1922, an All England Club was formed, which boasted such luminaries as Jack Hobbs the cricketer and other famous names of the time from the world of sport.

The Daily Mirror organized and sponsored a nationwide tournament in which there were 40,000 competitors. Table tennis was firmly on the map, and on April 24, 1927, the English Table Tennis Association was born, under the chairmanship and direction of Ivor Montague, son of Lord Ewatthling.

He was not only to become the architect of modern-day table tennis, but he also achieved critical acclaim as both a director and film producer. At the time, The ETTA had a membership of 19 leagues but now has over 300, with around 75,000 registered players. The first world championships were held in 1927 and were won by a Hungarian, Dr.

Jacobi. Apart from the famous Fred Perry redressing the balance for England in 1929, this was to be the start of an unprecedented run of success for the Hungarians, who completely dominated the game throughout the thirties. Their team was led by the legendary Victor Barna, whose inspiration and skill did so much to elevate the game to sports status.

1. The 1950s saw the game turned upside down by the invention of the sponge or sandwich rubber, this new material for bats, which, up until now, had been a relatively simple affair with a universal thin covering of pimpled rubber.
2. Until this time, spin had played only a minor part in a game that had been dominated by the defensive style of play.

But these new bats or paddles, introduced by the Japanese, had the capacity to move the ball around in an almost magical way. The ITTF, the game’s governing body, was quick to legislate in a bid to control this new development, seen in some quarters as equipping players with an unfair advantage.

• The thickness of the sponge and rubber sandwich was controlled and remains so to this day.
• But the nature of the game had been changed, establishing the fast attacking speed and spin style of the modern game.
• Today, the sport both in England and abroad is very well established and is growing each year.

The culmination of this has been its recognition as an Olympic Games sport, being featured for the first time in the 1988 games in Seoul. Television coverage of the men’s singles final attracted an incredible worldwide audience of 2 billion. In China, the game is played by literally millions at work, in school, and in community parks.

What year did ping pong start?

In 1890, Englishman David Foster, attracted by its wide appeal, introduced the first game of tennis on a table. In 1897, the first national championships were organised in Hungary.