Rick Riley gets the FJM treatment; long live FJM

A) I just noticed there's a Simmons-Klosterman podcast up on ESPN.com right now, so I'm pumped to take that in tomorrow. Those have pretty much been my two favorite writers my entire life, and most of the stuff they've done together is pretty good. I got Klosterman's new book - and first novel - Downtown Owl for Christmas and read it in about four days. It actually wasn't anything special (if you want to get into him, start with Sex, Drugs, and Coco Puffs), but still, he's one writer I can never put down.

B) Watched Step Brothers for the first time yesterday....unreal. Possibly a top five comedy all-time.

C) My weekly top ten list. (link)

D) Rick Riley's beer pong column has received some heavy play in the blogsphere the last few days - including from our friends at Sportspros(e) - and friend of the blog Matt Bradwell was kind enough to FJM the entire thing.

Dig in, after the jump...


BY MATT BRADWELL

There is only one place I know that combines tiny balls, plastic cups and vats of beer. Besides Jose Canseco's house, that is.

Great start.  What a clever bait-and-switch.  I mean, holy shit-tits, I thought he was just giving us the lede to his column, but WAMMO! Ricky sticks it hard to Jose Canseco!  Hilarious AND relevant!

It's a beer pong tournament. This is a sport that requires a steady hand, faulty hearing and a titanium liver. It's believed that 73% of all tuition money goes toward it.

It's funny because parents in the middle to upper class spend a significant portion of their lives saving money so they can send their children to college, where said children often engage in recreational binge drinking in the guise of casual competition.  Everyone can relate to it!

Beer pong is played on a table slightly smaller than Ping-Pong's, by teams of two. Ten cups, filled about one-third with beer, are set like bowling pins at the ends. As you try to toss or bounce a Ping-Pong ball into the cups on the side opposite yours, opponents jump and yell unspeakables about your mother. If you make it, they must drink it. First team to sink all 10 cups wins. It's very sophisticated.

Oh man, he said it's sophisticated, but he's implying that it's not!  Who's gonna stop the Rick train when it gets rolling!?

But the beer pong I play

Those six words are either completely false or utterly disturbing considering he's 51-years-old.

is nothing like the kind in the World Series of Beer Pong, which I covered recently at the Flamingo Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas.

Thank God he covered that tournament since, absolutely nothing else relevant is happening in sports at the moment.

That's where North America's 414 best pong teams competed for the $50,000 first prize. Second prize: bubkes. Gulp.

You have never seen such large people throw such tiny objects into such small receptacles with such hair-raising frequency. The best teams hit about 70% of their shots on the eight-foot tables. That's like pitching a quarter into a parking meter slot seven times out of 10.

You know what my favorite thing in the whole world is?  A good hyperbole.

More shocking was that it was more about pong than booze. Four of the 10 cups were filled with water, which worked out to one beer per player per hour. Regular pongers pour more than that on their Raisin Bran.

In fact, drinking was optional.

No booze at all!?  Man, this is sounding more fun with each passing sentence.

One team used only water in the first round--Mrs. and Mrs. Lara and Kristin Mendez of New York City. That's right, two married women. Beer Pong: changing the world.

Rick Reilly: discovering lesbians and beer pong in the same weekend.

Still, there were quality team names, such as: He Sucks ... I'm Good; Beer Pong ... Because Jesus Would; and Chase's Mom ATM. There was also Francois the Butt Dusters, made up of my sons, Jake (21) and Kel (23).

And there we have it.  ESPN is paying over a hundred dollars-per-word for a look-at-what-my-neato-kids-did column.  Awesome.  And Francois the Butt Dusters!  Sweet gay joke!  Glad to see the little Reilly's are as clever as their father.

The Dusters started off 4-0, including a W over a team from Rochester, whose members, no joke, would, out of nowhere, slap each other hard on the face.

THAT'S CRAZY!

The slapee, red-cheeked, would look at his partner--stunned--and then yell, "Yeeeeahhh!!!" One guy from Jersey ripped his shirt off just before a crucial point. One team played sitting on each other's shoulders.

Rick Reilly:  I've got this crazy idea for column.  It's about the world championship of beer pong.  I know, CRAZY!  And get this, the teams have these crazy names and do all sorts of crazy things!  Just front the bill while I go to crazy-ole-Las Vegas.
Frustrated Editor:  Actually, since you have a very candid rapport with Tiger Woods, I was thinking about sending you to his place for a piece about his recovery, training and strategy for when he returns.  Our readers would be really into it, and it would be a huge scoop on the competit-
Rick Reilly:  My kids are in the crazypants beer pong thing [waves ludicrous contract].
Frustrated Editor:  [to self] Why the fuck did I take a job with Disney?
Rick Reilly:  CRAZY!!!

The real drama centered on Albany's the Iron Wizard Coalition. These guys made last year's finals and sank their final cup while their opponents, Chauffeuring the Fat Kid, still needed four. They went triple Gramatica, jumping and dancing and hugging. "I had that money spent," says Mike Hulse, 28, of the Wizards.

But they forgot about beer pong's diabolical redemption rule, which allows a last chance as long as you don't miss another cup. Fat Kid never did. Four straight sinks. Pong history. Kid wound up winning the game and the cash. "Do I think about it?" says Hulse, who doesn't make much working for a cable company. "I think about it every time I look at a bill. Every freakin' time."

Mike Hulse.  28-years-old.  Works low-paying job for a cable company.  Plays beer pong competitively.  Struggles to pay bills.  Biggest Life Regret: losing beer pong tournament.

Alas, the Wizards wound up 49th this year. The Butt Dusters finished a valiant 182nd. The finals came down to the tourney faves: Smashing Time (Ron Hamilton and Michael "Pops" Popielarski, both 25) vs. Getcha Popcorn Ready (Brian Nentwig and Joe Radesco, both 23). The 6'4", 280-pound Hamilton chugged a bottle of Jack Daniel's beforehand. "The key today," he said later, "was me getting real drunk." (Maybe it wasn't always more about pong than booze.)

THAT'S SO CRAZY!!!!

Popcorn, winner of the loser's bracket, needed to win both games to be crowned King Pong. Smashing Time had to win only one. Popcorn won Game 1. The next would be for everything. And that's when I saw something I've never seen in sports.

Someone getting paid 2 million dollars-per-year to write about beer pong?

The two teams had made a secret deal before the match: If Popcorn won Game 1 and the tourney continued, the winners would give the losers $3,000. Can you imagine? "Tell you what," Kobe says to KG before Game 7. "Winner buys the loser a Rolls. Deal?"

The king's sport of beer pong is forever tainted by these misgivings.  Or something.  Also, S a D Reilly, since ESPN made you the highest paid sportswriter on the planet, the closest you've come to writing about the NBA is a column about golfing with Charles Barkley at a celebrity golf tourney.  Name dropping KG and Kobe in the same sentence as a group of fucktarded rednecks does not cover your ass.

Bad move for Smashing Time, which then proceeded to sink little white balls just like in Tiger's dreams.

I'm pretty sure Rick Reilly just called Tiger Woods a racially biased pedophile.

They used only 12 shots to make their final 10 and win easily. Twelve balls, 10 cups. Try that at home.

Have.  Agreed, I'm sure I couldn't do it.  Still not very impressive beyond and a "holy shit, guess what my friend's girlfriend's brother did this one time" story.   Moving on.

It should be noted that the final was filled with honor. Nobody mentioned anybody's sister or flashed unwelcome appendages.

That's good. All this bush league stuff will have to go if we're going to take beer pong to the next level: the Olympics.

"Shit!  Almost at 800 words!  Better wrap this up with a lazy-one-sentence-rim-shot-