Tuesday, December 12, 2017

The American Cornhole League

This week I discovered—to my surprise—the American Cornhole League on ESPN2. (I’m not making this up—you can google it for verification.) As far as I can tell, the league is a creature of the American Cornhole Organization, where you can buy sweatshirts and so on.  

Competitive cornholing, I now see, is a national phenomenon. (According to dictionaries of slang, a cornholer is a penetrator in anal sex.)  

I have to admit it gets difficult for old men like me to keep up with how sports keep changing.

In the game I saw, two teams tried to lob beanbags into a hole. The teams were usually two young men, but I did see one woman cornhole with her boyfriend. The game itself resembled a form of horseshoes that had been simplified for beer drinkers who found horseshoes too complex. I watched a playoff, preliminary to a final weekend In Las Vegas called “Cornhole Madness.” 

After the playoff game between Arkansas and Mississippi State, I went on line for an explanation. The announcers had said things like “There’s not much strategy” and  “The holes are really small,”  but I thought the main strategic point of the competition was obvious: to avoid elimination.  

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