Sting Pong

We were at my parents' house on Christmas day. It was so fun to be there with the entire family. Jared and Kathy are here with their girls from Texas and this was Ty's first Christmas home since finishing his mission. It isn't often that all of the cousins can be together, so they were in seventh heaven having all of their best friends there to play with. We were all hanging out, visiting and enjoying being together.


But pretty soon, all this "family time" wasn't quite extreme enough for the men in the fam. Someone, I think it was Jasen, came up with an idea to liven things up. It was just a matter of time, really. A game of Sting Pong was proposed.

What?? You've never heard of Sting Pong? This isn't a male bonding experience in every family? Well then, let me explain.

The first critical element is the invitation. I believe it went something like this, "Anybody who claims to be a man, meet downstairs at the ping pong table." Secondly, all of the guys congregate and take turns saying how badly they want to skip out (except Jared, whose never played before and doesn't know that he should be afraid...yet). Next, the game ensues, which is similar, in the basics, to "around the world ping pong." All of the guys (6 in this case) form a circle around the table, everybody has their own paddle, somebody serves and then moves clockwise so that the guy next to him can hit the ball when it comes back across the table. Same thing is happening on the other side of the table: hit the ball, then move clockwise to let the next guy have his turn. So, everybody is constantly running around the table hitting the ball and then running some more. Are you following? Here's a picture to demonstrate:


So far, this sounds like fun, right? Yeah, lots of fun... until somebody misses the ball. In that case, the guy who misses has to stand at the head of the table, hold his shirt up so that his stomach is exposed and wait there while one of the other guys hits the ping pong ball at his exposed skin as hard as he can. Fun game, huh? It actually gets better. If the group decides that the one hitting the ball is being nice and not hitting it as hard as they can, everybody playing gets to take turns hitting the ping pong ball at his stomach, as hard as they can.

Here's Kedar waiting to be hit with the ball, protecting his face with his paddle:

The game goes on like this until they all have ping pong ball sized welts covering their stomachs. There's really not a winner or a point, except to inflict pain.

You know, this game reminds me of when we took turns letting each member of the family shoot rubber bands at our noses from across the room... Wait a minute, you've never played that game either?