Cornholed

While flipping the channels one day I happened on a sports network featuring a cornhole tournament.

Cornhole is a word that always implied something vulgar or obscene to me, yet here they were playing a game bearing that name. What’s next, a game called upchuck?

Anyway, the point of the game is to toss small bean bags at an inclined wooden platform with a hole in it and to try to get the bags into the hole. I understand the bags used to be filled with dried corn - hence the name. If they painted a face on the board and the hole was the mouth, could you call it pie hole?

Now I can imagine bored young men in the nineteenth century playing this sort of game in farm country. I suspect some drinking may have been involved. Or maybe some entrepreneur coming up with this as a parlor game. But when did this become a television-worthy event? With associations, teams, and prizes no less?

I suddenly thought back to when I was in high school. During lunch breaks, a few of us, bored, came up with a game involving a tennis ball and a classroom wastebasket. We’d find an empty room, put the wastebasket on top of something - the teacher’s desk, a stool, a bookcase - and from various locations in the classroom try to toss the tennis ball into it.

We called it “Trashketball.”

We later drifted away from the game. It helped that a teacher found out we’d been playing in his room and he asked us to stop.

Our game was a silly one - as silly in some ways as cornhole. But the world is full of strange games. Lawn mower racing, for example. Or cheese rolling. Or toe wrestling. As a person of Scottish descent, I have to own tossing the caber - basically heaving a telephone pole. I suspect that one, like so many other games, began as a way to show off for the guys, and perhaps to impress some young ladies.

And I suspect in all of these competitions some drinking may have been involved.

Cornhole made it on television in part because there are now channels totally devoted to sports, and they have to fill their schedules and generate advertising income. There are all sorts of sports showing up that used to be just activities people did to fill time and hone skills - ax throwing, rock paper scissors, and even stone skipping.

It’s a situation similar to one faced by all those cable news channels that have to fill their schedules with programming. In the past, some of the talking heads they hired might just have been the loud-mouthed guys who pontificated in bars or the passionate women who voiced their views with the neighbors over coffee. And sometimes their opinions make as much sense as tossing bean bags. Or telephone poles.

One wonders what competition they’ll turn to next to fill sports channel schedules. Tiddlywinks? Twister? Tabletop football?

There's money to be made. Or fifteen minutes of fame. And a few adult beverages consumed. 

Maybe it’s time to bring back Trashketball. 

Pax et bonum