Have you noticed that this is a fantastic time to get obsessive about a hobby or interest? That is unless that hobby involves group choral singing, watching live sports, or eating in crowded restaurants. But if you’ve found a hobby that that you can participate in alone or at a distance, this is the year to hone your craft. 2020 is filled with long periods of few outside commitments and lots of interrupted time at home. Chase has found a weekly Dungeons & Dragons game online. I’ve recently purchased a smoker which involves a long stretches of drinking beer closely monitoring the temperature of meat. And as for our neighborhood, we’re playing cornhole.
Whether it be ping pong, fantasy football, or golf our neighborhood likes to play and likes to compete. Cornhole has always been in the background at neighborhood gatherings, but this year it’s been taken to an entirely new level. Once we stopped washing groceries and sanitizing our shoes, our neighborhood collectively determined throwing bags filled with corn from 27 feet away was a COVID-safe activity. Next, there were a couple gatherings that ratcheted up the level of competition. As my neighbor projected the classic movie Grease onto an inflatable movie screen in his driveway, cornhole went on late into the evening. This particular neighbor is the proud owner of cornhole boards with holes lined with cornhole LED lights (yes, there is such a thing) which provided an illuminated target well into the dark.
It wasn’t until this year that I learned some of the finer nuances of cornhole. Some years ago, I had built a set of cornhole boards, but for years they languished in the backyard. Next, I purchased a set of bags on Amazon and selected them based on color to go along with the boards. But it turns out it the material, not the color of the bag that counts. Cornhole bags are designed to have a “slick” side and “stick” side, and you throw with the appropriate side down depending on how you want the bag to behave once it hits the board. (Think of chipping with a 7-iron vs a sand wedge.) Cornhole also served as programming filler for ESPN early in the pandemic. If you wanted to watch sports on television, American Cornhole League was the only game in town. Here you can learn all important vocabulary terms like v-block, backstop, bully bag, and airmail.
Two of my neighbors have taken their games to entirely different levels. One of them is flashy, a showman. As he intently stares down the board, he dramatically muses things like, “Let’s see if I can send this, catch the edge of my other bag, and bring both in.” And more often than not, he does exactly what he intends to do. Next door lives the underdog. He’s soft-spoken, chasing the champ, and just happens to be Italian. In an effort to protect their identities, let’s call them Apollo Creed and Rocky Balboa.
Both Rocky & Apollo practice almost daily. We might be sitting on the patio for dinner and hear the distinctive splat of 15 ounces of corn hitting a 2′ by 4′ piece of plywood. Then another splat. And then another. We’ve realized that cornhole practice has a distinct sound to it. There’s usually no talking, just the rhythmic sound of bags hitting boards echoing through the neighborhood. A game of cornhole sounds completely different–shouting, cheering, talking trash, general drinking noises. But at least once a day, I hear those practice noises coming from one or two hours west and why not? Might as well leave this pandemic better at something.
Sometimes practice isn’t enough and after dinner I might receive a text in my Rocky/Apollo thread that reads “Wanna throw some?” and we’ll set up the boards in front of my house. I can’t possibly compete with the neighborhood pros one-on-one but we’ve developed a nice rivalry: Apollo/Ryan vs Rocky/myself. If I’m being honest, Apollo & Ryan are better than we are, but we’ll steal a game now and then. One night we played for five hours as no one wanted to stop. We’d pause and wave to our neighbors driving by and I’m pretty sure we waved to families as they were on their way to dinner as well as on the way back home. At the the end of each game, everyone would look around to see who would be the addict who would suggest we play another game.
One of our biggest challenges is the lack of daylight as summer turns to fall. The night of the five hour session we rigged up a work light on a step ladder to continue playing well past dark. The light set up was bit fragile and potentially a fire hazard, so the very next day, Apollo went to Home Depot and purchased two sets of telescoping halogen lights complete tripod stands. Have I mentioned it’s a good time to get obsessive about one’s hobbies?
So now when it’s game time, we all jump into action. Boards get placed at the appropriate chalk marks in the road. If they move a bit or need to be re-adjusted, there’s a contractor’s measuring wheel to walk off the 27 feet. The lights on tripods come out of Apollo’s garage. Extension cords get run back to houses to provide power. Various camping chairs are set up to provide a gallery for watching the game. And most recently, a side table with iPad displaying an cornhole scoring app was added to the mix.
As were playing last Friday, another neighbor happened by our game. He was on his way to another neighbor’s to break in an outdoor pool table. Cocktail in hand, he took the whole scene–work lights, iPad app, gallery seating–and regaled us with a hearty “Hello Nerds!” Now this is a man who makes a living writing science fiction/horror and has lifetime credentials to Comic-Con. As his wife pointed out, if he’s calling us nerds, we’ve clearly crossed a line.
Speaking of line-crossing, I failed to mention bag selection in my description of our setup. Again, I’m not good enough for the kind of bags I use to make much difference. That would be like saying the kind of golf balls I use really impact my score. But, as you can imagine, people have strong bag preferences and there’s a diverse marketplace to respond to the cornhole consumer. There’s ratings for bags depending on how “sticky” or “slide-y” the surfaces are. Listening to the pros talk about different bags is like listening to a sommelier discuss a fine wine or more accurately a pot dealer detail different strains of marijuana. This one is really fast even the stick side is going to take you farther than you think whereas this other one is really mellow and will stick right where you want to be. I still have our red and blue Amazon bags that are all the same same surface. I’m considering buying some Slide-Rites (which sound more like sandals than sporting goods), but I do have some concern they might be a “gateway” bag.
Due to the rising popularity of cornhole inspired by ESPN coverage, apparently we are in the middle of cornhole bag shortage. Faced with prolonged delivery times, Apollo ordered multiple sets of bags from various online sources to have them race to see which could get to his house first. (As you can see, some bags are faster than others.) Now that they’ve all arrived, he’s got quite the colorful array of bags to choose from. It’s like Christmas morning when a new set of bags arrive. One Friday afternoon, I think a new set of Hellfires were tossed in the air before the Amazon delivery truck had pulled out of the neighborhood.
A lot of you remember the Southern California Blackout of 2011. During the largest power outage in California history, people made due without their televisions, computers, and other electronics. They played board games by candlelight and threw impromptu potlucks on the front porch. As people were forced to discover their neighbors and low-tech entertainment, friends told me that powerless September night was the most fun they ever had in their neighborhoods. That blackout was a 12-hour interruption to normal life; the pandemic has disrupted our routine for considerably longer. Similar to 2011, our neighborhood cornhole is an example of improvising and making the best of a bad situation. This is by no means the 2020 I expected or wanted, but nighttime cornhole will be one the good memories I’ll take away in spite of it.
