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By Any Name, Even Baggo, The Pitch Is the Same; It Goes Better With Beer

By DAVID KESMODEL – Wall Street Journal

CHICAGO — Heidi Hoffmann clutched a red cloth bag of dry corn in her right hand and stared down her target, a 6-inch hole cut in a wooden platform at the other end of a cavernous bar. If she could hurl this bag and one or two more into the hole, she could clinch yet another victory for her team in the ChicagoCornhole league.

“This is unbelievable,” complained opponent Andrew Rotolo, mystified by his team’s 17-1 deficit.

WSJ’s Shelly Banjo takes a look at the obscure, but increasingly popular game in the Midwest called “Cornhole,” “Bags” or “Baggo.”

Ms. Hoffmann, a slender 33-year-old claims adjuster, is among this city’s top players of a rapidly growing pastime. The game, best known as cornhole but also called Bags or Baggo, has become a craze in recent years at bars, tailgate parties and church picnics in the Midwest. It’s particularly popular in Cincinnati, where folks say it originated more than 50 years ago as a backyard diversion, and has more recently grown popular in Chicago, Indianapolis and Milwaukee.

In the game, typically played two-on-two, players score three points each time they toss a 1-pound bag — traditionally filled with corn kernels — into a round hole cut into a slanted board about 30 feet away. A shot that misses the hole but stays on the board scores one point. Foes can knock each other’s bags off the board to negate a point. The first team to reach 21 wins.

The game is drawing rival leagues, equipment vendors, and big sponsors. The four-year-old American Cornhole Association boasts about 20,000 members, who aren’t required to pay dues. Chipotle Mexican Grill Inc., the Chicago Tribune and Visa are among the sponsors of the first Windy City Cornhole Classic on July 28 at Soldier Field, home of pro football’s Chicago Bears. Beer companies often sponsor local leagues.

The maker of Golden Tee, one of the most popular coin-operated videogames of all time, recently launched a game called Bags. The company says it already has sold 3,200 of the bar-friendly games, so many that it can’t fill new orders until August. A team of independent filmmakers recently completed filming “Cornhole: the Movie,” a mock documentary reminiscent of the film “Dodgeball.”

The game’s name, which is also slang for a sex act, may be part of its allure in the bar scene but could hurt its prospects for growing bigger. Some prefer to call it Baggo. “What would you want your kids playing?” asks Kirk Conville, chief executive of Baggo Inc. in Hot Springs, Ark. It has trademarked the term Baggo and sells game sets at Dick’s Sporting Goods and other retailers.

media-frankgeersTwo years ago Frank Geers, a 38-year-old veteran of event marketing, founded an alternative group, the American Cornhole Organization, of Milford, Ohio. To finance it, the married father of three cashed out his 401(k) and took out a second mortgage on his house. He’s now borrowing money from friends and family to make ends meet. Mr. Geers says he began ACO partly because he didn’t think the American Cornhole Association was doing enough to promote the game.

The association’s founder, Mike Whitton, says he’s proud of the four-year-old ACA’s achievements. No one else “has the membership we do,” he says.

ACO, whose roughly 500 members pay at least $15 a year, makes its own line of bags and boards and is one of several organizations hosting what they call national or world championships. Its customers include Carnival Cruise Lines. Last year, Matt Guy, of Alexandria, Ky., earned the designation of “King of Cornhole” by winning the ACO Nationals singles title at the Northern Kentucky Convention Center. Mr. Guy, a longtime horseshoes tosser, won $500. The 36-year-old will have a shot at winning $5,000 at the next ACO Nationals in January at the Oasis Resort and Casino in Mesquite, Nev.

“It’s a silly-enough looking game that people become intrigued by it,” says Mark Rembert, 22, a native of the Cincinnati area who founded a club at Haverford College in Pennsylvania. “Everyone thinks they should be really good at it, and when they’re not, it becomes addictive.”

By that reasoning, the game is a lot like golf, except it doesn’t require the time, the money and the wardrobe. It seldom takes more than 30 minutes to play three games. The equipment is portable. Sets are often dragged from the trunks of cars before Cincinnati Bengals and Indianapolis Colts football games. And they can be set up indoors or out. The 16-ounce bags are light enough so anyone can play.

Then there’s the beer. Sports bars, seeing a perfect tie-in, have been big promoters, as have game-equipment vendors eager to standardize a game that until recently was played mostly with homemade gear. Several organizations have introduced leagues and tournaments with cash prizes and trophies.

One evening recently at Joe’s Sports Bar, a 20,000-square-foot warehouse on Chicago’s North Side, Ms. Hoffmann’s team was trying to boost its record to 3-0 in the Chicago league, started three years ago by two Ohioans. At the moment, 36 two-person teams are playing a seven-week season.

Ms. Hoffmann was playing with a substitute partner, but that did little to lift the confidence of Mr. Rotolo and his teammate, Jason Corn. “She kicks my a- most of the time,” said Mr. Rotolo, a 28-year-old retail store manager, while nursing a plastic cup of beer on the edge of the playing court. Five games went on simultaneously beneath two dozen TV screens showing baseball games.

Ms. Hoffmann competed in a sleeveless white undershirt, flip-flops and green Capri pants. A former tennis player for Western Illinois University, she has played cornhole for three years and won several area tournaments. She says her game improved dramatically when she began flipping her wrist so the bag would spin through the air, rather than lofting it flat, as most beginners do. “There’s no comparison,” she says. “I have better aim and accuracy.”

The first team to win two games wins a league match. The right-handed Ms. Hoffmann wound up and fired. Thud! The bag landed just short of the hole, but on the board. Her second shot landed just to the right. Her third slid off the board, and her fourth landed on top of her first two bags. Moments later, her partner, Kevin Huberty, a 26-year-old structural engineer, landed several shots to help the team to a shutout win.

Game two was over almost as quickly. After guiding her team to a 17-1 lead, Ms. Hoffmann eyed the target. She slung the bag just in front of the hole and it skidded in. Mr. Rotolo looked toward heaven. Ms. Hoffman sank a second bag. Mr. Rotolo failed to win any points. The match was over.

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