Live from ‘On Table’: Inside the first years of women and pong

The basement is where the rules are learned.

Beer gathers in sticky pools on the floor, and the air carries the smell of whatever has already been spilled. Someone has knocked over a cup, maybe two. A ball skims the edge of a plastic rim while the next players wait along the edges of the room, heckling, laughing and waiting for their turn.

The rules begin with small things — where the cups sit, how hard the ball can be hit, whether the game moves fast or floats in long lobs. None of it is posted on the wall. You learn by watching, by being corrected and by realizing that each basement has its own understanding of how pong is supposed to be played.

Before pong became one of Dartmouth’s most popular and enduring traditions, it was something passed from person to person. Someone brought you downstairs, where you waited along the edge of the room and watched the game unfold. If you were good enough, bold enough or simply there long enough, eventually someone handed you a paddle, pointed toward the table and told you where to stand.

For women arriving at Dartmouth in the first years of coeducation, that invitation mattered.

While women were first admitted to the College in 1972, enrollment figures and graduation dates capture only part of that transition. 

Women were entering a campus whose classrooms, buildings and social customs had been shaped by generations of men. Their place at Dartmouth was negotiated through daily encounters — whether they were welcomed into a room, treated as classmates, invited into social spaces or made to feel that their presence had disrupted the College other students expected to inherit.

Pong belonged to that all-male world and was one of its most important rituals.

In classrooms, Steve Bell ’76 said, women had a noticeable presence, but on weekends, there was still an imbalance between men and women that was hard to ignore. Even as women from nearby colleges continued to come to Dartmouth for social events, and though they were now present as students on campus, the College’s social life remained heavily shaped by men, fraternities and old rituals. 

“It was not a balanced social life,” Bell said. “But it was a lot better than it had been.”

For many students, the way into that social world was down a fraternity staircase, toward a pong table.

Students used paddles, kegs and plastic cups. In the version of pong remembered from the 1970s, two cups sat side by side, one paddle length from the edge of the table. Players served and returned, trying to hit the cup, land the ball inside it or on rare occasions strike hard enough to split the plastic.

Women played there too, Bell said. In Psi Upsilon, his fraternity, women’s squash and tennis players came over because they knew the men through athletics. He remembered them as strong players who were respected at the table.

“There were a lot of good women who played pong,” Bell said.

That memory complicates one of the more persistent myths about Dartmouth pong: that paddles with their handles broken off were introduced around the time of coeducation to make the game harder for women to play. While the story still circulates on campus, it appears to have been passed down largely through oral tradition rather than documented accounts. The alumni interviewed for this story could not confirm that origin.

Bell said paddles were already in use when he arrived, and that he did not remember students in his class introducing handle-less paddles as a way to discourage women from playing. Instead, he remembered breaking off a handle “to celebrate winning a point, like a high five,” and continuing to use them less as a matter of custom and more as economics.

Bell said that broken paddles stayed in circulation simply because there were no better options. He added that handleless paddles became more common “at the end of a term when the social budget was pretty empty and we couldn’t afford to buy new paddles.” 

“We never played with handle-less paddles unless we couldn’t find any alternatives,” Bell said.  “I’m also not aware of anyone deliberately breaking off a handle to make it harder for anyone to play.” 

Amy Cholnoky ’77, who played pong as a student and later as the parent of three Dartmouth students, also told The Dartmouth she did not remember broken handles from her undergraduate years.

“Paddles were always used, and I never saw a broken handle until our kids went to [Dartmouth],” Cholnoky wrote in an email statement to The Dartmouth.

By the time her children attended Dartmouth, broken handles were common enough that she adapted. 

“I always traveled to Dartmouth with my own paddle when we visited the kids,” she wrote.

Cholnoky said she would “hate to think” that people broke handles because they did not want women to play. 

She first encountered pong in the basement of Psi U after the first Dartmouth football home game of the season. Some of the male cheerleaders belonged to the house and came straight from the game in uniform, she recalled.

“It was an environment that was very friendly, fun and warm — I felt almost immediately at home,” Cholnoky wrote.

In the 1970s, each fraternity seemed to have its own rules, she wrote. Some played “fast pong, some lob.” Some placed cups together, others apart. Cholnoky preferred the cups together, in the back middle of the table.

“Cups apart was harder, because it was too easy to knock over your own when you were swinging for a shot,” she wrote.

What Cholnoky remembers most is not the mechanics of the game, but the feeling around the table.

“I just know that in the spaces where I played, it was a great social activity and I was always made to feel welcome — singing along to the jukebox, laughing and playing with friends, having a beer between games and heckling the players on the table,” Cholnoky wrote. “It was a great way to unwind from academics.”

It also became part of her own Dartmouth love story.

“I met my husband in the basement of [Alpha Chi Alpha fraternity] playing pong,” Cholnoky wrote. “What more can I say?”

But not every memory from those basements is so easy to hold.

Paula McLeod ’78 arrived at Dartmouth as part of the College’s third coeducational class. She wanted to be “among the first” — as a “budding feminist,” the idea of being a pioneer appealed to her, she said. But once she arrived, she noticed quickly that Dartmouth had not fully prepared for women. The social world exemplified that. There were few alternatives to fraternities when students wanted to go out, McLeod said.

“I can only remember one party that was not a fraternity party,” she said. “I don’t remember there being the option of any other parties.”

Some houses felt welcoming: McLeod said she had fun at fraternities and made close male friends. But she also remembers the moments when women’s place at Dartmouth felt “unsettled.” 

At one event, she remembered the basement growing rowdier as men poured beer on the floor and slid on their stomachs. Male friends eventually told her it was time to leave and walked her out.

Looking back, McLeod said she may have moved through Dartmouth in a state of constant alertness.

“I think I walked around the campus of Dartmouth not feeling very safe,” she said. “I think I was in kind of a constant state of anxiety there.”

The game of pong cannot be separated from the rooms where it was played. Fraternity basements were governed by male membership, male rituals and male memory. Women could be welcomed at the table and still be entering a world not built around them.

Sometimes, women entered male spaces by playing with the performance of masculinity itself. McLeod told a story about her roommate Frances, who dressed as a man named “Frank” to attend a fraternity cocktail party. McLeod and another roommate accompanied her as “hostesses,” staying by her side because Frances, in character, could not speak.

By the end of the night, McLeod said, Frances was walking down the line of students rushing the house and kissing the brothers instead of shaking their hands.

The history is not as clean as the myth. It is not simply that men kept women from pong. Cholnoky played and loved it. Bell remembered women playing well. McLeod described houses where she felt welcome.

But it is also not enough to say women were included because some women played. Inclusion depended on the house, the night, the room, the rules and the people watching. It depended on whether a woman was an athlete, a friend, a girlfriend, a guest, a player or an outsider. It depended on whether someone handed her a paddle or whether she had to find her own way to the table. Women’s inclusion in pong culture was conditional in a way that men’s never was. 

For Cholnoky, pong remains a living tradition. She and her husband still have a table at home. They still play when Dartmouth friends come to town. Their three children all went to Dartmouth, and during their nine years as Dartmouth parents, she wrote, there was “a lot of pong.”

“I think it’s great that pong is now played widely by women at Dartmouth — why not?” Cholnoky wrote.

Fifty years ago, the answer may not have been obvious to everyone. Today, for many women at Dartmouth, pong is not a male tradition they have to enter carefully. It is simply Dartmouth culture — strange, sticky, competitive and theirs too.

But traditions remember things, even when people do not. A paddle can look like just a paddle. A basement can look like just a basement. A game can look like just a game.

Until someone tells you what it felt like to walk into the room.