Caps.

A name made crisp by a gentle breath exhaled from throat and lips. A blend of consonants and vowels, as seamless as the blend of competition and camaraderie known only to caps players.

"Caps should never be remembered as a drinking game," future caps Hall of Famer Tom DuHamel ’01 noted. "Caps is a drinking sport."

Indeed, caps is a lifestyle. Its brief, but storied history contains moments of greatness, truly amazing feats, and unexplainable truths.

Pomona traces caps origins back to South Campus in the fall of 1997. In an attempt to conserve paper used for disposable cups and to lighten dining hall dishwashing loads, plastic mugs were distributed to all students to use as they saw fit. Current aficionados of caps owe their enjoyment of the sport to founding father Steven Boyajian ’01, who saw fit to use the cup for a receptacle in which to catch caps. Games were played to seven, and an average game could last hours. Thus, modern day caps was born in a form not dissimilar to that practiced campus-wide today.

David Park Caps is a real sport. It’s going to be in the Olympics, and members of Pomona’s Class of 2001 are totally going to get gold medals.

Soon, inevitable progress was made as the pint glass replaced the plastic mug and the game was extended from seven points to eleven.

"That’s really when caps began to take off," DuHamel said. "There was something about being able to see the cap go into the glass. Soon you could find the game being played all over South Campus. Caps became an institution."

Games were played in and outdoors, both during the day and at night. A 32-team tournament was organized, and interest sprang up from all corners of campus. The trophy was a caps belt, the envy of all participants, hand made from beer caps by caps players.

And in those days, attempts to stifle caps proved useless.

"Once in the early days, soon after we’d started playing with pint glasses, an RA came out and told us that we couldn’t play outdoor games with clear cups," DuHamel recalled. "But playing in anything other than a pint glass simply wasn’t an option. So we duct-taped two pint glasses and brought them outside for a game."

Experts agree that interest in caps peaked in the spring of 1999, and has been steadily declining ever since.

"Part of it is that the quality of games got too high," DuHamel said. "Players got so good that they could sink caps too often, and it discouraged inexperienced players from picking up the game. In a sense, caps killed itself." The introduction of other games, specifically beer pong, was also noted as a possible reason that caps’ popularity waned.

Today, caps is played almost entirely on North Campus, though isolated sponsor groups on South Campus do play caps, thanks to an unintended but nevertheless fortunate consequence of the sponsor program.

Lawry is generally conceded to be the hot spot on campus for caps, if indeed one exists at all.

Caps is deceptively simple and endlessly complex. Two teams of two players each sit across from one another trying to toss beer caps into the beer filled pint glass of the other team.

When a shot is made, a team has the chance to make a rebuttal.

From that point on, the first team to miss a cap drinks their beer between them, dividing it however they see fit. But the simple protocol of caps masks an underlying mental struggle within oneself and one’s team and with one’s opponents that is really the essence of the caps experience.

"It’s a competitive avenue that most people have no way to fulfill after high school sports," future Hall of Famer and long time caps philosopher Ted Sheffield ’01 noted. "Caps is not about drinking and it is not about getting drunk. It’s about sitting down and competing in the ultimate team game."

DuHamel agreed. "Caps is more about winning than getting drunk," he said.

Sheffield added, "You can be down 15-2 and if you and your partner make every shot, you’re going to win. There’s no giving up in caps. It’s like baseball in that sense. There’s no time element."

Sheffield also portrayed caps as an intensely emotional game.

"The rebuttal is one of the greatest emotional roller coasters you can go on," he said.

"You’ve just made a shot, you’re on an emotional high. And all of a sudden, within five seconds, not only is your shot negated, but the other team has scored a point and you have to drink a beer. And there’s nothing you can do about it."

Sheffield also talked about an oft observed phenomenon in caps: that rebuttals go in a higher percentage of the time than do normal shots.

"Rebuttals bring out a type of focus in Pomona students that you rarely see, not only in caps, but in life," he observed.

"It’s cool to see a cap go in a glass," Sheffield and DuHamel agreed. "And there’s no better way to flirt with a girl than to play caps with her–or to bury caps for her while she’s watching. Let’s face it: everybody loves making a cap."

In short, caps is a drinking game (no, a drinking sport) like no others (and there are no others).

Caps can also be a family game.

"Would you play asshole with your mom," DuHamel asked. "Would you play kings with her? No, you wouldn’t. But would you play caps with her?"

"I’ve thought about it," said Sheffield.

"I would do it," said DuHamel. "And you know what? I bet she’d be pretty fucking good, too."

DuHamel remembered, "Once I was playing in a game to 15. The game was tied and because it kept being extended, we ran out of beer. But in caps, a tie game is not an option. So we found a driver and drove all the way to 7-11 at 1:56am to buy a single Natty Light. And we finished the game. Because caps isn’t soccer."

"I once saw four shots in a row," remembered Sheffield. "What are the odds of that? You can’t see something like that and tell me there’s nothing special about the rebuttal."

Future HoFer Matt Goldsmith ’01 once told of a pint glass being shattered by a cap. This writer and humble caps player has seen the same phenomenon, as well as shots that have bounced in off the ground, the wall, a light fixture, a pool table, and possibly off Dave Schwendimann’s ’01 head. More amazing, it is not unheard of for caps to bounce off the surface of the beer and out of the pint glass.

"And really the whole game is special," said future HOFer Ben Funke ’01, who once described caps as "more about the process than the result. It’s important to talk about the team aspect, too," he added. "Caps is about how you make your partner feel. Ninety percent of the time the winning team in caps will be the team where the guy who scored the least points scored more than the low scorer on the other team."

"That’s testament to the team nature of the game," Sheffield said. "No matter how much the notion of the ultimate caps player swims in your head, it all comes down to the fact that there’s no ‘I’ in caps."

And as much as it is a team game, caps is a mental game.

This writer once played a game of caps in which the opposing team, down 8-1 in a game to 11, decided to play the Rocky soundtrack. Inspired by the music, they went on a 9-1 run, at which time the Rocky album ended. They then lost the game 12-10.

"The key is to believe that you’re going to make every shot," Greg Gomes ’01 said.

"It’s all about giving the cap a chance to go in," Sheffield added. "When you play caps you’re talking a make in every fifteen shots or so. A good caps player gets the cap close every time and lets the odds work for him."

"Let’s say your going to see three friends that you need to do some catching up with," DuHamel said. "You could sit around a table and just drink. Or you could sit down, play caps, tell the stories you need to tell when you play, and get the competitive experience that we all need as well."

Indeed, caps is a game to be played with friends, and a game during which new friends can be formed.

"A caps game always ends in a handshake," DuHamel said. "Always. And sometimes, it even ends in a hug."

While some are pessimistic about the future of caps, the seeds are certainly being planted for a new generation of caps players to take the torch when the current class of founders graduates. And if that happens, hasn’t the class of 2001 already given a senior gift far greater than whatever could be purchased with a collection of money?