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 Joe’s Sports Bar bar on the North Side. 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.
Hoffmann, a slender 33-year-old claims adjuster, is among this city’s top players of a rapidly growing pastime.
If you haven’t noticed already — and it’s hard not to hear the “thud” of bean bags hitting boards on Chicago’s sidewalks — the game, best known as cornhole but also called Bags or Baggo, has become a craze in recent years in the Midwest. It’s particularly popular in Cincinnati, where folks say it originated more than 50 years ago, and has more recently grown popular here, in Indianapolis and Milwaukee.
The game is drawing rival leagues, equipment vendors and big-time sponsors. The four-year-old American Cornhole Association boasts about 20,000 members, who aren’t required to pay dues. Chipotle, the Chicago Tribune and Visa are among the sponsors of the first Windy City Cornhole Classic on July 28 at Soldier Field.
The maker of Golden Tee, the popular coin-operated video game, 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 basics: 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. The first team to reach 21 wins.
Hoffmann, an ex-college tennis player, says 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. “There’s no comparison,” she says. “I have better aim and accuracy.”
Two years ago, Frank Geers, a 38-year-old veteran of event marketing, founded an alternative group to the ACA: the American Cornhole Organization, of Milford, Ohio. To finance it, he 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. Geers says he began ACO partly because he didn’t think the American Cornhole Association was doing enough to promote the game.
The ACA’s founder, Mike Whitton, says he’s proud of the ACA. No one else “has the membership we do,” he says.
