The best part about watching professional cornhole on TV may be listening to it. As aural A.S.M.R. goes, it ranks right up there with golf. First comes the satisfying plunk of the bag landing on the board’s slanted 18-millimeter grade-A Baltic birch surface, followed by a whispery thhhnnn as it slides upward toward the hole. And then if the shot is true, the polymer-resin pellets inside the bag rustle — shh-chh — as it drops through. Cornhole bags are the scalp massager of sports equipment.
You wouldn’t know it if you were watching on ESPN+, but on a Friday night in April there were only about 250 spectators surrounding the floodlit court at the low-slung John A. Alario Event Center in Westwego, La., and they observed a respectful silence during shots, as if this were the All England Club during Wimbledon and not suburban New Orleans on the cusp of a weekend. So the only sounds you heard if you were following the action remotely were plunk thhhnnn shh-chh, plunk thhhnnn shh-chh.
This same night, at the Smoothie King Center across the Mississippi River, the hometown Pelicans were playing the Sacramento Kings for one of the N.B.A.’s last playoff spots, and about 2.6 million viewers tuned in to the broadcast on TNT and truTV. Meanwhile, the live audience for the American Cornhole League’s 2024 Kickoff Battle, Shootout Singles division, was far smaller — but credit each of those fans for being determined to find it. They either had to visit the A.C.L. website, IPlayCornhole.com, and open the Cornhole TV livestream; or follow along at one of the A.C.L.’s social media channels; or subscribe to ESPN+, scroll down on the app to “Also Live,” then slide past more than a dozen N.C.A.A. baseball and softball games to the next-to-last tile. Over the course of the tournament, across six ESPN telecasts, the A.C.L. drew an average of just over 50,000 viewers. If you were one of them, though, you got treated to some epic, nail-biting action. That’s the other fun part about watching pro cornhole on TV: These players are incredible.
“I like to call it sticky content,” Trey Ryder, the voice of the A.C.L. on ESPN, told me during a pause in play. “Because I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard the same story over and over: The guy that walks into their living room, it’s on TV, and they go, What in the world is this? And then they see one round, and then all of a sudden 20 minutes went by.”
According to a 2023 Ipsos survey, cornhole is the most-played sport in America, ahead of bowling and swimming and far ahead of golf. “I played it like anybody else — with a beer in my hand,” says Greg Weitekamp, the chief operating officer of Tupelo Honey, which produces all of the A.C.L.’s telecasts. “And you couldn’t play it without the beer, because you had to balance yourself, right? The beer in one hand, and the bag on the other side.” For most of us, cornhole is a sport we play in a backyard or in a parking lot while we’re waiting for another sport to start. It’s a straightforward game with no discernible strategy beyond “throw the bag through the hole.”
That version of cornhole and the world-class cornhole on display at the Alario Event Center bear little resemblance to each other. Consider the sheer variety of shots that the pros execute. There’s the “airmail,” when you throw the bag with a high arc and drop it straight through the hole, a critical skill if your opponent lands a “blocker,” a defensive maneuver in which the bag stops in front of the hole. Another option is the “roll,” which is when you land your bag (plunk) right in front of your opponent’s and use its momentum to somersault (chh-chh-chh) over the blocker and into the hole (shh-chh). That will blow your mind. But it’s nothing compared with the rarest shot of all: the “bar of soap,” which is when your opponent’s bag is blocking the hole and your bag hits it hard enough to knock it over the hole before yours falls through it. It’s the 7-10 split of cornhole.
Each competitor in a professional cornhole match gets four shots per round — 3 points for each bag through the hole, 1 point for each bag that stays on the board — and if you sink them all, that’s called a four-bagger. It’s the equivalent of hitting four straight N.B.A. three-pointers, only a cornhole shot is taken from farther away (27 feet versus, at most, 23 feet 9 inches) and the A.C.L. pros do it all the time. The best of the best hit four-baggers in half of their rounds.
Jeremiah Ellis, a U.P.S. driver and a father of four from Columbus, Ohio, is a rookie on the tour who joined the A.C.L. last fall after dominating a junior circuit and winning a tournament that earned him the title King of Cornhole. The A.C.L.’s pro division has just 250 slots, and in order to qualify, Ellis, who is 32, had to outduel hundreds of players at the league’s annual pro qualifier. Like Shohei Ohtani when he joined Major League Baseball from the Nippon Professional Baseball league, Ellis is a rookie in name only. Everybody already knew who he was before he had won a pro event. In fact, the A.C.L. is hoping that Ellis, with his fiery disposition — his email address used to begin “BagginNBraggin” — will become pro cornhole’s first name-brand athlete. He’s an airmail specialist, and he plays fast, pressuring his opponents into making mistakes as they adjust to his pace.
The standout match on this Friday night was the championship round of the Shootout Singles, featuring Ellis and a four-year veteran of the tour named Eian Cripps, a local Louisianian. Traditional cornhole is a race to 21, with points awarded based on how much you outscore your opponent during each round. If, for instance, you get a four-bagger and your opponent sinks three and then misses the board with the fourth, that’s 12 for you and 9 for your opponent, so you get 3 points for the round. This format isn’t very TV friendly, though. In March, Ellis won a match that lasted 41 rounds. Sometimes matches are over in five. That’s too unpredictable for a live TV broadcast with a set schedule, so the A.C.L. added a more compact “shootout” format: 10 rounds, highest score wins. Cornhole translates smoothly onto television. A split-screen format shows the thrower on the left and an overhead shot of the board on the right, giving viewers a bird’s-eye perspective of the bag play.
Cripps took control of the match with a roll shot past three bags (!) that drew a roar from the spectators. (It looked even more dazzling on ESPN+.) Then, several rounds later, he finished off Ellis with a four-bagger, pumping his fist and bellowing, “Let’s go!” as he sank the clincher. He was mobbed by family and friends and A.C.L. pros. This was the first tour victory for Cripps, and he pocketed $3,600 for it, which may not seem like a lot of money, but it’s the most he had ever seen. He is only 14 years old, after all.
During a post-match interview, Ellis struck an upbeat tone. “It’s just a steppingstone,” he said. Before joining the A.C.L., Ellis spent six years in the American Cornhole Organization, a smaller circuit with a spottier schedule, weaker competition and no TV deal; its winners might take home $1,000. For much of that time, Ellis had his eye on the A.C.L., which debuted after the A.C.O. but grew much faster. He would watch A.C.L. tournaments on ESPN with his son, and his son would ask why he wasn’t on television, too. “That’s the league I wanted to play in,” Ellis told me. “They have everything.”
The A.C.L.’s 20-date tour schedule requires a lot more travel, however, and Ellis didn’t have enough vacation days with U.P.S. But last summer he received a fifth week of vacation, and now he was using a couple of days here in Louisiana. He was still hunting his first A.C.L. tournament championship — his runner-up finish to Cripps was the closest he had come, but it meant he would leave town with at least $2,400. He would also be back the next night for the first-to-21 format, known as the National Singles. “That’s more my game,” he said. He was ready to go 50 rounds if that’s what it took.
The American Cornhole League’s first ESPN appearance was on July 21, 2017, and for half of the telecast, the A.C.L. commissioner, Stacey Moore, was certain that would be its last. They were doing everything wrong, apparently. “When you’re on that four-letter network,” he says, “that’s basically a badge of honor, right? It’s like, ‘OK, you’re legitimate.’ ” And then 15 minutes into the telecast, he says he got a long, angry email from an ESPN producer. “I was like, Are they going to take us off air? I was freaking out.” The tournament was being broadcast from the stage of a theater in Cherokee, N.C., and they could only afford to use the house lights, so the players were casting shadows. The cheap green carpet laid down beneath the cornhole boards looked like puke on TV. There were only four cameras, which limited the shot angles. The scoring system, according to the ESPN producer, was too confusing, and the sound mix was out of whack.
Moore told this story with a smile, because it was clear from where he was standing now — seven years later at the Alario Event Center, with a $500,000 budget, eight cameras, a playing surface surrounded by LED advertisements for Mike’s Hard Lemonade and so many hot lights they made the board surfaces faster — that it had a happy ending. Moore was easy to spot because, other than the on-air play-by-play announcers, he was the only person in the venue wearing a button-down shirt, paired on this night with red Gucci-branded Adidas. He’s a lifelong Carolina guy, North and South — raised in the North, attended grad school in the South, now lives in Charlotte — and a serial entrepreneur with an intense competitive streak.
Moore, who is 54, has been involved in lots of businesses (online seafood, gift wrap sold in schools), and the inspiration for a pro cornhole league struck during one of his less-successful ventures, the digital publication Inside Tailgating, which is “dedicated to promoting the tailgating lifestyle.” He enjoyed cornhole just fine, but the tailgaters were obsessed with it. They set up their boards in the morning, slipped Buds into koozies and played for hours. Tempers flared. He knew this was the next great TV sport. In 2015, he started the American Cornhole League in Charlotte, which lured top players from the A.C.O. with promises of prize money and more serious competition and endorsement opportunities — a true professional league. And of course, there would be television, which was the key to his master plan.
But there he was in 2017 blowing his shot on Day 1.
Then, about halfway through the telecast, Moore recalls, one of his lieutenants bolted from the production truck. “He’s like: ‘Do you have any idea what’s going on right now? Twitter has absolutely exploded. Your broadcast has gone viral.’ All these people were sitting in sports bars and just saying, ‘I can’t believe cornhole is on TV — this is awesome.’ ” A few days later, ESPN and Moore began negotiating what would become a two-year deal to air dozens of hours of pro cornhole across its various platforms. They have since renewed the deal three more times, including this year, and expanded A.C.L.’s availability.
The television business is a mess. Traditional linear channels, which operate on a schedule, are hemorrhaging viewers to streaming platforms. The sole refuge amid the disruption — the rare predictable moneymaker left — is live events. Live sports are like gold bars in a recession. They’re appointment viewing in an era in which we have become accustomed to watching whatever we want whenever we want. “I have a TV subscription, but literally, if you took live sports off, I would cancel my TV subscription,” says Ryder, the A.C.L. announcer. “The only reason that I am watching television nowadays is for live sports.”
The streaming platforms, meanwhile, are throwing money at live sports the way they used to throw it at Martin Scorsese to make three-and-a-half-hour movies. N.F.L. fans will pay for Amazon Prime to watch “Thursday Night Football,” soccer fans will pay for Peacock to watch the English Premier League and a very small but fervent audience will pay for ESPN+ to watch cornhole. “What has been made pretty clear,” says Brandon Katz, a senior entertainment-industry strategist for the media-consulting firm Parrot Analytics, “is that live sports are the last vestige of hope for linear TV in terms of staving off decline and a significant value provider for streaming.”
This is why NBC has reportedly offered $2.5 billion per year to snatch N.B.A. rights away from TNT (which is currently bundled with Max), why Apple is spending $250 million per year so its streaming service is the only place where you can watch Lionel Messi play league matches for Inter Miami, why CBS Sports acquired the television rights to the Sport Fishing Championship (as well as some A.C.L. events) and why ESPN just struck a deal to air 28 matches of League One Volleyball, a new women’s pro league. And it’s why Disney, Fox and Warner Bros. Discovery — ordinarily corporate rivals — are teaming up to create a monster sports bundle, called Venu Sports, that is expected to debut this fall and gather the N.B.A., the N.F.L., Major League Baseball, Formula 1, the World Cup, Ultimate Fighting and, yes, the American Cornhole League, along with dozens more sports, onto a single platform.
ESPN’s relationship with the American Cornhole League accelerated shortly after its messy debut, when it joined the roster for ESPN Ocho, the annual Coachella of quirky niche sports like ax throwing and air guitar, which first aired on Aug. 8 (Ocho/Ocho) and was inspired by a joke in the 2004 movie “Dodgeball,” starring Ben Stiller and Vince Vaughn. Cornhole was “very, very low risk for us,” says Brent Colborne, ESPN’s senior director of programming and scheduling. “It’s fun. Anyone can play this thing.” Let’s try it, the thinking went at the time. Viewers loved it, and it quickly became the linchpin of the Ocho’s roster. This August, in fact, for the third year running, the Ocho will be largely broadcast from the A.C.L.’s production facility outside Charlotte.
Cornhole’s ratings don’t move the needle much, or really at all, for a behemoth like ESPN, but its audience is loyal, and the sport’s inclusion among the network’s offerings gives customers one more reason to subscribe to ESPN+. The strategy, Katz says, is to use the platform’s limitless bandwidth to offer something for everyone — “a cornucopia of sports options.” (No pun intended, he swears.) It’s also cheap content. The production budget for that debut cornhole broadcast from Cherokee was just $30,000, and the A.C.L. footed the bill in exchange for ESPN’s coverage. Costs have increased as the sport has grown, but even still, Katz says, ESPN’s “path to what we would call commercial success” is much shorter for cornhole than it is for “Monday Night Football.”
In order to stay afloat, all of the subscription platforms are trying to find their own cornholes, and the competition for niche properties has turned into a frenzy. CBS Sports pounced on the rights to the fledgling Sport Fishing Championship — deep-sea fishing for really big fish — as soon as its organizers unveiled the circuit in 2022. “I actually received a phone call from them the day after we announced it,” says Mark Neifeld, the S.F.C. commissioner. More than 50 million Americans go fishing every year, he notes, “and participation in a sport drives viewership.” (According to Walmart, 100 percent of its Supercenters have a fishing aisle.)
The S.F.C. wasn’t just hoping to score a television deal — it exists only because of television. A sport-fishing venture of this sort wasn’t even possible until just a few years ago, when low-orbital satellites from Elon Musk’s Starlink service made it feasible to deliver a live, high-resolution TV broadcast from the middle of the ocean. “We essentially built a league in front of the technology shift,” Neifeld says.
No cutting-edge technological breakthroughs were necessary for cornhole. The A.C.L.’s challenge was much simpler: convincing people that a backyard pastime could be transformed into a legitimate professional sport.
The American Cornhole League’s next forking-path moment presented itself a month into the pandemic, when Moore decided that the A.C.L. would beat the major pro sports leagues back into action. At this point, the entire industry was in full panic mode. Moore was worried that the A.C.L. wouldn’t be able to pay its vendors. Tupelo Honey was facing an empty calendar. ESPN was airing marble races in prime time. It dawned on Moore, though, that cornhole had social distancing built into it and was a two-player sport, with a small production footprint that could be operated quasi-remotely. Those features helped the A.C.L. score four hours of live programming across three ESPN channels — the big time! — every weekend during the summer of 2020. Cornhole was no longer just a curio on ESPN Ocho. It was a real business.
Moore isn’t delusional. He knows that there’s a ceiling for pro cornhole’s audience. But he thinks it’s much higher than most assume, and he’s always studying the biggest pro leagues for ways to emulate their success. Because those leagues have stats, analytics and numbers for fans to nerd out on, he added cameras to collect throwing data like bag speed and apex height. He created the shootout format, as well as a pro-am style circuit called SuperHole that pairs A.C.L. pros with N.F.L. players, because it turns out that N.F.L. players are crazy for cornhole. (Saturday night’s SuperHole event featured Derek Carr, the New Orleans Saints’ quarterback.)
For pro cornhole to reach its peak, though, Moore needs one of his A.C.L. players to become a viral-clip generator and turbocharge the league and the whole sport, the same way Caitlin Clark has done for women’s basketball. He needs a superstar. It could be Jeremiah Ellis. It could be Eian Cripps. Or it could be Brayden Wilson, an exceedingly polite seventh grader from outside Austin, Texas, with a cherub’s face and a silver cross around his neck.
During Brayden’s warm-up tosses for his semifinal match in the men’s National Singles on Saturday night, ESPN+ flashed his capsule bio: “Occupation: Student.” He is the youngest pro in the A.C.L. He just turned 12. Physical superiority offers no advantage in cornhole, but being too young to drink beer is a sizable one. (Moore loves the novelty of the occasional child prodigy, but in part because he’s trying to build a league of full-time competitors, he wants to cap the number of underage pros at 5 percent of the field.) This was going to be Brayden’s first appearance on TV as a pro, and he was giddy.
“I’m more nervous than he is,” said his father, Stephen, who owns an air-conditioning business in Bastrop. “My heart’s pounding. You don’t want a kid to fail, but you know they got to go through things in life. I told him: ‘Look, they want to grow the game. They want the Tiger Woods of cornhole.’ I said: ‘You can be that person. I believe in you.’ ”
At home in Texas, Brayden spends more time practicing cornhole than doing homework, throwing bags for two hours a day. His friends think it’s awesome being pals with a kid who is already a professional athlete, and they stick up for him when he gets teased at school for going all in on cornhole and not, say, football, as you’re supposed to in Texas. “Some kids — sometimes they get jealous,” Brayden said before his match against Gavin Cano, a grizzled veteran at age 20. “They’re like, ‘Oh, you play for a living?’ I’m like, ‘Heck yeah, I do.’ ‘You make money?’ ‘Yeah, I do.’ ”
The problem with playing a pro sport on live television is that friends and family watching back home might witness you getting your butt kicked. In the race to 21 points, Brayden fell way behind, 13-2. During a TV timeout, Stephen called his son over for a quick pep talk, and whatever he said must have worked, because Brayden soon charged back, the beer-buzzed crowd growing wilder as the gap narrowed and then erupting when Brayden took the lead, 19-17. On ESPN+, Trey Ryder chuckled with delight. Was a star being born in front of our eyes?
Nope. Another problem with playing a pro sport on live television is that pro sports don’t give a hoot about your narratives. In the final round, Cano hit a magnificent shot, knocking in three bags at once — shh-chh, shh-chh, shh-chh — and tallying 4 points for the round. Final score: Cano 21, Wilson 19. After they shook hands, Brayden lowered his head and tried to fight back the tears, but the cameras caught him wiping them away. He joined his family in the stands, where his father rubbed his shoulders. “I’ve never been more proud of him after a loss,” he told me later, his voice quavering.
Waiting for Cano in the championship match was the King of Cornhole himself, Jeremiah Ellis. And this time he didn’t have to worry about his kids back home in Ohio watching him lose to someone not much older than they were. He rolled past Cano for his first pro A.C.L. title, collected his trophy — a miniature A.C.L. board, like a plaque with a hole in it — and added to his total winnings for the weekend: $8,900. He celebrated so much on Bourbon Street later that night that he missed his flight home to Columbus. (A month later, at the A.C.L. tour stop in Las Vegas, he would win again.) His dream is to make enough money from cornhole purses and endorsement deals that he can retire his brown delivery uniform in favor of his official red-and-black cornhole kit. But for now, this weekend in Louisiana would have to be just another steppingstone. On Monday morning, he would be back at the wheel of his U.P.S. truck.
Devin Gordon is a writer based in Massachusetts. He is the author of “So Many Ways to Lose: The Amazin’ True Story of the New York Mets, the Best Worst Team in Sports.” Angie Smith is a photographer based in Los Angeles and Mexico City who has photographed the comedian Jacqueline Novak, a #VanLife road trip and Democrats in Wisconsin for the magazine.
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