How Cornhole Went Pro

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.”