The tailgating pastime of champions: Cornhole

First off: It's not what you think.

Yes, it's got a name that sounds like it was coined by a sniggering schoolboy in seventh-grade shop class. No, you probably don't want to walk the streets in a shirt that says CORNHOLE MASTER.

But cornhole is about more than a childish, silly name.

It's also about beer.

"It's an everyman sport," said Chris Gibner, owner of Tampa Bay Club Sport, which organizes cornhole tournaments in Tampa and St. Pete. "Just about anyone can do it, kind of like bowling or something. And you can do it with a beer in your hand, which is nice."

This tantalizing appeal has made cornhole, a beanbag-toss game with roots in the Midwest, the most popular tailgating pastime this side of tossing a football. Maybe even more popular than beer pong.

If you haven't played cornhole, you've likely played some cousin of it: horseshoes, bocce, beanbag toss.

The setup: Two boards, each with a hole in the middle, placed 27 feet apart. Teams take turns tossing beanbags at the boards, receiving one point for each bag on the board and three for each bag in the hole, until one team gets to 21. That's it.

"I'm not going to say you don't need a lot of skill to win," said Bill Sharpe of Tampa Marketing Company, which is organizing this weekend's "Cornhole Bowl" in Ybor City, "but you don't need a lot of skill to play."

Patrol the parking lots on game days at Raymond James Stadium and you're bound to see scores of cornholers in action. This season cornhole games have popped up at Rays games, and there will be a cornhole setup at Saturday night's Lightning home-opener.

But it's nothing compared with cornhole's popularity in the Midwest. Cincinnati native Jason Martin, who owns Custom Corn Toss, an equipmentmaker in Clearwater Beach, says hundreds of cornhole players turn out for weekly tournaments, and dozens of fanatics set up cornhole boards at Bengals, Colts and Bears games.

With all the Midwest transplants in sunny Florida, Martin said, it's no surprise the game has migrated down this way.

"You can be male or female, seriously athletic or a wimp, it doesn't matter," Sharpe said. "Anybody can go and just have fun."