Updated September 30, 2025 at 10:58 AM EDT
Editor’s note: This segment was rebroadcast on Sept. 30, 2025. Click here for that audio.
In the early 2000s, thousands of U.S. schools had their students race the clock to stack cups in gym class.
The man responsible for spreading sports stacking around the world is a former circus clown from Colorado named Bob Fox. His son, Kit Fox, wrote about the phenomenon recently for Defector in a piece called “If You Ever Stacked Cups in Gym Class, Blame My Dad.”
“ It’s essentially a track meet for your hands. So you think about a track meet, what you’re trying to do is go as fast as possible over a certain distance, right?,” Kit Fox said. “Sports stacking is the same except for your stacking plastic cups as fast as possible in predetermined pyramids.”
Bob Fox didn’t invent cup stacking but he popularized it. What did your father see in cup stacking that other people did not?
“ He saw a couple things. I think the first thing is that he comes from a teaching background. He was actually a [physical education] teacher when he first introduced this to his students, and he was not looking to launch a business or start a fad or anything. What he saw is an activity that was just really, really great for kids, and he realized, well, if you get enough passion and you get this just in front of enough kids and demonstrate it, they go absolutely crazy for it once you get your hands on it. And it takes only about five to 10 minutes to learn the basics. Once you learn that and then you get to race against the clock, you’re hooked.”
At one point in your childhood, you write that he ordered 120,000 cups to the front door of your house and he sold all of them. Who was buying these cups?
“ Sport stacking was actually invented in the 1980s at a Boys and Girls Club in Southern California. So essentially, the adults in charge told the kids, ‘Hey, we’ve got some Big Gulps from a gas station, figure out what to do with these.’ And it sort of evolved from there.
“Some rules were kind of codified. The toy company Hasbro thought, well, maybe we can create a fad like pogs or whatever. And they started distributing these cups all over the U.S. and frankly all over the world. And nobody bought them. They very quickly went to the clearance racks, and my dad, who was in the middle of his PE classes, was having hundreds and hundreds of kids, both at his school and then other schools hearing about it, saying, ‘We want to get into this. We wanna start competing. How do we get into this?’”
You traveled all around the world. You were really good at this. What was that like?
“ It was fantastic. I won’t claim that I was the Donald Draper of cups or anything, but us three kids, I was about 5 at the time. My brother was about 7, and my sister was 9. We all collectively became obsessed with it, and because of that, we all became just very good at it.
“We had the ability to go into these convention halls where a bunch of PE teachers would come and learn about the latest activities and just gather these massive crowds pretty much stacking all day. And that was the strategy is just stack fast. We will get people to stop in their tracks and they’ll ask, and then they’ll come back later and learn how to do it.
“And so and frankly, we also did it in front of schools. You’d have the entire school of 500 kids sit in front and we had a whole assembly roadshow. My dad being a clown background, he knows how to put on a production. So this wasn’t your run-of-the-mill ‘let’s learn about sharing or fire safety.’ This was action-packed and juggling and music and us stacking, of course.”
What’s going through your head when you’re zooming through those stacks of cups? Is it pure focus?
“ It’s funny, I think the best stackers in the world — which we were at one time, and we’ve been far surpassed — will say that nothing goes through your head. It’s very similar to a flow state and other sports that people would talk about is the practice that you do, the thousands and thousands of times that you repeat this are so that when you’re on the competition level, you are just trying to go as fast as possible in as smooth a manner as possible. It’s kind of like micro adjustments as you go through.”
By 2004, there was the World Sports Stacking Championships. Coaches were working with national teams. But not everyone loved it. The conservative Glenn Beck bashed cup stacking on Fox News. He thought it made kids weak. What did your parents think about that, for instance, that this was getting so much attention around the world?
“ I think they were simultaneously baffled and loved it. And, I don’t want to downplay my mom’s role in this whole enterprise because her genius was actually both the storytelling and kind of the press. She came from a press relations background and she knew that all press was good press, right? We could have Glenn Beck bashing us. And guess what? That put us in front of an audience of millions of people who were like, ‘Hey, what is this crazy thing?’ ”
You could be really good at stacking cups even if you’re not the star of the basketball team or the football team. Do you think sports snacking changed people’s lives?
“Absolutely. Certainly, there were kids who star on the basketball team that were fantastic at that. In fact, my sister ended up playing basketball professionally herself, and this activity helped her with hand-eye coordination and things like that.
“But because it’s not kind of like a physically dominant activity, it evened out the playing field completely. Kids with special needs, kids with autism, for example, really were attracted to this because of how regimented and how they could just see success right away. And from there you had kids who built up massive followings on YouTube. You had kids traveling overseas and even just at these tournaments. I mean, you’d have a family from suburban Texas making friends with a family and kids from South Korea who’d never been to America for the first time.
“I think that the overarching fad where there were so many kids who did it in elementary school and we all have this similar common memory of doing that and thinking, ‘Wow, that was crazy,’ that’s like a larger story of a much smaller community of several thousand, if not tens of thousands of kids who really found friends, some of them for the first time.”
Are kids still stacking cups?
“100%. What’s astounding is just the global nature of it. So while my parents are happily retired and kind of have stepped away from the business. It’s now employee-owned. It’s still based in Colorado where it was started.
“But the best stackers in the world now are over in Asia. I think they’re in Malaysia. There’s a massive following over there. It’s really kind of had a — definitely not as big, on a much smaller scale — a kind of similar trajectory to like the YouTube eSports generation. The world championships are still happening and then every year, there’s still something called the stack up where we try and get as many kids to stack over a 24-hour period as possible. And I think last year they got about 750,000 kids from all over the world to do that. So it’s certainly still active in thousands of schools in the U.S. and definitely spread even further afield to the other side of the world.”
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This article was originally published on WBUR.org.
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