"Come on, Mama Bear. Papa needs some new truck tires." Michelle Kelly draws her arm back, swings it forward and releases the four-pound metal doughnut. The quoit (pronounced kwait) bounces in the dirt and hits the stake in the ground (clink!), 21 feet from where she threw it. Her husband, Randy, who would love to drive to the next tourney with new wheels on the pickup, applauds.

"That's good quoits," he yells.

A few pits over, brothers Billy and Jason Conrad proudly wear T-shirts they had airbrushed for the tournament, which read "World Quoit Champs" on the back. They won the World Quoit Championship in 2004. "We lost the first match," says Billy (games are best two of three), "and were down 20-12 in the second one, and we came back and beat them 22-20." Jason, who recently had a front tooth knocked out in a four-wheeler accident, chimes in, "Beat 'em bad the third game."

Of course, saying World Quoit Championship is a bit like saying "World's Best Shoo-Fly Pie." Quoits is extremely regional, found almost exclusively in eastern Pennsylvania.

"Back in the 1920s and '30s, quoits was more popular than horseshoes," explains Troy Frey (pronounced "Fry"), who throws under the guise of "Clay 'The Pitching Dutchman' Stoltzfus." Frey, something of an unofficial spokesman for the sport, has done a tremendous amount of research on quoits, relying mostly on old books and 19th-century newspaper clippings. "Back in the 1800s, it was played pretty much all over — the East Coast, the West Coast. Then some quoit pitcher figured out how to pitch ringers in horseshoes on a regular basis. So people started flocking to horseshoes, and I think that's how the game of horseshoes started to get more popular than quoits."

Though both games involve pitching metal objects at pins, the similarities end there. The stakes are 40 feet apart in horseshoes, 21 feet in quoits. Quoits are much smaller than horseshoes, though they weigh more: four pounds to two and a half for horseshoes.

"Horseshoes is one dimensional," says Ken Kaas of a team called Big Time, who go on to finish second in this year's tournament. "You just go for the pin. That's it. In this, you have to decide, 'Do I go for a point, or go for the ringer.' If you go for a ringer and miss it, it's gonna bounce way off."

Adds Frey, "There's more defensive strategy in quoits. It's also a lot harder to get a ringer, so I think it requires more skill."

The 2005 World Quoit Championship (put on by the U.S. Quoiting Association, www.usqa.org) is held in the town of Amityville, Pa., which is so small it doesn't have it's own ZIP code. The Championship begins with a 10-game "regular season" in the morning. After that, the top 40 teams (out of 64) advance to the tournament round.

The Conrad brothers advance to the round of 40. "There's a lot of really good competition," says Billy after the opening round. "Pulling off a repeat is gonna be really tough."

The Kelleys aren't so humble. They steamroll to a 9-1 record in the first 10, and hold the number one seed after the initial round. "We feel good," says Randy. Are they the team to beat? "Every time I come here, I think we're the team to beat." His wife has no shortage of confidence, either. "Today's our day," she says flatly.

The couple, who have five children, host quoit-throwing parties at their house every weekend. "We'll order a bunch of pizza, have all the kids in the neighborhood come over, and stay up all night throwing quoits," says Randy. Their teenage son, Tyler, participated in this year's tourney, barely missing the cut with a 5-5 record. He helps me with my form. "Don't fling it like you're throwing a frisbee," he says after my throw lands so far off to the right that it would have hit a guy the next pit over if it hadn't fallen so embarrassingly short. "Throw it like a horseshoe but don't flip it." Quoits that land on their backs (called "she-quoits"), no matter where they land, are worth no points. My next throw lands about five feet short of the pit. I pump my fist triumphantly.

Michelle Kelley is in the minority. Out of the 128 competitors, 125 are male and all are white. The fact that I hadn't shaved for a couple of days before the tourney definitely allows me to assimilate more readily. The players are also friendly and funny. When I tell one of the players, who introduces himself only as Big Dog, that I'm from Philadelphia, he turns to one of his buddies and says, "See, I told you that there are white people in Philly." Political correctness isn't necessarily in high demand here, but neither is keeping the sport insular. "The entire purpose of forming the USQA was to promote the sport to all people," explains Frey.

Team Kelley falls in the sweet sixteen, but the Conrad brothers catch fire and roll into the final four. But the dream of a dynasty was not to be, as they fall to the eventual champs, the Masterquoiters, in the semifinals.

"It wasn't our best game," said Billy afterwards. The Masterquoiters go home with $1,400 and, more importantly, the respect of the Quoit-munity.* As for the Conrads, well, they plan to work on their game over the winter. Says Billy, "We'll be ready to get back up in there next year."

*Sorry. That was stupid.