"To recap," in an initialism / TUE 7-30-24 / Fashion brand founded by an Australian surfer / Uber- relative / Use non-lead pipes? / Actor who plays Luther Stickell in the "Mission: Impossible" franchise

Constructor: Jeffrey Martinovic and Will Nediger

Relative difficulty: Easy

THEME: RSVPING (60A: Acknowledging and invitation ... or a hint to the starts of 19-, 32-, 39- and 49-Across) — the letters R, S, V and P precede "-ING" in the first word of each theme answer; so the puzzle itself is RSVPING, in a way; it's "R"ing, then it's "S"ing, then it's "V"ing, then it's "P"ing ... (!)

Theme answers:

• RING ANNOUNCER (19A: "And in this corner..." speaker)
• SING BACK-UP (32A: Use non-lead pipes?)
• VING RHAMES (39A: Actor who plays Luther Stickell in the "Mission: Impossible" franchise)
• PING-PONG BALLS (49A: Projectiles tossed into cups of beer, in a drinking game)

Word of the Day: Beer pong (the "drinking game" in the clue for PING-PONG BALLS) —

Beer pong, also known as Beirut, is a drinking game in which players throw a ping pong ball across a table with the intent of landing the ball in a cup of beer on the other end. The game typically consists of opposing teams of two or more players per side with 6 or 10 cups set up in a triangle formation on each side. Each team then takes turns attempting to throw ping-pong balls into the opponent's cups. If the team "makes" a cup - that is, the ball lands in it, and stays in it - the contents of the cup are consumed by the other team and the cup is removed from the table. The first team to eliminate all of the opponent's cups is the winner. [...] The game was originally believed to have evolved from the original beer pong played with paddles which is generally regarded to have had its origins within the fraternities of Dartmouth College in the U.S. in the 1950s and 1960s, where it has since become part of the social culture of the campus. The original version resembled an actual ping pong game with a net and one or more cups of beer on each side of the table. Eventually, a version without paddles was invented and the names Beer Pong and Beirut were adopted in some areas of the United States sometime in the 1980s. In some places, Beer Pong refers to the version of the game with paddles, and Beirut to the version without. // Bucknell University's student-run newspaper, The Bucknellian, claims Delta Upsilon fraternity members at Bucknell created "Throw Pong", a game very similar to beer pong, during the 1970s, and that "Throw Pong" was then brought to Lehigh University by fraternity brothers who visited Bucknell and this led to the creation of the version of beer pong that is played today. // The origin of the name "Beirut" is disputed. A 2004 op-ed article in The Daily Princetonian, the student newspaper at Princeton University, suggested that the name was possibly coined at Bucknell or Lehigh University around the time of the Lebanese Civil War. Beirut, the capital of Lebanon, was the scene of much fighting during the war, particularly mortar fire. (wikipedia)

Easy but not boring, with a revealer that does what it's supposed to do—reveal, in a surprising way. I could see the "-ING" repetition but thought "that is not a theme, what are we even doing here?" And then I hit RSVPING and had a sincere "ohhhhhhhh, OK" moment. It's silly, but it works, and I don't know that I want anything more out of my Tuesday revealer than that. It's R'ing, it's S'ing, it's V'ing, it's P'ing, it's here it's there it's everywhere, ing ing ing, ding ding ding, great. And if the RING and SING answers aren't *that* exciting, the SING and VING answers make up for it. Well, let's start with the VING answer, because it seems like there *aren't* any other VING answers besides this one. I don't know if VING RHAMES was the inspiration for this puzzle, but he's certainly the person you can't make this puzzle without. The necessary ingredient. I assume he's a household name by now—I've known his name for three decades, ever since his Extremely Memorable performance as Marcellus in Pulp Fiction (1994). The plot with him and Bruce Willis is extremely violent (Rhames tries to kill Bruce Willis, but then they both get taken hostage in the basement of a pawn shop ... very bad things happen ...), but what I remember most about his performance in that movie is the back of his neck. The first time you see him, the camera is trained on the back of his very thick neck and bald head for a very long time, as he sits at a table in a bar. Makes him seem very cool and imposing. His neck has a band-aid on it, which apparently inspired a ton of fan theories ("the devil takes your soul from the back of your neck""he cut himself shaving" etc.).