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A few months back, there was a big splash in the UK about some lousy media
coverage given to ultimate (I think it was in Time Out?).

Well, of course, not to say that everything is better on the other side, but
here is what the New York Times (its a big paper over here - you may have
heard of it) had to say:

New York Times, November 20, 1998

More Than a Simple Fling: Ultimate Frisbee

 By JERRY BEILINSON

 NEW YORK -- My wife doesn't stroke my ego the way she did before we were
married. I told her I was going to play ultimate Frisbee, for the first time
since college 10 years ago. She said, "Wait, I wanna buy more life insurance
first." Then she felt bad and offered to help me find my moldy old cleats,
which hadn't been worn in more than a decade. "I don't need cleats," I said.
"This is a mellow game. They even said beginners are welcome." Fran looked at
me with what I'm pretty sure was pity and told me to drink plenty of water. 

 Two hours later, I'm in Prospect Park in Brooklyn. I'm not quite wheezing yet
but my legs feel like lead and my man is running away from me with ease. He
crosses into the end zone and catches the disk with the relaxed air of Michael
Jordan shooting over, say, a boiled chicken. This guy I'm failing to guard is
named John, I think. And I'm not sure, but there may be two Johns here. Either
that or all this panting is making me see double. 

 Ultimate is sometimes called Frisbee football, but it's really more like
soccer, especially from a cardiovascular perspective. It was invented by some
New Jersey high-school students in 1968 and went on to spread through the
country and to some extent through the world. 

 Official games have seven players on each side on a field that is 40 by 70
yards, not counting two end zones that are each 25 yards deep. The teams line
up on opposite goal lines and one throws off to the other, as with the kickoff
in football. 

 But there the similarity to that game ends. Action is continuous. You can't
run while holding the Frisbee, but you do run around like crazy trying to get
open so your teammate can throw it to you. If you catch a pass, you stop
short, pivot on your heel and pass the Frisbee in turn to another player, one
who is preferably further up the field. 

 Drop the disk (slang for Frisbee) or throw an interception and the game
continues in reverse: while the other team goes on the attack you switch to
defense. To score, a team has to pass the Frisbee across the goal line. Then
finally play stops, and the teams return to opposite ends of the field to
start another point. This is usually a good time for the paramedics to come in
and tidy up the likes of me. 

 Like other team athletes, ultimate players scream. In Prospect Park, one guy
is shouting: "Stack! Stack! Stack!" Then, it's: "Force home! Force is home!"
and other jargon I don't understand. But when my side is on offense, I cut
straight at the defender, pivot and run full speed back at my teammate holding
the disk. He gets off a pass and I snag it. Someone calls, "Good cut!" 

 My defender is a few inches from me, shouting the stall count: "Stall one!
Stall two! Stall three!" If I don't get a pass off by the time he reaches 10,
the Frisbee turns over. I fake right, pass left and bury the disk in the
grass. "Don't air bounce!" someone screams. I was trying to throw under the
arm of the defender and then make the disk curve sharply up into the hands of
my teammate. It used to work in college. Back then, in the days when my
friends and I ruled intramural ultimate at our Midwest university. Out on the
meadow in front of the old library, we'd spend afternoons tossing the disk
around. It was translucent, and it traced long arcs in the sky, pure as
mathematics, or blistering straight lines. No football or javelin ever had the
beauty in flight of a 175-gram ultimate Frisbee. 

 There were a lot of ponytail and earring wearers, late sleepers and guitar
players in that group. On game day we'd show up late, warm up with cigarettes
and maybe a beer, and win. And we took pleasure in beating the likes of the
football fraternity. That team would arrive wearing identical white T-shirts
and prepare with lock-step calisthenics. It was skill over strength, physics
over physicality, the triumph of the soul over mere substance. 

 But the fit inherit the world. In Prospect Park, my head feels as heavy as my
legs and I've retreated to the grass under a shade tree to drink water and
watch the game. This is a pretty spot. The field is called the Nethermead, and
it's a short walk from the Third Street entrance on Prospect Park West. The
lawn is thick and trees are scattered idyllically around the edges. If I do go
back in the game and the worst does occur, this might do nicely as my final
resting place. 

 After a couple of hours about 30 players have shown up. The game has been
going on every Saturday morning, rain, shine or snow, for years. They even
played in the big blizzard of 1996, says Scott Bolden, who is not only
tireless on the field but also has a sort of world-culture cool going on. He's
wearing a striped soccerlike jersey, green shorts and wraparound sunglasses.
While this is a pickup game -- beginners welcome and all that -- he explains
to me that many of these players also compete on club teams. 

 Competitive ultimate is governed by a somewhat anarchic group called the
Ultimate Players Association. There are men's and women's divisions, with a
recently begun coed division. College and club leagues are separate; the clubs
are better. There's no professional play in ultimate and neither sponsorships
nor any officiating. Just a lot of players who can't kick the habit. This is
what I love about the game: its classic sporting attitude. Baseball was maybe
this cool in the 1880s. 

 Sean Castellino, chatting on the sidelines, tells me that a couple of
Prospect Park regulars have been on national championship teams. His own club,
F Train, is a "scrub Brooklyn team," he says. I saw the team earlier in the
day practicing on another field. It's a hefty notch below New York's best
team, the name of which seems to morph from year to year. Right now, it's
called the Westchester Summer League All-Stars. 

 I go back into the game. The problem with my regular have-another-doughnut
conditioning program is that I can really only play one point before I get too
tired to run very hard. After that, I resort to a lazy sort of ultimate-
playing defense off my man, mainly staying far from the disk on offense. I
retreat to the sidelines again after three points. 

 On the other end of the spectrum is Irina Konvickova, who plays hard for 90
straight minutes, it seems to me, before reluctantly taking a break and
letting someone else go in for her. A native of what is now the Czech
Republic, she hadn't played the game before moving to the United States. The
sport was played only in Prague and she had spent her time competing at the
national level in judo. Now, at 28, she has been playing three years. She
happens to be the only woman playing on the field today. 

 She lives in Manhattan and used to play at a long-running pickup game in
Central Park, but gave it up in favor of the games at Prospect Park. She says
she finds the level of play lower in Central Park, and because more people
would show up she didn't get to play as much. "I don't like to sit down," she
says. "I like to play the whole time." A lower level of play? Less time on the
field? I'm there. 

 The next afternoon, Sunday, I'm in Central Park on a field aptly called the
Dust Bowl, on the Fifth Avenue side just north of 97th Street. So far, the
regeneration of the lawn in Central Park has missed this spot. Instead of
being the worst player on the field here I'm just in the bottom 30 percent. 

 Enough players have shown up to make three six-person teams. It works like
the pool table at a bar: you win, you keep the field, except that one team
never plays more than two games in a row. I play better than I did in Prospect
Park. I get in on a couple of plays on offense. And on defense, I manage to
stay close enough to the player I'm guarding to preserve my dignity. Once I
even jump over him in the end zone to swat away the Frisbee and prevent a
score. There's some question as to whether the play is broken up by me or some
low-hanging branches, but heck, we get the disk. 

 For me, Central Park will do nicely for now. Still, there's got to be a game
out there where I can excel. If not, I'm going to start my own pickup game.
Maybe I'll recruit my daughter's friends. They're all in nursery school and
some of them are really short. 

 It's a week after Central Park and I'm checking out a higher level of play,
but this time there's not a chance I'll get in a game. I've come to the
regional club championships of the Ultimate Players Association held at the
State University College at Purchase, N.Y. 

 The Westchester All-Stars are playing today; eventually the team will place
fourth nationally. So is D.O.G. (for Death or Glory), the Boston team that has
won the national championship for four years running, and will go on to do it
again this year. They rose to the pinnacle of the game after the breakup of a
New York dynasty team, New York, New York, which had won five years in a row.
Lady Godiva, the best women's team in the region and the eventual winner at
the nationals, is here, too, and steamrollering the competition. 

 A lot of players and some spectators have come to Purchase. A lot of dogs are
running around, too, chasing Frisbees and one another. I sort of feel as if
I'm at a Grateful Dead concert: the mood is welcoming and unpretentious. This
makes sense because a critical part of ultimate is the spirit of the game.
Players make their own calls, and they do it honestly. Picks and body contact
are not only illegal but also rare and genuinely accidental. 

 If these guys had played us in college, they would have won easily. Yet no
matter how loud the players scream, how hard they train or how often they make
bruising diving catches it's still recognizably the same game I played back on
the meadow all those years ago. In those days, it seemed as if grace was at my
fingertips. I launched the disk into space, and there it was: glory. 

 Out on the field in Purchase someone from D.O.G. throws a long bomb into the
end zone and the players sprint toward it. On the sidelines, we all watch as
the disk floats for long seconds against the sky. It's beautiful. 

 
**********

Other than a casually inaccurate statement about how goals are caught, I'd say
its pretty durn good.

For the web-inclined, its at:
http://www.nytimes.com/yr/mo/day/news/arts/weekend-warrior.html.

For the hard-copy inclined, its the Friday, 20 November, p. B52.

Stephen
formerly Gun, now Pocomoke, always Happy