More Than a Simple Fling: Ultimate Frisbee
New York Times, November 20, 1998
By JERRY BEILINSON


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 disc.

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.