Ultimate Sport Opinion

Ultimate Sport [NYTimes. Feb 23, 2013]
By JASON LUCERO

Founded in the late 1960s, in the heyday of hippiedom, ultimate Frisbee is often associated with pot smoking and people who don’t like rules. In college, ultimate is relegated to "club status," the stepchild of athletic departments.

Adult leagues and pickup games are often improvised amalgams of like-minded eccentrics, forever in search of adequate field space. The sport is very popular in Canada. You know something is misunderstood when you look to Canada for a sense of identity. I've been playing ultimate for 25 years.

Leave it to a bunch of weirdos to invent the perfect game. Ultimate is intensely physical, a mix of measured teamwork and bursts of individual athleticism.

It's like playing football if you played all the positions - quarterback, receiver and defensive back, and played them continually, without breaks. (We’ll rest when we’re dead.)

It's fluid in the way basketball and hockey are fluid — fast-paced and constantly evolving between offense and defense. But even in its most contested moments, the culture of the game requires civility. It's only a matter of time until professional football players carry handguns during games. In ultimate, there is no bullying — no hard fouls to earn respect, retaliatory fouls to show even less respect, none of it. We don’t have or need referees — we play with a commitment to fairness. Our hippie forefathers reasoned well: ultimate is a game; it should be fun and only fun. It is. 

You feel a play developing, see a momentary advantage. Your teammate sees you open and throws not to where you are, but to where you will be, but only if you sprint. (Playing well requires decisive choices on myriad hypothetical outcomes. Graduate students love the game.)

I look forward to playing this weekend. I'll see my friends, people I've been playing with for years, many of whom I know only in this context. Doctors, economists and firemen among us. Our day jobs have nothing to do with the game — if anything, ultimate offers respite from all that. We're here to lose ourselves in, and to, the game, and it works every time. 

Because Frisbees float as they arc through the air, the game feels as if it's playing out in slow motion. (How unexpected that we often experience this sensation only when moving at top speed.) You run down a long throw, catch it with your fingertips only inches before it touches the grass. Scoring yields a burst of elation, an instant of incontrovertible victory. This sense of glory lasts until play resumes. Once it does, the past is forgotten.

I'll play this weekend because the unique sense of exhilaration the game offers exists only in the present tense. I also need more glory. Come join us. You, too, can be a weirdo. We have the last laugh. In degrees of excellence only one word can aptly describe our game. Are you really going to make me say it?
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[h/t Christy & David & Joe]