Flatball

I'm not sure how to open this one. There's a magnetic quality to the sport of ultimate that pulls you in. People who've played and become immersed, they know what I mean. Those who haven't, if they're even aware of the game, attach something of the hippy stigma to ultimate, thinking flippy-floppy disc-tossing long-hairs. How serious is a sport without referees?

Even the name is a dish. Ultimate. You have to ululate as you say it. We take ourselves seriously, I assure you. (Hey, Americans call a sport which revolves around a man throwing a ball with his arm and hand football.)

Sarah, playing for Korea at the Singapore Open.

Sarah Mukai introduced me to Ultimate. Sarah was convinced by friends back in her second last year of high school, 1997, to turn out for a game and never looked back. Sarah represented the legendary Prince of Wales high school team, played for Canada Juniors at the world championships in Minnesota in 1998, and won three Canadian University Championships with the UBC women's team. What better individual to introduce me to the game. I'd seen some video of Ultimate before I met Sarah, but knew nothing substantial about the sport. A Frisbee, right? I saw my first game in Victoria, BC, at the Hallowe'en tournament known as Pumpkin Pull. Sarah re-united with her old Prince of Wales team and I learned why she always wanted to throw the disc with me. We travelled soon after to Korea for two years of teaching. I started playing for the first time in Seoul, with a eclectic crew of clothes-stripping, soju-sloshing Ultimate fanatics. Koreans, Canadians, Americans, for the most part, and, in the case of the foreigners, for the most part teachers. Raj was an exception, an engineer from India. Paul was the sole fellow Kiwi. There was a great sense of community amongst Seoul's Ultimate crew. I attended Ultimate weddings, threw disc at mud festivals and travelled to the home of dak galbi for hat tournaments. I learned some of the intricacies of the sport, its distinctive language and the very core of ultimate, spirit of the game.

Jihoon, layout champ.

Sports are all about specialized language. Cricket has fielders in the gully, the slips, at fine leg; batsmen hit cover drives, leg glances and, if they're brave, they scoop; bowlers fire the off cutter, the yorker, googly, Chinaman, flipper and doosra. Baseball has pitches: the knuckleball, slider, changeup, splitter, curveball, slurve, et al. Ultimate plays the language game too. We throw flicks (forehands) and hammers, scoobers and blades. We defend with the force. A Callahan, named for Henry Callahan who was a proponent of the play, is an interception of the disc by a defender in their opponent's end zone for a point. The Greatest is a rare play which involves a player leaping from in-bounds after a disc sailing out-of-bounds, catching and passing the disc back to a team member in the field of play, and doing all this before landing out-of-bounds. Zone defences include the cup, the wedge, the clam and one of my favourites, the rabbit (aka the chaser or the puke).

Ultimate. The inventors of the game weren't modest when they coined its name. (Frisbee was dropped from the title, being the trademark disc of the Wham-O toy company.) The name was coined in 1968, when students at Columbia High School in New Jersey began playing the "ultimate game experience". Those first games, adopted from a version of Frisbee football, and played in the parking lot of the high school, formed the essential framework of Ultimate. At the heart of Ultimate as promulgated by the Columbia High students was what has come to be defined as "spirit of the game".

Columbia High School Frisbee. Joel Silver is far left.

A non-contact sport played without referees, a foul was contact "sufficient to arouse the ire of the player fouled." Fair and graceful play was championed. Ultimate continues to be self-officiated, even at the most competitive levels of the sport. There is a freedom to playing a sport without a third party on the field. You don't second-guess an official's calls - your focus is very much your own play and your team's.

Spirit of the game is an aspect of Ultimate that cannot be underestimated. It is one of the main reasons I play. Ultimate's underlying principle is to assume players will never deliberately foul. The onus is on the player to play fair. In other sports, you may cheat the ref; in Ultimate, you only cheat yourself.

Ultimate spread quickly from its Columbia High foundation. American colleges were ready for a codified version of a Frisbee game. College students threw cookie can covers and cake pans through the 1930s and 1940s. The Southard brothers created Aceball, first played at Kenyon College in Ohio in 1942 with a large-size Ovenex cake pan, and similar to touch football. The game was photographed by LIFE in 1950. The first college Ultimate team was formed in 1972 at Lafayette by Columbia High grad and future Hollywood film producer, Joel Silver, one of the primary writers of the original rules. The first tournament was played in 1975. The sport expanded throughout North America and across the Atlantic to the UK. As college students graduated they formed club teams. Ultimate began to develop administrative bodies, with the formation of the Ultimate Players Association in the US in 1979 and the World Flying Disc Federation in 1984.

Olden days ultimate.

Offshoots sprung up. Of the Ultimate variations, Beach Ultimate is a favourite of mine. It's a holiday - you get to travel to the coast to play. The fields and teams are smaller, the games shorter, but the action is fast-paced and the environment is conducive to getting air in pursuit of that disc. I was first hooked on Deokjeokdo, a Korean island in the Yellow Sea. I played on South Korea's most famous beach, Haeundae, which attracts over one hundred thousand people a day during the summer to sit under branded parasols. My stand-out trip was to a tournament on the sands of Boracay Island in the Philippines. Swimming in the ocean between games was a reward for sand-crusted pores.

Haeundae Beach

K-Mike, ready for that swim in Boracay.

Number 7, Lou Delicious, an instant before he takes the disc with elevation and timing.

Sarah and I played on a team at Canadian Nationals in Halifax in 2006, taking the train all the way from Vancouver (via a memorable weekend in Montreal). We played in the mixed division with a team comprised predominately of Korea alumni. This video illustrates the dynamics of quality mixed division play. Another aspect of Ultimate that I value: mixed-sex teams. I can play a competitive team field sport involving the opposite sex which is fair and balanced. And I get to play with my wife. We continue to play while living in Campbell River on Vancouver Island, pick-up ultimate every Thursday night, come rain or shine, snow or gale. A sports organization in Courtenay to our south started an Ultimate league last year. We played for a team called Well Flung and went undefeated through the summer. This year I entered a team by the name of Crust. We played a thriller at Queneesh Elementary on Monday night. Down 2-7 at the half, we took the game 13-12.



(Photo credits: Sarah and myself, plus 4 from the unattributed world of the internet.)