THE ULTIMATE GAME: DNA
or: frisbees - how it's made | 064🥏 (pt 1)
“To design a game is to imagine the person who will eventually play it.”
— Sam Masur in Tomorrow, & Tomorrow, & Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin
what kind of people play a game that is non-contact, self-regulated, free flowing, essentially cooperative, and values the joy of play above all else?
tldr: many of my happiest memories revolve around the frisbee.
after carrying one disk around three countries, i have seen first-hand that frisbees are magical, social artifacts capable of transforming strangers into friends in nearly any setting or terrain. in my eyes, a frisbee is a vessel, a blank canvas, a portable desk, a fan, a dancing companion, and most of all: an invitation to play.
this series of essays is dedicated to exploring how Ultimate and frisbees more broadly can foster solidarity & holistic human development in a time of division and overlapping health crises.
cooperative play, mind-body awareness, conflict resolution, self-accountability, mental resilience, and teamwork are just a few of the skillsets invoked through a simple 175g circle of plastic.
in order to move forward into new forms of relating & play, we begin by going back — with a story about the creation on the modern disk.
part I: origins & aliens
in 1947, an amateur pilot from Idaho name Kenneth Arnold was flying his personal plane when he saw 9 blue-tinged flashes.1
Arnold later described the airborne objects as a “diagonally stepped-down, echelon formation” that moved in unison, like “the tail of a Chinese kite.”
by calculating the time (a minute and 42 seconds) it took the objects to fly between Mount Rainier and Mount Adam (50 miles), Arnold found a rough approximation of their speed at 1,700 miles per hour - more than double the speed of sound and 3 times faster than any aircraft of the time.
Arnold landed and told his story to the staff at the airstrip in Yakima, Washington. shortly after, word spread to reporters across the country. in the interviews, Arnold described the unidentified object's movement “like a saucer if you skip it across water.”
for some reason, the concept stuck.
big time.
once the iconic flying saucer had been shared, it appeared again and again: with 853 reported sighting in 1947 alone, the flying saucer went on to become a trademark of American science fiction.
in 1948, a young American by the name Fred Morrison seized the momentum of the flying saucer and took an idea to the Southern California Plastics Company, producing a crude prototype called the Arcuate Vane and, three years later, the Pluto Platter.
the Platter was a success. despite not being mass produced, it reached the beaches of the West Coast, and made possible the first recorded competition with a flying disc in 1954.
around this time, the founders of a fledgling toy company named “Wham-O’ (famous for their other new creation, the hula-hoop) met Morrison and made a deal.
it was about this time that UFOs collided with pie tins.
according to the Flying Disc Museum, pie tins around the world have been tossed since their appearance in the mid-1800s. but the name “Frisbee” may have originated from a particular source: from one William Russell Frisbie, of the Frisbie Pie Company.
“The popular theory goes that Yale students “frequently bought Frisbie Pies and after eating them, would toss the empty pie tins around the Yale campus…As metal pie dishes are not the kindest of missiles to be struck by, this led to throwers shouting the cautionary word “frisbie-e-e-e!” (not unlike golfers shouting the word “Fore!”) to warn both the catcher and bystanders of the approaching disc (Weiss, 2004).”2
Rich Knerr, hearing this call at college campuses, grabbed the phrase and stuck it on Wham-O’s plastic disk — and thus the Frisbee was born.
part II: the birth of a game
— the summer of love, 1967 —
the game of Ultimate was conceived in the U.S. amidst political assassinations, the escalating war in Vietnam, urban riots and civil rights unrest (Heale, 2001).
as increasing numbers of largely young people became “alienated from the parental generation” they looked for forms of escape and resistance and loosely formed what became known as the counterculture (Roszak, 1972: 1).
“the idea was to liberate yourself from the confining conventions of life and to celebrate the irrational side of your nature, kind of let yourself go…
The point is that it was the culture that was sick, so one way to change was to live it differently” (Anders, 1990, 36).”3
Ultimate emerged between Jared Kass and his friends at Amherst College in 1967, drawing inspiration from soccer, basketball, and American football.
the joy of play and the beauty of a disk in motion was intuitively understood to be the most important thing, and the players seemed to sense their way towards the basic DNA of the game: non-contact, no running with the disk, interceptions or disk dropping as cause of a rapid change of possession.
I highly recommend this interview between Willie Henderson and Kass in 2013 for more detail about how the game came to be. it’s fascinating to see how organically the game arose — Kass wasn’t even aware that his crew was partly responsible for the game that now sees over 3 million players in the US alone. Instead, he described one moment that stuck with him:
“I just remember one time running for a pass and leaping up in the air and just feeling the Frisbee making it into my hand and feeling the perfect synchrony and the joy of the moment, and as I landed I said to myself, “This is the ultimate game. This is the ultimate game.”
this is the end of part one. thank you for sharing your time with me today. if you enjoyed this work, please consider sharing with a friend. i’d also love to hear what you think.
you can reach me via email or twitter / x.
part two will follow next week. until then, stay warm & groovy.
all the love,
river
Bibliography / Further Readings:
The Atlantic, The Man Who Introduced the World to Flying Saucers
The Sports Journal, The Origins and Development of Ultimate Frisbee
Ultimate History, Founders
The Atlantic, The Man Who Introduced the World to Flying Saucers
The Sports Journal, The Origins and Development of Ultimate Frisbee
Ibid.
Boy, the historical background of the Frisbee seems as natural and seamless as the disc itself. Wonderful!