David Gessner - Ultimate Glory: Frisbee, Obsession, and My Wild Youth

I t is a hot November day in southern Florida in 1987 and Frisbees fill the air. People driving by the Miami Dade College athletic fields stare out their car windows, not quite able to figure out what is going on. At first glance the fields look like they have been taken over by an alien culture. Those drivers who remember the 60s slow down to scratch their heads and wonder if the Summer of Love has returned. The place does seem caught in a time warp: music occasionally blares from huge speakers, men wear longish hair and beards, and both men and women run around in strange bright-colored costumes. Groups cluster to smoke pot, others drink beer and urinate on trees, and, at one point, a half dozen young women sprint naked across the fields.

But while a carnival atmosphere pervades, it becomes clear, upon closer inspection, that this isnt exactly Woodstock. First, these hippies seem exceedingly fit. Second, they sport a surprising number of bloody knees and elbows, as if they had just emerged not from a love-in but from some primitive form of battle. What originally looked like costumes turn out to be uniforms. Tattered unconventional uniforms but uniforms all the same that, combined with all the blood, leave the men and women looking less like Deadheads than like extras from the movie Braveheart. Finally, there is what these ragged people are doing with all the Frisbees. They are throwing them, sure, but not in the way Uncle Joe throws Frisbees at your backyard barbecue. In fact, not in the way youve ever seen people throw anything. Plastic discs fly through the air, flicked with a rolling dice motion or thrown upside down like spears. These discs can travel over 80 yards, hovering, bending around objects, some slicing like knives, others describing absurd parabolas.

A curious woman, out for a stroll, walks over to one of these Frisbee people, a man who is sitting on the ground lacing up his cleats. Hes a young guy with thick veined legs and long, dark hair like Samsons. She asks him what exactly it is he is doing.

Playing Ultimate, he says.

She scrunches her face as if trying to place this. Then her eyes brighten with recognition.

Isnt that the thing you do with dogs? she asks.

The man smiles, resisting rolling his eyes, as if hes heard this question a hundred times before.

No, its played with human beings, he says in a patient if slightly put-upon voice. Its a serious field sport like soccer or football.

The woman takes a closer look out at the fields and begins to notice some order within the seeming chaos. She considers the possibility that the young man is not entirely wrong. Perhaps a serious sport