Counterculture Game Grows Up--Sort of

Dreamers have poured into California for a million reasons. Only a handful have come for the Frisbee.

With a disk-flinging pal, Mike Weems moved from Atlanta partly for a change of scene, but largely for Santa Barbara’s thriving brand of Ultimate Frisbee: a grueling, graceful game that combines elements of soccer, football, basketball and jovial anarchy.

“This was just the place to be,” said Weems, 31, a hotel accountant who had to bow out of elite competition because of injuries he suffered in a dive for the elusive disk.

Likewise, it was Ultimate Frisbee--insiders call it Ultimate--that prompted Greg Husak to sign on for a master’s degree in geography at UC Santa Barbara. As an undergraduate, he had played with the Black Tide, the university’s unofficial Ultimate team. Graduate school enabled him to keep playing.

At 27, Husak, who now is working toward his doctorate, is a co-captain of the Santa Barbara Condors, the oldest and one of the most successful Ultimate teams in the country. He and his teammates--men old enough to teach their toddlers a decent backhand flip--won the national championship in 2000 and 2001.

“It’s a bunch of guys I really care about,” Husak said. “We’ve kind of grown up together.”

At a recent pick-up game on Santa Barbara’s East Beach, Husak dived into action.

The sun was setting and the ocean breeze had picked up. A dozen laughing, loose-limbed, fresh-faced young men and women made impossible leaps for the spinning disk on a playing field marked with sandals stuck in the sand.

Children and dogs drifted onto the field. A man in dripping swim trunks joined in, fresh from a twilight dip. Husak snatched a disk as it swooped out of bounds. It could have been the glowing California beach of a beer commercial.

The players at East Beach and about 60,000 others across the country have a group of suburban teenagers to thank for their fun. High school students in Maplewood, N.J., are credited with inventing the game in the late 1960s.

Typically, two teams of seven compete on a field 70 yards long. Ultimate begins with a “pull,” a long fling equivalent to football’s kickoff. The receiving players aim to make their way into the opposing end zone, fling by sizzling fling. There’s no running with the disk and no physical contact.

A child of the counterculture, Ultimate has no referees. For the most part, players must decide themselves whether someone has deliberately slammed an opponent or has held the disk for more than the 10-second maximum. Players even are expected to call fouls on themselves, as required by the Ultimate ethic reverently called “the spirit of the game.”

“It’s the only sport I know of that has a mandate like that built into it,” said Bernie DeKoven, a Redondo Beach consultant who writes and teaches about games. In addition to speed and agility, Ultimate requires carefree zest. At some games, men play in skirts. Two California teams fought what they called “the holy wars,” with Catholic players outfitted in monks’ robes and hora-dancing Jewish players in yarmulkes. A Las Vegas team features players in sequin-bedecked Elvis outfits.

Missy Colombo, a 27-year-old architect from northern Virginia, has seen it all. Since September, she and her boyfriend have trekked across the United States, most of the time in a 1975 Volkswagen bus, dropping in at dozens of tournaments and pick-up games.

“It’s a fantastic community,” she said as she awaited the repairing of her VW’s transmission in Santa Cruz. “We’ve made instant friends everywhere. At a tournament in Tucson, we met a couple from San Diego, and within an hour, they asked us to housesit for them and take care of their cats.”

In Ultimate, inhibitions can drop as swiftly as a pair of shorts.

In Hawaii, Colombo played at a tournament where women on one team spontaneously shed their tops while their opponents just as quickly chose the bottomless look.

“We scored two or three points that way,” Colombo said. “People from other fields stopped play to check out what was going on.”

For the first time, Ultimate was featured at the World Games in 2001, and there’s talk of eventually infiltrating the Olympics.

From its headquarters in Colorado Springs, the Ultimate Players Assn. grapples with the game’s urgent issues. How can high athletic standards co-exist in the same arena as big fun? And how can players in the heat of high-stakes battle be fair when it comes to judging their own infractions?

“Observers” are available at elite games, but only when players can’t hash out a ruling themselves.

“There are purists who say no to any third-party observers,” said Joey Gray, the association’s executive director. “But if you’re going up with another guy and you’re only focused on the disk, you’re not going to be able to look down at your toe and see if you’re in or not.” Gray, one of the world’s few Frisbee administrators, is asking a task force for a solution to the problem.

In the meantime, teams such as the Condors pump up for another championship season. Most of the players know one another from their days at UC Santa Barbara but, pursuing professions, they have scattered.

About twice a month, five of them commute from the Bay Area to Santa Barbara for practices. One night a week, a trainer helps the Santa Barbara-based teammates with their sprinting technique. At least four nights a week, team members lift weights for 90 minutes before shooting hoops or practicing the elegant Ultimate plays developed over the team’s 28 years.

Even at its highest levels, Ultimate has no big-time sponsors and no prize money. That means players must pay their own way to distant tournaments. No more than a few thousand spectators--mostly friends and supporters--cheer them on, even at the nationals. But who expected fame and fortune from an $8 plastic toy?

“I’ve gone to Scotland, Vancouver, Honolulu, Japan,” said Jason Seidler, 28, a Condor who works as a computer programmer in San Francisco. “I’ve traveled around the world because I play Frisbee. Incredible.”