What Is It? What Is It Not?
Subscribers to Poets & Suicides may be surprised to hear that the time has come to discuss Ultimate Frisbee.
(We must, however, immediately begin with a digression: the initiated are aware that “Ultimate Frisbee” is a misnomer, as the word “Frisbee” was excised from the sport’s grandiose title years ago, when the Wham-o! corporation — official maker of the “Frisbee” — was outmaneuvered by an appropriately-fringe company known as Discraft, which has been producing the official 175-gram plastic disc used in Ultimate competition for more than 25 years. And here we are, only one sentence into this entry in the Poets & Suicides compendium, and already we have been forced to explain some aspect of the sport, which is unfortunately what happens when one attempts to discuss Ultimate with the uninitiated, because despite the sport’s enormous growth in the past two decades it is still the case that many [or most] people, when told you play the sport of Ultimate, will ask you if that’s “the thing you do on the beach,” or “the thing you do with dogs,” or “the thing where you spin it on your finger.” The amount of explanation required to catch someone up on the actual parameters of the actual sport deeply discourages any such explanation, which is why, in his high-intensity playing days, the Author simply told people he played soccer, because why bother with the whole byzantine rigmarole when the person across from you didn’t really care and was going to find you ridiculous no matter how many times you peppered in the words “serious sport,” or “National Championship,” or “track workouts.” In fact, even now, the Author is tempted to call himself a soccer player — as his character Finn Daily does in the Author’s forthcoming novel, ANTHROPICA — and to go back to fretting over other aspects of the Life Project. But he cannot, because he has some explaining to do.)
The Author would love to be able to dismiss the sport of Ultimate as a youthful pastime, one that meant little to him and that he can now look back on with a more mature or enlightened perspective, but he cannot do that in good conscience, because the fact is that the Author played the sport at its highest level for many years, with great seriousness and dedication, and that he does not look back at those years with regret, but rather with longing. The Author won a National Championship and a World Championship as a member of New York, New York Ultimate, arguably the greatest team to ever play the game. (Though here, too, we need a quick digression, because the Author doesn’t want the readers of Poets & Suicides to think he was a superstar of some sort; he was very young when he tried out for New York, New York, and he made the team based on his youth and speed and fire, and rode the team’s coattails to the just-mentioned championships; his career as a serious player had its ups and downs but could not be called anything much more than “average.” We will elaborate on this below, but will barely scratch the surface of the issue, as Poets & Suicides has come to the blank page today with a different objective.) The Author made many of his closest friendships through Ultimate, and spent thousands of hours chasing a 175-gram plastic disc around football-sized fields, traveling to every corner of the nation to engage fervently in an activity most people found esoteric or simply absurd. He trained as hard or harder for Ultimate than he trained when he was running Division I track in his post-high-school identity-haze (before the first of his complete mental breakdowns ended his burgeoning career as a half-miler, which was doomed anyway, because his high school 2:02’s weren’t impressing the Division I middle-distance runners routinely posting sub-1:50s). Ultimate, in other words, was not just an activity the Author engaged in but the center of the Author’s life for a long, long time. And now that ANTHROPICA is on the cusp of release, the Author feels compelled to address the attitude (and the liberties) he has taken in this novel with regard to the history of the sport, the demeanor of those who play it, and his own personal relationship to a game that has driven far better men than the Author to obsession.
(Anyone who would like an in-depth look at the actual history of the sport, or who would like to experience the sport from the inside-out, ought to immediately read the extraordinary Ultimate Glory, by the deeply gifted writer David Gessner, who the Author almost certainly competed against at some tournament or other. Gessner’s book is probably the greatest thing ever written about Ultimate, and it is written not just for Ultimate players, but for everyone. Also of compelling interest is the film Flatball, made by Dennis Warsen [aka Cribber] — a former teammate of the Author and one of the game’s truest, larger-than-life superstars and a member of the Ultimate Hall of Fame — and narrated by Alec Baldwin. Yes, seriously.)
We will begin with some of the liberties the Author has taken with real-life facts in his fictional tome:
In “real life,” the governing body of the sport of Ultimate (at least here in the United States) is the USAU (USA Ultimate), which supplanted — in name, at least, for purposes of “rebranding” — the original governing body, the UPA (Ultimate Players Association) in 2010. In ANTHROPICA, however, which is set in 2020, the UPA is still the sport’s governing body. The Author found that “USA Ultimate” sounded somehow too legitimate for his satirical purposes, plus through most of his own playing days it was the UPA that held sway over his life. But the Author fears that his use of the incorrect moniker will lead those “in the community” to see him as a poseur when, in fact, the Author — who could be accused of fraudulence in countless areas of the Life Project — is anything but a poseur when it comes to Ultimate.
In “real life",” Ultimate has grown prolifically; in 2020 there are multiple professional leagues and some of the top athletes make as much as 50k/year — not much by professional sports standards but still a sign of legitimacy that the Author’s novel does not allow for. Finn Daily (again, the book’s Ultimate-playing sort-of protagonist) speaks of the “rumors of a professional league,” but the text follows this line of thought no further.
In “real life,” Ultimate is now played by more than 7 million people in over 80 countries. It has a global governing federation (The World Flying Disc Federation, or WFDF). Highlights from professional Ultimate are not-infrequently featured on ESPN, championship games are televised, and the Olympics are interested. None of this is true within ANTHROPICA, where Ultimate is relegated to the extreme outer margins of sport and culture.
In “real life,” the Author is the co-inventor of a sport called “mini ultimate,” which is itself played around the world and used by many teams as a training activity for full-field Ultimate. The Author has asked the editors of Poets & Suicides to mention this simply because he is proud of the accomplishment (one shared with the great Brion Winston, aka Dick Nasty), even if he could find no reason for its mention within the textual walls of ANTHROPICA.
In “real life,” the Author would NEVER have done what Finn Daily does in the closing chapters, which the Author cannot say anything more about, for his army of (non)readers would surely erupt in outrage.
These are some of the worst or most egregious factual inaccuracies or omissions, but they are not the reason that the Author took to Poets & Suicides today, either. What worries the Author is that he wants his fellow Ultimate players — teammates, former imagined enemies, and the current generation of superior athletes — to like ANTHROPICA and to appreciate the amount of space Ultimate is given in the book, and he fears that his (at least partially) satirical representation of the sport will feel, to members of the community, like just another version of the disinterested mockery they have endured throughout their personal histories with the sport (“Is that the thing you do on the beach with dogs?”), when in fact the Author sees it as a loving testament to the sport’s role in his life, as well as a kind of confessional re: his personal failings on the field. The Author, like his character Finn Daily, was for most of his Ultimate career a “handler,” which means he spent much of his time close to the disc, receiving many passes from teammates unable to advance the disc downfield, who instead “reset” play (to avoid being “stalled out” — holding the disc for more than ten seconds results in a turnover) by putting it in the Author’s hands so that he could attempt to advance it or reverse the flow of play or otherwise “keep things moving.” The Author was often on some of the country’s best teams. He never, in his long and unstoried career, failed to qualify for Nationals, where the top teams assembled each October to duke it out for a Championship. Early in his career, as mentioned above, he won a National and a World Championship, and though he never experienced that ultimate Ultimate Glory again, he did have many other glorious moments, including fantastic games that helped his teams qualify for Nationals, and an unlikely, late-career appearance in the semifinals of Nationals with his brothers on Pike, the team he decided to finish his Open career with, a team that was not expected to soar to such heights.
But the Author also had many moments in which he, frankly, choked. Big games in which he was smaller than the moment. Turnovers on game points. Pivotal possessions on which he experienced what David Gessner calls, in Ultimate Glory, the “choke of omission.” (There are 7 players on the field for each team and you can sort of hide, be a passenger and not a driver, and thereby avoid the possibility of making a terrible mistake. That’s a “choke of omission” and the Author had plenty of them.) In fact, the Author’s mental instability and second-guessing — which are pivotal to Finn Daily’s character in ANTHROPICA — meant that he was a different person from game to game, tournament to tournament. He sometimes rose to the occasion, filled with fire and determination; but he just as often cowered from the moment, and it is not an overstatement to say that he relives these moral failures daily, or that they are among the biggest regrets of his life. The Author was once a speedy and ornery young person. He could be an Asshole back then (just ask around). As his speed and athleticism began to wane through aging and injury, he simply did not have the mental fortitude to excel, and he sometimes found himself hoping he would NOT be put into the game, that he would NOT be given the opportunity to fail. These are difficult things to face, and ANTHROPICA — more than attempting to provide an accurate history of a sport the Author fell in love with at an early age and pursued with enormous vigor for decades — are an attempt on the Author’s part to face them. And he hopes that the community will receive it in this spirit.
If the Author could change one thing in his life, it would not be to correct stupid errors he’s made in his personal relationships, or to go back and make better decisions regarding his publishing career, or to take back moments in which he was short-tempered with his children. No, if the Author could go back through the wreckage of his past, he would take back two specific turnovers from Ultimate games. Both game-point goal-line turnovers in moments where a completion would have won the game. Given more latitude, he would also take back or redo or simply sit out one entire Nationals, in which he was ill-prepared mentally and was essentially useless to his teammates and to himself — a three-day “choke of omission.” The fact that these failures of character are among the most important moments in the Author’s life might seem insane to those outside the community, or even to those within the community who have never experienced this kind of self-doubt or lingering regret. But the Author suspects that many of those within the community will get it.
Ultimate players, brothers, teammates, honor-bound fellow warriors; forgive the Author his failures. He has loved you all. And he hopes very much that you will find something to love in ANTHROPICA. And by the way, the Author is open all day. What is it? Not enough. What is it not? Enough.