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Tribune Stories
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Locked Out
Ultimate defies its nay-sayers
Brian O'Connor
Tribune Staff
It is sometime shortly before noon, and the Wisconsin Hodags Madison's Ultimate Frisbee team is visibly drunk, but not without some reason.
For Madison, the sectionals are a chance to have a good time before the regional meets set in and ruin some of the fun. This explains in part the heavy drinking.
Imagine if you will the natural evolution of sport. Imagine the sports that have evolved to the highest conceivable level of refinement, sports that have been around for years, sports that are the end of a centuries-long process of evolution. These sports are soccer, basketball, baseball and polo.
Walter Frederick Morrison patented the Frisbee in 1955. The rules of Ultimate Frisbee were invented in New Jersey in the 1960s, but the game in its popular form wasn't around until the early 1970s. Rutgers and Princeton held the first intercollegiate game in 1972. The Ultimate Players Association was founded in 1979. This puts Ultimate Frisbee somewhere on the leading edge of the primordial ooze of sport.
Just as European noblemen once derided soccer as the sport of the drunken masses, so too does Ultimate invoke an unrefined label from some sports purists. The players in the Lake Superior sectional don't seem to care, even the ones wearing funny costumes. The one that sticks out the most on the men's side costuming is more of a tradition on the women's teams, one player tells me is the fellow from Madison decked out in a skin-tight hodag costume, complete with horns, face paint and tail.
According to a few Marquette MU-Tang players some easily distinguished by the creative hairdos handed out in a frenzied showing of esprit de corps the previous night Madison has a much larger talent pool to select from, whereas Marquette in particular has to patch together a team from people who show up to club meetings.
It is conceivable that the Lake Superior Ultimate sectional will one day be much bigger than the unused football fields behind Wisconsin-Whitewater. To get there, Ultimate will need a striking innovation, something like what the forward pass did to football and what the one-timer did to my own beloved hockey. Something that is nothing more than an exhibition of all the masterful yet muffled grace and speed that go into every small play involved in the sport of Ultimate.
Until that day, apart from the rigorous warm-up routine, Ultimate will resemble a bunch of college kids throwing a Frisbee around.
This article appeared in The Marquette Tribune on April 19 2005.
OConnor Off the Ball
After four years of playing Ultimate Frisbee at MU, I was ecstatic to know that we were bringing the most promising team in our 5 year history to the Lake Superior Sectional tournament this past weekend. I was even more excited when I learned that the Marquette Tribune was interested in writing a column, giving Ultimate some exposure on our campus. Had I known it would turn out the way it did in the March 18th Tribune, I would have saved my enthusiasm. Brian O'Connor's column "Ultimate defies its nay-sayers" was a slap in the face of Club Ultimate Frisbee. After a day on the sidelines at our best tournament ever, he found no value in the fact that MU Ultimate entered the tournament as underdogs ranked #7 of 11 and beat #4, #5, #6, and #9 to take 4th place and advance. He found no value in discussing the newly-formed women's Ultimate team which attended its first sectionals this year and faced the struggles of a new team starting from scratch. He found no value in delving into the sport and capturing any of its inherent uniqueness. He rather chose to scratch the surface, superficially noting that, indeed, the best team in the nation--UW-Madison--was less than challenged given the pool of competition and that Ultimate Frisbee is not like soccer, basketball, baseball, or polo.
In order to have some value, O'Connor believes "Ultimate will need a striking innovation, something like what the forward pass did to football." For those who play Ultimate, such an innovation exists and its called the spirit of the game. Unlike most other sports, there are no referees, each player is responsible for making calls when it comes to fouls, in and out of bounds, etc. and does so with the respect of teammates and opponents on the line. Play is very aggressive, but never at the expense of the physical well being of opponents. The striking innovation needed by Ultimate apparently now consists of overcoming the narrow minded opinions of sports columnists who struggle to comprehend anything not shown on ESPN.
To say Ultimate resembles "a bunch of college kids throwing a Frisbee around" is the equivalent of saying that writing for the Tribune resembles a bunch of college kids flaunting their vocabulary, trying to build their resume, when in fact there is more.
O'Connor speaks of the evolution of sports and how Ultimate has only evolved for 30+ years. If evolution of the sport of Ultimate is lacking, then the strategic chess match of man and zone offenses and defenses employed along side of ultra-competitive, yet respectful play must be creationism at its finest. Does this warrant the type of column that was put forth? What was the point of writing such a column?
It appears that O'Connor's writing ability "will need a striking innovation" in order to convey a message worth the time of his readers, until then, I guess we'll stick to the things we all know and can rely upon to provide a fully evolved history on which to base a column. Besides, deriving and conveying a message or meaning requires much more effort than stating the obvious. My advice; add a sarcastic tone and O'Connor may just be the next Jerry Seinfeld.
Julian Kos
MU Club Ultimate Frisbee
This viewpoint was submitted to the Marquette Tribune Wednesday April 20th
